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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   3730 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 13, 2026

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Culture warry, but I don't have enough meat or a specific post to include this on the main thread: in your opinion, how much of current dating discourse and the corresponding social trends are due to changing material conditions and economic anxiety? I've seen much more dialogue about how Gen-Z women are regressing to the mean compared to their Millennial women counterparts - more concerned with materialism and man's ability to provide, more expectant of chivalry (though they've renamed it "princess treatment"), more averse to hookup culture. Gen-Z women are much more considerate than Millennials of the fact that there are determinants of partner quality beyond just "love" and that a purely "equal" relationship is not necessarily ideal. This is despite (or perhaps because of) their ostensible feminism. I've also seen talks of how looksmaxxing is a response to changing socioeconomic conditions, that it is a means of restoring some sense of control. The theory goes, the economy is becoming increasingly obtuse and inaccessible to many young people, so to cope, they turn to something they can more immediately affect change upon: their bodies.

What do you think?

Mm, probably like 20%? We host a lot. I have a house, so this is pretty easy. But we hosted a lot too when we had a 2 bedroom apartment with 1 common room and a tiny galley style kitchen, just 15 instead of 30. Our friends who didn't host now host once a year now that they have houses.

Obviously anecdotal, but the trend bears out in my experience. People who aren't already social don't become social when they finally hit it big and their material constraints loosen. I think most of this is downstream of culture/internet/expectations, pointing to material deprivation that is very real, but not actually very limiting on your ability to meet and interact with people is just a convenient way of absolving yourself of responsibility for the choices you would rather not justify in words.

There are actually two separate groups that make up each generation:

Millennials have Boomer parents who largely had GI Bill parents and so on.

Gen Zs have Gen X parents who largely had Silent Generation parents and so on.

There is some intermingling and drift, some people were born to parents in their early 20s and have kids in their early 20s, but by large there are actually two sets of Americans with different genetic makeups and values living beside each other.

Gen X and Gen Z tend to be the more pragmatic generation.

Very little.

I've seen much more dialogue about how Gen-Z women are regressing to the mean compared to their Millennial women counterparts - more concerned with materialism and man's ability to provide, more expectant of chivalry (though they've renamed it "princess treatment"), more averse to hookup culture.

This is just the continued evolution of ballooning female entitlement. But nobody wants to admit this as it would mean admitting women are not perfect blameless angels, so it gets blamed on economic anxiety instead.

I've also seen talks of how looksmaxxing is a response to changing socioeconomic conditions, that it is a means of restoring some sense of control.

In my opinion this is just ripping away the collectively upheld fiction that everyone pretended to believe previously; that looks didn't matter and it's what's inside that counts. This was never true. Ask anyone who went through a glow-up and it's astounding how much better people treat you when you're hot.

Looksmaxxing seems to me to be a direct consequence of dating apps, social isolation, and the decline of third spaces. If your entire hook for a woman is your profile picture, and she isn't going to offer you a chance to charm her unless you pass the looks test first, how you look is going to matter a lot more. Men will notice and respond by hitting the gym and doing whatever else Clavicular is pushing. I met pretty much all my girlfriends in third spaces and that gave me time to prove I was funny which can take you from a 4 to a 7. I'm lucky I'm married--I'd be in hell if I had to rely on the apps.

All of this, plus the "arms race" effect. It's OK to be a bit frumpy if that's just what all the regular guys look like. But when everyone starts working heavily on their appearance, you start to stand out a lot more (in a bad way) if you're the one who's not.

@ratherblather

Looksmaxxing is also a return to the mean. Men throughout history have always worked on their bodies, vainly concerned themselves with their physical appearance, hid disfigurements, worn jewelry and makeup. Paul was already complaining about this 2000 years ago.

The entire male aesthetic of the 20th century was a temporary blip created by Anglo-American Protestantism (emphasis on the American, late 17th century English Protestant guys loved their fancy wigs and blush), and mass military conscription (long hair and beards aren’t good for trench lice and gas-mask seals). And also because Capitalism, Communism, and Fascism were all glazing the aesthetics of the working class for different reasons.

Dandyism has entered the chat.

I have weird obsessions, okay? I only wish I had gotten that book when it was new, as opposed to now. That price tag, yikes...

"Dandymaxxing" is unironically a better term than "looksmaxxing".

