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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   13257 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 23, 2026

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Time for another dating market piece

From a non-Western angle this time. I enjoyed* this article on the Chinese dating market and its increasing level of dysfunction

*which is to say, I liked the information I gained. I did not at all enjoy reading it as it has the most irritating style known to man, a turbo Linkedin style piece by someone who thinks they are vastly more profound than they actually are. Do not read it. I have excerpted the interesting bits below:

Here’s a translated message from a Chinese woman to a man who confessed his feelings for her, sent via WeChat, which you should read as the mission statement for everything that follows:

“You chose me because of my appearance. I can also reject you because of your appearance. I’m telling you honestly, I’ve never been pursued by someone as ugly as you in my entire life. This isn’t just venting; it’s my genuine feeling, from the bottom of my heart. Ever since you confessed to me, I’ve felt incredibly inferior every day. Do you think Liu Yifei or Fan Bingbing would be pursued by someone like you? You wouldn’t pursue them, because you know those beauties wouldn’t be interested in you. But you’re pursuing me, which means that in your eyes, I’m a match for your looks. My God, just thinking about it gives me a vague urge to kill someone. I beg you to stop liking me. Your pursuit has deeply hurt my self-esteem.”

In 2010, a 22-year-old model named Ma Nuo appeared on If You Are the One (非诚勿扰), China’s most-watched dating show: fifty million viewers per episode, second only to the state news broadcast in ratings. An unemployed male contestant asked if she’d ride bicycles with him. She replied, with a small giggle that would become the most replayed giggle in Chinese internet history, that she’d rather cry in a BMW than laugh on the back of a bicycle.

The country detonated. Government censors ordered the show reformatted. The State Administration of Radio, Film and Television issued regulations. A dating show required state intervention in the way that famines and insurrections require state intervention, because it was threatening social stability in exactly the same way.

Ma Nuo later revealed that the contestant wasn’t actually poor. He was a wealthy second-generation student studying abroad. The production crew had asked her to reject him. The BMW line was a joke she’d read online

In Zhengzhou, a Foxconn worker told a researcher: “The groom’s family is expected to provide a car and a new apartment. That’s more than 200,000 yuan. Our average farming income is 5,000 yuan a year.” He paused. “Having two sons,” he said, “is considered bad luck. It means you have to provide two apartments.”

The caili (彩礼), the betrothal gift, was originally symbolic: a gesture of respect to the bride’s family. Red envelopes. Dried fruits. Perhaps a pig

By 2023, the national average caili had risen to 69,000 RMB ($9,500). In Zhejiang province: 183,000 RMB. In rural Jiangxi: 380,000 RMB, not including the apartment, not including the car.

The state tried to intervene. Jiangsu capped caili at 50,000 RMB. Gansu tried similar limits. One county in Jiangxi tied caili compliance to school enrollment priority for your children, meaning if you paid too much bride price, your kids might not get into the right school. The state was literally bribing (blackmailing) families to accept smaller bribes for their daughters.

The sociologist Hu Hsien-chin made a distinction between two kinds of face: mianzi (social prestige from visible achievement and display) and lian (moral standing granted by others for your character). You can have high mianzi and no lian, everyone can see your Porsche and also know you’re a fraud. The marriage market optimizes for mianzi because mianzi is legible. Lian is subjective

Xiao Tao (“Little Peach”) streams from 8pm to midnight. She does not take her clothes off. She talks. She plays mobile games while talking. She reads comments aloud and responds to them. She calls her regulars da ge (“big brother”). When a da ge sends a virtual gift, she reacts with what appears to be genuine delight. When a big gift arrives, the animated cruise ship, the rocket, the supercar she gasps and says the sender’s username and thanks them by name, and 200,000 viewers see this, and the man who sent the gift receives, in exchange for 3,000 RMB, approximately forty seconds of being known .

The state has started cracking down on “excessive virtual gifting” as a social stability concern. Platforms are now required to cap daily gifting limits. This is not a coincidence. The state understands, even if it won’t say so, that the livestream economy is what happens when you price 30 million men out of the marriage market. They don’t riot. They buy virtual cruise ships for women in Chengdu.

A 2010 census showed 82.44% of Chinese men aged 20-29 had never married, fifteen percentage points above women in the same bracket. Demographers projected 29-33 million surplus males in the coming decades.

Historical records on what happens to surplus male populations are consistent and not reassuring. During the Ming and Qing dynasties, bare branches “tended to drift from their hometowns and form brotherhoods, secret societies, bandit gangs, and military groups.” In extreme cases they toppled dynasties.

