Anecdotally, as someone who has been on the other side of that debate, I very quickly got fed up with the constant goal post shifting. Not having any luck on the apps? You aren't really trying, have to approach in person. You did that, but none of the women you know are single? You aren't really trying, meet new people. You tried that, but the places you might go to do that are all male-dominated? You aren't really trying, get new hobbies (but of course pretend meeting women isn't why you are doing that). After a while I realized that no amount of effort would actually get anyone to admit that I was in fact trying.
This does remind me a bit of how people treat OCD- like there's no way you can still have OCD if you're in therapy or on meds, you must not be trying. The truth is so variable because it all depends on the person But many people *genuinely* are too scared to try.
This. Male dating advice is awful if you have perfectionist tendencies. Nobody wants to just say maybe in some cases the world isn’t fair or you’ve simply had bad luck. You’re always doing something wrong if you’re unhappily single. It’s always a skill issue.
Some people do feel that way, I don’t think that it’s always a skill issue, but I think if you’ve never tried (like the guy in my example) it’s really hard to assess what the issue is. Clearly he has enough going for him that he’s developed relationships with multiple women online!
Oh yeah I agree in that case, sometimes it is a skill issue or a lack of effort and risk taking. I don’t think you give unreasonable advice, but I see this perfectionism in male dating advice more generally fairly frequently.
Male dating advice often turns into basically “have you considered completely remaking your lifestyle and personality, and also obtaining 90% percentile social skills, and building a giant mixed gender social circle of extroverted partiers?” People don’t explicitly say that, but that is the implication if you take all the advice seriously.
Maybe this is something else I should write about, but I wonder how this conflicts with female dating advice because I feel like if you were in my generation, you were told to basically make yourself the perfect girlfriend and obsess over beauty from middle school onward, and then there was a shift where we were told, we shouldn’t care what men think even in situations where we’re obviously doing something that isn’t helping us.
I’d be interested. I have noticed that contrast too where women’s dating advice focuses so much on self-acceptance and having ever higher standards than on the nuts and bolts of being more attractive or approachable. I didn’t realize this was a shift form previous generations though.
"I didn’t realize this was a shift form previous generations though."
I've seen multiple times people advance (to me) wild claims that women have never been told to change themselves for a man and it's only now occurring to me that some people didn't grow up watching romcoms from the 90s-00s.
Yeah I feel like male dating advice, for a lack of better words, tend to be very self improvement pilled and tend to standardize a lot of things - I guess in a sense, male dating advice feels very much like workout advice.
But in reality, a lot of dating is just pure luck and finding a place where you have high chances to meet more compatible ones and assess compatibility, which is almost polar opposite of standardized or checklist able skills
If your lifestyle and interests aren't putting you in a position where you are likely to meet someone AND meeting someone is really important to you, then yep, you will have to make those changes.
As I mentioned earlier, I had a really hard time talking to women, that's what alcohol is for, I spent years going out drinking to clubs trying to hook up.
Well, I think there's also a difficulty here in that we're all clearly talking about dating *discourse* which is more a political debate than an attempt at giving advice. People on either side will never allow that the people on the other side have any point bc polarization. Substack seems promising to me as a space which allows discussions outside of that dynamic.
Important, bc on another level - it's not simply that it is true that some things are not fair or outside of your control, but also requests that are technically fair or within your control are often super hard and discouraging, or force you to suppress aspects of yourself. It's totally "fair" and "in your control" (if incorrect) to say "men only like women with this size breast, so you just have to get a boob job," but we all know to reject that as silly advice because we all know about the secret caveat on "find a partner" which is "*who likes and affirms me" lol
I had the same thought and came here to mention that, Testname. I think the dating advice sphere needs to define “trying” in more specific ways. I have * my * definition of “trying”, but I once heavily offended someone by using the word flippantly, as it’s often used to move the goal post or suggest that the unsuccessful person has been sitting around doing nothing.
I agreed with this piece until close to the end. I don't ask my Gen-Z college and graduate students about their dating habits but I end up learning stuff anyway. Someone mentions a boyfriend in a conversation about weekend plans, someone's girlfriend stops by the lab, etc. The numbers show less sex/dating than in previous generations but it's still happening enough that if you are 24 and have never dated anyone, that's still strange and (if you put in reasonable effort) may reflect you being unattractive.
