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I'm feeling rather insane right now so I'll post a screed.
Do you ever feel like there are just... too many men on this planet? Not humans. Just men, in particular.
Humans are like 1.05 males: females at birth, so there's a natural imbalance. I can only assume this was balanced in the past because males died more: from war, or hunting animals, or just generally taking more risks.
None of that happens now, in our ultra-safe modern feminized society. So we just have a bunch of surplus males sitting around.. doing nothing... simping for women. Taking up body building, or feminism, or prostitution, or onlyfans, or whatever else will give them a drop of female attention.
Everybody knows "Ender's Game," but did you ever read the sequels? It has one (Speaker for the Dead) where they find an alien race that can only reproduce through a chemical change caused by war. That's... how I feel. Like, our species basically requires war in order to sort out our psychology. Otherwise there will be this latent male aggression caused by intra-sexual competition, and it won't end until we have some stupid fucking war over nothing, just to reduce the surplus male population.
There's too many dicks on the dance floor
Oh, absolutely. There was even a big post either here or on /r/SSC where a poster argued quite convincingly that a big part of the reason why there is a modern dating imbalance and women have so much power in the marketplace is precisely because there are too many 18-25 men today compared to even 1980. In 1980 the male:female ratio had equalised by age 20-24: https://www.populationpyramid.net/united-states-of-america/1980/ ; while today the imbalance is still almost as bad as at birth: https://www.populationpyramid.net/united-states-of-america/2023/ . Of course this 5% imbalance gives women a very disproportionate amount of power (it's not 5% more power, due to how strong the human male sex drive is, men will jump through a ton of hoops before enough of them drop out so that the market clears).
I can't seem to find the post though, even after a cursory google...
Another big factor is that, more and more, 18-25 year old men are competing against older men.
Let's say you're a 22 year old woman. Who would you rather date? A 22 year old man living his parent's basement? Or a 30 year old man with his own place?
Older men are better than young men. More attractive, more successful, more emotionally mature. Men's overall value in the dating market peaks at age 38. Women peak in their early 20s or before.
While this has always been the case, in the past it was mitigated by young people falling in love and marrying without ever really entering a post-college dating market.
Now, a 23 year old women can get on the apps and instantly match with a bunch of successful, good-looking guys who seem available. It's pretty tough to turn down this proposition in favor of some young dork who actually is available. Worse, once they are discarded by these better men, they are unlikely to want to settle for worse options. It is hard to form a secure attachment with a woman if you're not the best person she has ever dated.
The gender ratio of 18-25 year olds is 1.05:1. That hugely understates the problem. For young men, it is far far worse than that.
The curious thing is the new emerging taboo against age differences in relationships. Large age differences have always been somewhat inappropriate and suspicious, but differences of only a few years between obvious adults are now being castigated. I would expect this to be simply female mate competition by older women reacting to the situation you describe, discouraging successful men in their 30s and 40s trading them in on the dating apps for a younger model. However, this taboo appears to be coming from younger age groups who seem convinced that age gaps imply grooming which implies non-consent. Why are some young women apparently trying taboo a 22 year old women dating a 28 year old man when they are also disproportionaly hooking up with older men on the dating apps?
In the popular imagination "grooming" is a conspiratorial right-wing thing, but it's true it's actually quite normative among younger people in general, that theme and accusation.
Colleen Ballinger aka Miranda Sings was accused of that and I'm pretty sure it wasn't coming from the right, who were never paying much attention to her.
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