There are men who have been publicly shamed on Weibo for insufficient gift-giving. Birthday posts where the gifts are deemed, in comments, to be “not even trying.” Proposals live-streamed to followers where the ring is evaluated in real time. One man proposed in a restaurant while his girlfriend’s phone filmed it for her followers. The comments started arriving before he’d finished the sentence. The comments were not all positive. He could see them arriving on the phone screen while he was still on one knee.

This is cuihun (催婚). Relentless familial pressure to marry. It arrives with seasonal regularity, like the flu, and with roughly similar symptoms.

On Taobao, you can rent a boyfriend or girlfriend. Prices: 50 RMB per hour to watch a movie together. 100 RMB if it’s a horror film, because physical contact is implied and must be priced in. 3,000-plus yuan per day for the full meet-the-parents package. During Spring Festival, prices surge to 10,000 yuan per day.

In 2007, the All-China Women’s Federation, a state agency ostensibly created to advance women’s rights (and fully nails the aesthetic of the ‘The Supreme People's Assembly’ in North Korea), officially classified unmarried women over 27 as “sheng nu” (剩女): leftover women. The Ministry of Education added the term to the official lexicon.

The Federation then published taxonomies:

Ages 25-27: “Leftover fighters” (they still have courage!)

Ages 28-30: “The ones who must triumph” (this is a pun on Pizza Hut’s Chinese name, because what Chinese feminist propaganda needs is more fast food wordplay)

Ages 31-35: “Advanced leftover”

Ages 35+: “Master class of leftover women” (a reference to the Monkey King, which is definitely not insulting)

In 2011, the Women’s Federation published “Leftover Women Do Not Deserve Our Sympathy.” It included this sentence: “Pretty girls do not need a lot of education to marry into a rich and powerful family. But girls with an average or ugly appearance will find it difficult. These girls hope to further their education in order to increase their competitiveness.”

A state agency for women’s rights published that. In 2011. Not 1951.

Marriage registrations fell to 6.1 million in 2024, down a fifth year-over-year. Births fell to 7.92 million in 2025 as deaths rose to 11.31 million. China’s population is now actively shrinking. The fertility rate is 1.0 and falling. The women called “leftover” turned out to be the ones who could afford to say no.

China is no longer poor. But it behaves, in the intimate sphere, like a country that expects the famine to return. Houses are hoarded like grain. Children are invested in like they’re the last crop before winter. Partners are evaluated like wartime rations. The marriage market runs on the logic of scarcity even amid abundance, because the nervous system was built during scarcity and nervous systems don’t update when the spreadsheet does.

Speaking from my own experience, the article is a touch overwrought. I'm in a major bubble - I haven't lived there for years, I was a foreigner, and all the expats I know now are successful families with children the same age as ours - but so is the person who uses anecdotes from TV shows and marriage markets. Nonetheless, there is some obvious truth here, given the collapse in marriage and fertility rates in the country.

There does seem to be an inherent contradiction in streaming, with the author assuming the government are both using it as a substitute for human affection, while also trying to crack down on gifting and parasocial relationships. Which is it? Perhaps this is a flaw of the CCP themselves, pulling in multiple directions and unable to find a fix for their country's broken dating market.

It sometimes amazes me that there's anyone who actually pushes back on the redpill observation about "Hypergamy."

The idea that women are selecting for the highest status male in their local social system is integrated into virtually every aspect of human culture. There are exceptions in media (Disney's Aladdin had a princess fall for the street rat rather than an uber-powerful, and not bad-looking sorcerer sultan who wanted to keep her as his slave).

I would argue that reality is more exacting than fiction, here. Find me a real life story where an attractive woman with the option to pick between a handsome, reliable, but only moderately wealthy Blue Collar worker, and a high status millionaire minor celeb, and intentionally settled for the former.

And biologically its perfectly sensible. I don't think there's any other way for a woman to operate if she wants to ensure her offspring's success and her own long term security. Completely fair to acknowledge and accept this biological imperative.

The "blackpill" is that this factor doesn't get turned off if a woman gets married and has kids, so a guy is never fully safe from being supplanted if he loses status or a higher status male sets eyes on his woman. The high status males need to be reined in as well!

There is actual research showing that women who acquire more wealth use that to acquire independence, men who acquire wealth use it to start families.

But we are currently seeing what happens when all cultural guardrails and guidelines that limited that factor are removed:

Approximately, women will start demanding outsize displays of wealth, status, power, physical fitness in exchange for mating privileges, and thereby controlling more and more actual wealth, which leads to further inflation of demands.