"Dandymaxxing" implies a higher fixation on fashion than what I observe in the looksmaxxers who seem to be more focused on maxilla and bonesmashing.

Yeah, true. I suppose we could split them out into "dandymaxxers" (men investing a great deal of time, energy and money into improving their appearance from a sartorial perspective) and "physiquemaxxers" (men doing the same but for their actual physique: going to the gym, taking steroids, testosterone supplements etc.), both of whom fall under the umbrella of "looksmaxxers".

On the one hand, I think you make a good point. It's always safer to be able to earn your own money so as to not be economically trapped, but the safe paths to that for middle class gen-z women are far from guaranteed.

I also think that the rise of easy to make short form content lets pointless materialists find and indulge each other more than ever (it's always existed just with less variety, previous generations had qvc china birds and beanie babies vs the disgusting labubus, designer handbags, and those plastic dumpling things) and that's true for gold-digging as well. I think consumer goods are so cheap compared to other costs of living our scarcity magpie brains just can get overwhelmed and greedy. Its just easier to visualize when there are millions of video posts vs GenX / Senior millennials having no public content they actually created until maybe magazines in their mid-20s? I don't think "princess treatment" is anything other than financial wanting to be bought stuff, not a true respect for chivalric norms aside from open the door and pay the check.

But I think the hookup culture thing is more strongly related to kids having no freedom as teenagers (no jobs / alcohol / driving) and then putting them into colleges that tell them anyone unattractive hitting on you is part of rape culture.

I doubt it has anything to do with any shifts in economic or material conditions, just more people being Very Online allows concept handles and awareness of them to spread more quickly and widely, for more people to feel more comfortable to say the quiet part out loud.

I can assure you Gen Z women didn’t invent or even reinvent female princess complexes, the female fondness for using up men’s time, money, energy, and bragging or showing off about it. See, for example, expensive engagement rings, lavish weddings, getting gifts/drinks/dinner bought for them, getting taken on cUtE (that is, expensive) dates, and/or sharing photos to brag or show off the aforementioned.

Nor was it some secret among men that chicks dig tall, muscular guys with handsome faces and that at least one way to improve one’s lot was to hit the gym to better the physicial dominance cues that chicks love.

I agree, none of these concepts are exactly new. I am more remarking that they are more prevalent among Gen-Z compared to Millennials. I think in the Millennial collective consciousness (or maybe the Obama-era Optimist conscious), they were the generation that equalized dating, that wouldn't be shallow, that would bring about positivity and equality and love and sexual libertinism. This is idealistic, to be sure, and practically speaking plenty of Millennials weren't this way. Even so, it's still notable to me that Gen-Z is taking baby steps against that mindset.

I think a lot of the millennial dating discourse you/we personally encountered was in the nerdy/educated liberal social scene, due to IRL filters and the internet at the time being full of nerdier/educated people and the online media being liberal. There was this collective front of women writing blogs who maintained the narrative that women only want Nice guys (who are feminist), and any guy who can't get laid is insufficiently feminist and also not an actual Nice Guy but in fact a Nice guy, also something-something-male-gaze, frat party rape, wage gap, et cetera.

These days the internet is much trashier, and the ideological messaging has drifted to "must be a frothing leftist to fuck me", while lowest-common-denominator have let slip that actually they just want half-elf CEOs with abs. Liberal Feminism doesn't have a monopoly on dating discourse anymore, and Redpill/manosphere content isnt exactly underground.

Isn't it just that older people are cringe so you have to go in a different direction in order to make sure you're not associated with their cringy staleness?

It's hard to say. This feels more subtle and insidious to me. If it were simple generational differences, I would imagine the Gen-Z swing would be more pronounced. In my eyes, the Gen-Z mindset doesn't seem like a wholesale repudiation of Millennial behaviors, rather a refinement of them taking into account the cynicism of the era. I think it explains, in part, why people aren't dating as much: so much ink has been spilled about the disastrous consequences of dating the wrong person, particularly their impact on your career.

My uncle, a retired Green Beret, used to always say "You'll lose money chasing women, but you'll never lose women chasing money." I think he's a chauvinistic goof for saying that, but I can't help but feel like everyone in Gen-Z, male and female, has internalized that mindset to some degree. Just substitute money for whatever an individual's prized social currency is. I may have a biased sample, of course, but no one wants to risk getting "slowed down" by a relationship.

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