I think incel self-identification arose in substantial part because of romantically unsuccessful men basically being told their experiences weren't happening. A lot of people, mostly but not always women, seem to think it is easy to find a girlfriend and that if you can't, it's because you aren't trying or don't practice basic hygiene or have a truly horrible personality or something. The unattractive wanted to shout to the world "we exist, our experiences happened." What else is a Reddit forum good for anyway? Point is, the unattractive still exist, even if not dating is becoming more of a default.
At any rate the word "incel" is useless for self-identification now. I like Ozy Brennan's suggestion that the category be split into "love shy" (can't find a partner) and "blackpilled" (thinks Chads are taking all the Staceys because the 19th Amendment or whatever).
This could be somewhat regional or class-oriented. The entiretey of Gen Z is not sexless, but they're far loneliner than millennials were at their age. I know marriage rates are lower among less educated and working class people, so that could be it? When I worked in tech, most of my Gen Z coworkers did have girlfriends and boyfriends.
I think you've hit on something here. In the bubble of the wealthy I do not see these trends in younger people I know. Maybe socializing frequently IRL has become another luxury good.
For married couples with young children having childcare at their disposal enables socializing with friends so those with that luxury are less likely to feel lonely.
I’m glad you brought up the socialization gap as well. I think there’s a huge knock-on effect that wealth has on confidence/belonging/social comfortability that no one talks about here!
There's probably a fairly strong socioeconomic class aspect. My Gen Z daughter is in college, and most of her peers have boyfriends or girlfriends. And, she's a weirdo who hangs out with other weirdos, so it's not limited to just Stacies and Chads. But, I think college is one of the few places left where's its still OK to approach someone for a date.
In fact, before she decided on college, my daughter was considering becoming a hairstylist - and all I could think was "oh no, if she doesn't go to college, how will she ever meet anyone? It'll be all girls and maybe a couple gay dudes at hairstyling school..."
In my generation (Gen X), a lot of my friends met their significant others at work; but that's a big nope nowadays what with #metoo.
We also just met people randomly by striking up a conversation. These days, however, most of those icebreakers are obsolete. You can't ask someone what time it is, or for directions, because no one does that anymore, you just look at your phone or use the phone GPS.
Yes, I think it's very clear that going to college could still be worth it just from a meat market perspective. Doubly so for guys given the current ratio's.
I don't know what the numbers are but, say, a 30% drop in sexual partners is very big but still not so big that it is normal to have never had a girlfriend at age 24.
On the quality of loneliness, it’s ambiguous because The Weeknd made a career out of singing about being a lonely sadboi but indulging a constant stream of sex & drugs. Ergo the 80% lonely stat doesn’t actually represent physical solitude
I’m always shocked at how ignorant most women are about men’s dating experiences. A lot of women seem to think as an average man you can fire up a dating app and have multiple dates lined up within a week, even if you’re looking for casual. They don’t realize that all but the most attractive men have to work really hard to get casual sex at all, and not super frequently even when they do get it, and that even men looking for something serious will have to have a lot of patience.
I also suspect that many of us, myself included, don't have a real good idea of what dating looks like for truly average women. I think I have a halfway decent idea of what high-demand and low-demand women's dating lives might look like, but average middle-of-the-pack ones? Not a clue.
Possibly unfair take: do women even think at all about men’s dating lives (besides CHH, god bless her big heart)? They know that the guys they’re mostly interested in mostly have other options. They know that some other dudes are predators. The rest of us there’s no reason to ever think about.
I want to say that’s more a geography problem. If you have good pics or show up to bar & “normal”, you can find someone average. But if you live in the middle of nowhere, you have less options
I think this is definitely true, because in general we tend to assume our own experiences are harder than the other side. We see our own specific challenges and think "wow it would be nice to not have THAT problem" and don't realize there's a whole other set we haven't considered.
On the other side, I also think men often envy women for being able to easily get casual sex, and fail to understand that women generally don’t *want* it.
Yes, the unattractive still exist but there are plenty of unattractive people of both sexes. The key is to have a realistic view of your own value, and then set your sights appropriately. I've seen plenty of unattractive/obese people that still end up married.
I was expecting to be annoyed (as I usually am with the use of the term), but found myself in furious agreement with most of the article. As I've been saying for years now, the term "incel" no longer means anything, and indeed equating lack of sexual/romantic success with misogyny just objectifies women. I'll also add that 99.9% of the discourse on incels isn't people identifying as such, but other people, usually progressives, using it as a slur. Incels are just a convenient boogeyman because our culture got stuck in high school, where it was cool to mock virgins.
