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A question: why do people believe that people - especially men - who are unsuccessful with romantic relationships are unsuccessful because of a lack of moral virtue? A man who's 30 years old and has never gone on a date or kissed anyone is assumed by default to be some kind of fat, basement-dwelling loser. When he is in fact a short but fit engineer, or a corporate lawyer, or a programmer for Google, he's then roundly criticized for being misogynistic or lacking in moral virtue. Occasionally, darker - much darker - suspicions are raised: let's say that there are reasons why these men frequently avoid being around unrelated children. It seems difficult for people to comprehend that an apparently healthy, gainfully-employed individual could fail to meet with romantic success despite a decade of trying...unless there is something seriously morally wrong with them.
Someone who fails at being a salesman, or a business owner, or even at playing basketball worth a damn...doesn't get that. "I'm a nice, decent, hardworking guy...but I can't sell shoes at Nordstrom, I've been working hard to do this and have dreamt of being a salesman since I was 12" is a kind of absurd complaint. He might be a fine human being and maybe he'd make a great heavy equipment operator, but he just doesn't have the talent for sales. We don't think there's something morally wrong with our hero because he can't sell shoes, or because he's a short, clumsy guy that sucks at basketball.
The actual reality is the Sex Recession was either something made up out of bad data, a temporary drop mostly due to women being more worried about COVID than men, especially among single people under 30, or was left-leaning women being more wary of "non-political men" and those men learning how to better sell themselves.
Why do I say this? Because according to the same data people used to write one zillion Hot Takes about how online dating has destroyed young men's ability to get laid, everything is fine - https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FyOlWt9aUAAYZsd?format=png&name=small
We're back to the only guys not getting laid actually being probably the guys who were never getting laid. Or maybe the incels aged out, and Gen Z, born into dating apps, know how to deal with them better as they enter adulthood.
What exactly is that supposed to mean please?
I happen to have remembered a short discussion in the /r/CultureWarRoundup subreddit about the new GSS data released in November 2021, and it actually showed the opposite if this.
The relevant parts of the commentary there regarding this are these:
And (from a different user):
Having said that, I do believe a) the sex recession is real b) it started long before the COVID lockdowns c) eventually the long-term consequences of said lockdowns will exacerbate it. It's rather obvious that anyone who was in adolescence during the lockdown has significantly eroded social skills as a result, and perhaps the most common complain levelled at young single men is that they lack the necessary social skills to correctly read the nuanced and carefully calculated signals from young women, and to generally navigate the social world and follow its unwritten rules.
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Wow, this is the first bit of good news I've seen on this site in months. Would be interesting to see a breakdown by generation.
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I suspect it's end is bad data/ change in definitions.
People are fatter than ever. Then there's porn.
It'd be helpful to look at hard data on venereal diseases / STDs, to the extent it is even publicly available. If the sex recession is real, and I'm convinced it is, the data should show the following:
A small minority of single men carry a large number of STDs simultaneously.
A large majority of single men do not, and have never carried any STD.
Regarding STD rates, the variance among single women is much lower than among single men.
On average, single women are more likely to be infected than single men, and if infected, are more likely to carry multiple infections than single men.
PiV sex is nowhere near as risky as anal sex.
I believe condom use is quite frequent among this demographic.
What exactly does anal have anything to do with this?
That someone who has a lot of sex doesn't necessarily imply a high rate of STDs.
Not necessarily indeed, but the causation is undoubtedly there. If you're a hetero man, you'll only be infected if you have sex with multiple women, or if your sole sexual partner is having sex with other men.
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The data has always been bad. Sample size is like 150 people (both men and women) in that age group for each year. That leads to so much noise in each observation it's really hard to deduce anything.
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My view is the data was always kind of meh, COVID really messed with it, and maybe this new data is OK, but maybe it's just as bad, but it shouldn't have been used or be used as proof there's an incel crisis or Tinder had destroyed gender relations or whatever.
Tinder enables winner takes all mechanic in dating, which doesn't help anyone but guys great at getting matches on tinder.
Is that even in dispute?
As to why there's a crisis, tinder / sex Revolution is not solely to blame. Few could have forecasted accurately that while porn use was no big deal, having access to a great variety of porn will cause sexual dysfunction in a lot of men. (5-10% is my estimate hard to find any or good data on that).
This is a bit of a ramble, but bare with me.
I honestly think what Tinder mostly did was give men definitive no's when they could've maybe dreamed in a perfect world, they could convince a woman they're the right match.
I'll put it this way - back in 1995, your random guy working a decent mid-level job at Microsoft in Seattle wasn't hooking up with the cute rock chicks hanging out in still super cheap 'n' grungy Capitol Hill, but the fantasy could still exist. Now, that same guy knows for sure it's a 'no.' Now, I do think one thing that maybe should be pushed slightly more is unless the other person has a photographic memory, you have a really terrible profile they'd remember, or you have terrible luck, it's probably fine to try to hit on somebody that swiped left on you six months ago if you come across them. Now, the issue there is you shouldn't probably remember the person you didn't match with six months ago, and that's a sign of deeper issues.
There's no actual good evidence of greater hypergamy among women of this actual hoovering up of all the women by Chad's that people on Twitter and the Internet claim is happening. The reality is, despite what some people on this very site claim is happening, you random average-looking office worker in suburban Des Moines is not swiping no on everybody who doesn't make six figures, isn't six feet, or at least "six inches." Now, maybe this is happening in very specific situations that people online are overrepresented in - ie. San Francisco - but most things people complain about Tinder, have been complained about dating since it became something more than what your parents decided you were going to do.
Now, you can maybe make some arguments about the drop of in-person meeting and such, but I do honestly think the results of Tinder have been overstated because two groups of people that Tinder causes issues in totally separate ways - women who get tons of matches on Tinder and dudes who get zero matches on Tinder, both have outsized voices in their own bubbles. I also firmly believe that there are a lot of dead profiles on Tinder or profiles that (mostly) women leave active to be another form of social media that gives them positive feedback in the form of likes. Now, that might be bad, but that's not a fault of women, since men would largely do the same thing if they could.
Tinder, porn, and general changes in dating are thing people are an '8' on a 1-10 scale and will lead to massive scales of societal destruction, but in reality, they're probably a '3' or '4' and nobody actually talks up the positives. Like, knowing say, whether your partner would be OK w/ an abortion or has drastically different views on their future is actually something that's probably stopped bad marriages, divorces, and terrible custody cases. That's not even getting into the fact the actual big society wide changes aren't so-much US going from people getting married at 24 and having 2.3 kids to getting married at 34 and having 1.8 kids, it's that even places like Iran, Saudi Arabia, and most of Africa are having plummeting birthrate drops.
Is it really a definitive no, though? I'm not sure that just because a woman rejects a man based on his Tinder profile, it 100% means that she would reject him in real life. Maybe it's like 90% or something, but that still means it's not a definitive no.
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This is a real and significant psychological effect. In the old days all these “redpills” would sound like rumors or conspiracy theories. You don’t really “get it” until you see a, “you have 121 matches,” notification pop up on your female classmate’s phone.
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