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Notes -
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?
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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