A few years ago I saw someone on Twitter, I think Gabriel Rossman, point out that the default leftwing insult was "incel" and the default rightwing insult was "cuck". He pointed out that low sexual status men are the one category of people who have no protections, whom anyone can insult and it's okay.
Since he wrote this, the rightists have shifted to using racial slurs more, but you get the point.
Yup, masculine insecurities are eternal. It’s the exact equivalent of calling a woman online fat and ugly - it will hurt no matter how untrue it is, and it’s designed to.
I think the main two reasons for the incel/misogynist conflation are:
- The "incel" community on reddit had a specific ideology, it wasn't just a collection of men with romantic struggles
- Calling a misogynist a misogynist gives them power, like calling them mean. "Loser virgin living in parents' basement" stings a lot more, even though there's not really anything wrong with being that.
It's led to a strange phenomenon where discussing *anything* related to male social isolation makes people assume you're complaining that horrible men are being denied a god-given entitlement to sex. (of course, some horrible people do make this point)
But sex isn't a cure for isolation. The inceldom is a symptom of the social isolation, not the other way around.
Plus, after the Santa Barbara and other similar shootings, the IRL world realized we were having to put up with nutcases with this ideology who were actually going out and killing people over it.
This is really interesting to me, as someone whose younger brother is a self-proclaimed "incel" who is in his 30's with no romantic experience but also has a combination of easily curable and incurable handicaps to his dating life. On one hand, he's tall, handsome and earning well into six figures as an optical engineer; on the other, he has pronounced autism and smells horrible in a medical way, and refuses to see a doctor to try and address that issue (we're unsure if it's a horrible rotting dead tooth or a hormone issue or what, but he's smelly enough that when he stays at my place I wash the sheets with vinegar when he leaves). He's also a raging misogynist who casually calls women "whores" and complains about "roasties" and loudly talks in public about how all single moms should be sterilized by the government before they spawn again. According to him, the sole reason he can't get a woman is because of the sexual revolution, because prior to that his paycheck would have been sufficient to lure in and keep a "good woman" because she wouldn't have other options.
I do feel like a lot of women either know or have encountered a man like my brother, and that becomes their idea of an incel: someone who finds it easier to blame women than to take simple steps towards becoming dateable. It's the utter resistance to any form of self-improvement and the externalization of that, making it everyone else's fault. There's an element of it that smacks of learned helplessness and hoping that by bitterly complaining enough, women will capitulate and lower their standards, that feels reminiscent of begging mommy to cut up their sandwiches for them because it's existentially unfair that the store still sells bread with the crust on. I'd say that in my social circles, THAT'S what the term "incel" refers to specifically, that infantile expectation that a man shouldn't have to put any effort into anything because women shouldn't have the option to fail to cater to men's whims. That's why people say Elon has "incel energy" even though he has baby mamas. It's the constant externalization of responsibility, the sense of entitlement to attention and praise, and the juvenile attitude towards self-improvement.
I don't think this is the platonic definition, but it does explain some of the definition-drift online.
Yeah, when my brother vents online about all the awful sluts who spurn him to debase themselves for a Chad he tends to leave out that he smells so bad that people won't go into enclosed spaces like cars with him! Which, to be fair, is something that probably wouldn't be easy to fix given how he's got relatively tidy hygiene practices, but really does change the entire context of the conversation.
Your brother is clearly someone who is richly deserving of being alone, and women are collectively doing exactly what they should by making sure he never gets to first base, but part of me also thinks that even when you’re an asshole, being unwanted probably still hurts like hell and does a number on you. I hope one day he realizes that he doesn’t have to be like this.
I'm doing my best, but I think the ship may have sailed on his ability to socialize with women (he called me a "fucking whore" at Christmas dinner this year in front of the family, so this has been on my mind a lot.) I have no doubt that he's in emotional and spiritual pain and because I love him and because I don't want to see anyone in pain, I wish I could fix it for him. I have my doubts that it would be easy for him to find a girlfriend even with a sparkling, extroverted personality because of the pungent odor. I don't know, percentage-wise, how much easier he could make his dating situation or how much he could actually change his attractiveness since I don't know why he smells that bad.
