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Notes -
Lots of discussion in the last few weeks on the dating recession, and I wanted to add another (anecdotal) data point to the pile.
I've been swing dancing here in Baltimore on and off for about the last three years (started in 2024 after my girlfriend broke up with me). Initially classes and actual dancing were heavily female dominated, often at ratios of 5:4 or even 3:2. This year that has completely changed: my class tonight was short 11 follows in a class of ~30 total people, meaning the ratio of men to women is about 2:1. The instructors managed to get some more advanced people to drop in to help out as follows, but half of them were dudes who wanted to learn the follow part. This was roughly true in the last session of the class as well although not as pronounced.
What I hypothesize that has happened is the message that dating apps don't seem to work has trickled down to the male part of the population. Around the same amount of women are taking this class as in the before times (2024), but the number of men has almost doubled. Men are starting out to try and meet people in real life again! Which is awesome. But for whatever reason, this hasn't happened with women.
I'm not entirely sure why this is, because dating apps don't seem to particularly work for women either. Maybe the illusion of abundance is enough to keep them from thinking that they need to meet people in real life? Maybe they're all in a situationship with the same man (lol)? Maybe women just have stronger social connections in general and don't need to do something like dancing to meet people?
Thoughts TheMotte?
Because women get a steady diet of fear porn about how men are all out to get them(and to be fair, some are. Not all or most, but certainly some). When they've had 'men are malicious and dangerous' pounded into their skulls they'll not go out of their way to meet men. Simple as.
As @Quantumfreakonomics alluded to, a much larger proportion of men are "out to get them" in the sense of a pump-and-dump. Unfortunately, I doubt that their cautious instincts are well-calibrated on average to avoid this, but it is a legitimate cause for concern on their part.
I think two things can be true at once, for example the average man on a dating platform might not be out to get you, but the average man you meet on a date made on that platform might be. The average man who manages to get you agree to sex on the first date is probably not going to be around for a second date.
Basically, the question to ask would be: "If this guy is such a great catch, then why is he single?"
I think there is a large gap between the hottest man (by whatever metric) a given woman might get to have sex with her and the hottest man a given woman might get for a longer term exclusive relationship, and a minority of men use that to be unethical sluts.
An awful lot of women don't actually care, though, except for the implications to their status. I met a very beautiful girl through a friend and she confided in me that her dating-app match had just messaged making it clear he expected her to put out on the first date (in about four hours time). She raged and vented for some time: did he really think she was the kind of girl who would do that?
You've already guessed the punchline. I commiserated with her over the failure of her date plans and she looked at me like I'd dribbled on her shirt. "Obviously I'm going. He's hot," she huffed, and flounced away.
And then people accuse me of hating "natives" when I express the (justified, I submit) contempt I have for these people. And my tax money is going on funding this shit. People complain about their tax money going on migrants with different values here in the UK, never mind that these migrants make up a small portion of society and there are lots of "natives" that don't even pay much tax in the first place, so the per "native" price they are paying is relatively small. On the other hand the tax there aren't that many people like me, I pay a shit ton of tax and there are a shit ton of these "natives" who make bad decisions that society (read: taxpayers like me) end up subsidizing and we're supposed to just sit and take it. I'd wager I'm personally paying 6 figures in GBP each year directly subsidizing the likes of these people. Few things make me seethe as much as seeing the government's yearly breakdown on where the money I spend paying tax ends up going.
I have at least 1.5 orders of magnitude (closer to 2 actually) more justification to be pissed off at the "natives" than the average "native" has to be pissed off at a poor migrant care worker. And yet...
Well, unlike the natives, you joined the society willingly with full knowledge of the deal. I'm not saying you're not entitled to wish it were otherwise or advocate for it to be so, but I am no particularly sympathetic to your complaints.
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Assuming you have citizenship elsewhere, you could move elsewhere and not pay those tax rates. Natives who complain about funding migrants don't have that option.
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Not English. I met her back in Japan - she was some non-Japanese Asian ethnicity like Korean or Indonesian. No idea about her finances but we're definitely not talking welfare queen.
Okay, that adds another layer to it. If she's managed to score a Japanese guy, she was probably willing to put up with more crap from him because of the Japanese attitude to foreigners. Though apparently Japanese have a good impression of Indonesians (if I believe online search results) while seemingly there's a more negative attitude to Koreans.
So it depends exactly where she was from and if the guy was Japanese or not. I mean, I still think she's an idiot, but there's more going on there than simply "yeah of course I'm gonna sleep with him, he's hot".
There may have been an element of that, I don't know. I can't remember if the chap was Japanese but she certainly had no shortage of non-Japanese admirers. She was half-French, or she'd grown up in France, if I recall correctly, and was involved with the embassy in some fashion. It's a fleeting impression from a while ago in any case so my recollections could be incorrect in any number of ways.
What makes it so vivid for me is the memory of her confusion at my confusion, as if it was weird and rather impolite of me to not be familiar with the kayfabe involved. Clearly, it was very improper of me to expect "there's no way I'd sleep with that guy!" would not be followed up with "brb, fucking that guy".
I filed it away as another part of the world I'd failed to understand until then.
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Getting corrupted by the westoid mindset is just as bad in the long run because it's contagious. She might not have been a leech and may have had a background which could fund her behaviour, in which case more power to her, she's not the sort of person who I'd want in my life but that's fine, different people are different. What's not fine are the people who are like this and fund it off the taxpayer's teat and then lecture us for our values. Neighbour, have you looked at your values???
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