This is at least one explanation for why females have gotten less satisfied with their status, even as they've been given more wealth and power.

Women's satisfaction dropped 15 points spanning the emergence of #MeToo, while men's fell five points. The latest reading among women, 44%, is the lowest on record, although it is not statistically different from the 46% readings in 2018 and 2020. At the same time, men's satisfaction with the treatment of women has remained flat at 61% to 62% since 2018.

Find me a single person who can argue with a straight face that females are on balance worse off, socially or politically speaking, than 2002.

And so China is rapidly plunging down this dystopic slope and trying to aggressively re-establish the guardrails from the top down.

Interesting to see if they can get to any sort of agreeable equilibrium. At least they are willing to do things that might upset women.

I would still guess that South Korea is the one plumbing the deepest depths of how far things can fall, but even they are showing the slightest glimmer of things turning around.

It sometimes amazes me that there's anyone who actually pushes back on the redpill observation about "Hypergamy."

To me, it's a no-brainer. In general, people react negatively to anything which is unflattering to women as a group.

The fact is that there are some problems in the dating market. A lot of men are having difficulty getting dates, let alone girlfriends and wives. A lot of women are having difficulty finding a suitable partner for a committed relationship or marriage. According to hypergamy theory, the main reason for these problems is that many women are way too picky; that their expectations are sky-high compared to what they bring to the table. By contrast, according to more conventional thinking, the main problem is that many men are immature man-children; that they are commitment-phobic; that they are lacking in basic hygiene; that they would rather spend their time playing video games and masturbating to online pornography; etc.

In our modern society, which option is more palatable? Obviously the second. As I alluded to, there is a taboo against saying anything negative about women as a group. And that's why people push back against hypergamy.

In general, people react negatively to anything which is unflattering to women as a group.

Take it one level deeper.

Why would it be 'unflattering' for women to actively seek out the best specimen as a potential partner/mate? Not very romantic, granted, but its not like that's a BAD strategy!

Part of it is because it DOES lead women to stray, cheat, and betray 'good' men due to perceived better options.

The other factor, I think, is that their instincts for what to look for in a guy, which were honed in the ancestral environment, run into some massive issues b/c traits that are adaptive in the modern world are different than those that were necessary to survive the ancient one. This unfortunately leads to them getting into abusive and one-sided relationships because a guy who is physically aggressive, risk-seeking, craves power, and flouts social rules would be very appealing on an instinctual level... and is less likely to care what an individual woman feels about him... and will likely want to have more than one woman. Modern prosperity likewise makes it easier to fake those traits long enough to knock up a woman before she figures out the truth.

Not that I would want to cull high-T males from the population.

So I'd argue the 'unflattering' part arises because women's instincts, even if pointed in the correct direction, lead them to sub-optimal choices when applied. We've given women almost full discretion to pick who they screw, who they marry, and who is even allowed to interact with them. And their choice-making has left much to be desired, even to themselves. And some large part of this is due to the actively deceptive males who are optimized for getting laid with minimal investment, who have figured out how to attract women while having few of the actually desirable traits.

In our modern society, which option is more palatable? Obviously the second. As I alluded to, there is a taboo against saying anything negative about women as a group. And that's why people push back against hypergamy.

Oh I know.

I've put up too many comments reflecting on and arguing that pretty much every single problem in the dating market today can be traced to women's behavior shifting, whilst mens' has remained largely the same... except to the extent they have to interact with women.

I wonder how far can one get sponsoring successful, well-adjusted and ordinary-seeming men and women to promote their choices and the advantages of following them.

What I mean by:

  • Successful - they are in a relationship that appears good for them.
  • Well-adjusted - neither of them is a covert or overt cheater, and both are serious about staying together (not necessarily married or planning to seal the deal, it's not like marriage carries a lot of weight with divorce being as easy as it is)
  • Ordinary-seeming - do not possess qualities that would lead the viewer to assume such life can only be achieved with outsized luck, effort, lifestyle changes. I.e. not overly rich, not met through a niche career or a heavily religious subculture, do not radiate youth pastor energy.

This is probably a solid way to put forth a pro-marriage, pro-natalism agenda.

But happy people in good relationships ostensibly don't feel much need to flaunt how good it is, and talk about what makes things work.

Would definitely need to be an outside observer intentionally tracking them down and publishing their observations from the outside.

The problem with poster-boying a monogamous couple is that monogamy is hard, and failure is easy and frequent even if you're trying your best. Putting a couple on a pedestal gives them a long way to fall.

Your Carrie Bradshaw type "complicated messy" women icons don't suffer from failure because it's an easier standard to reach.

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