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Notes -
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 just doesn't have a monopoly on dating discourse anymore.
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