But I do know that right now he's not taking ANY efforts to improve his situation, be they trying to set up dates, talking to his doctor, or reading up on how to talk to women. Instead he just sits on incel discords all day complaining about foids, which makes him unattractive and makes the idea of introducing my single, interested lady friends to him a no-go. He's set himself on hard mode and doesn't seem to take any ownership of that.
Jesus, I’m so sorry! He’s lucky that you’re even talking to him at all, if he treats you that way.
Also, I had never even heard the word “foid” until today, but it’s the kind of word that you can tell right away involves absolutely bottomless contempt.
The "all misogynists are incels" false equivalency is funny. I've seen someone on Reddit call Elon Musk, a man who has been married three times and fathered 14 children that we know about, an "incel". Whatever you think about his relationship with women, this is not celibacy.
So like he's a father in the loosest way possible. He doesn't love any of the moms. Isn't married to any of them now. The kids were conceived in a lab. It's possible he didn't even ejaculate for the recent ones and used frozen sperm from when he was younger. He doesn't raise the babies. That's done by nannies. It would be totally fine to call him an incel I think.
Obviously none of the stuff about being a bad father and having bad relationships with the mothers relates to celibacy in any way. Seriously, would you call a guy "celibate" because he leaves behind a string exes who hate him and children he ignores??
If they're all IVF babies, that does mean that we don't have _conclusive_ proof that he had sex. However, when a woman is willing to marry a man and be impregnated with his sperm, she is frequently willing to have sex with him as well. I also think that he had sex with his unmarried baby mamas, certainly at least two of them. A simple google search finds a video of him and Shivon Zilis attending a wedding less than 3 weeks ago at Mar-a-Lago.
The only way it is fine to call a man an incel when he is currently attending weddings with a woman who bore 4 of his children, is if "incel" is now a generic insult without any connection to its original meaning.
I find it hard to imagine that he’d have trouble getting a woman to sleep with him if he’s able to get multiple women to agree to get pregnant with his sperm.
In a previous article where you mentioned that most women wish men would approach them more often, one commenter (I think Lila Krishna) said that too often, the reality of that is you end up having a hard time extricating yourself from a painfully awkward conversation with a dude with zero social skills. The famous "hello, HR?!?" viral comic also comes to mind. Like, sure, almost everyone enjoys being approached - by the right person.
I will say that when I was younger, I found approaches flattering, even if they came from people that I was not attracted to, but I drew the line when someone couldn’t take a hint or was being really inappropriate about it.
Yeah, and that's obviously inacceptable. It's a line that *should* be drawn.
When I was growing up, you would see lots of movies and TV shows that would show not taking no for an answer as being an asset. You're not giving up! You're being perseverant! Going for the goal! And in most areas of life, perseverance *is* a great quality! But when consent is required, if you're getting signs of lack of interest, you should absolutely point your perseverance at someone else.
My wife regularly criticizes this aspect of rom coms - the guy who never gives up. IRL, as you say, the guy arguably *should* give up. My wife’s point is that, IRL, the guy *would* give up - 100% of the time. Constant rejection is very off putting and painful for most people.
It's also fascinating how often elderly women will describe how they met their long-time partner in those terms - "I had no interest at first, but he kept trying and he eventually wore me down", and they're saying it with genuine affection, not in a "yeah, I finally gave in to that fucker and I never should have" kind of way. I suspect there may be an element of "permission to be horny" somewhere in there, though.
I think it's mostly permission to be horny combined with courtship over time. But the image of persistence has also changed. @casualsex has written about how there's a knack to casually propositioning someone for sex and I think a similar thing applies here - the guy who has a winsome attitude of "you'll love me eventually" but is clearly actually going to treat you the same regardless of your decision is very different than the guy who keeps asking in angrier tones of voice and starts stalking you.
Yeah, I think (as with discourse over metoo) people really overestimate the number of dudes who were annoyingly persistent who were influenced by romcoms lol. Being a lout doesn't really correlate with watching chickflicks.
Haha, I’m not a very persistent person under the best of circumstances, so that has saved my ass at least a little in the past, but I think there was more of an ambient “if at first you don’t succeed” vibe (sometimes executed in a seductive way and sometimes not) that is a lot less acceptable today.
In the vein of "there are no solutions only trade-offs", totally agree that telling people not to approach folk in public did maybe help to make creeps more identifiable, maybe ladies felt safer but it led to less coupling.
now maybe that trade off is worth it to you. I used to hate the amount of disgusting guys who'd yell out of their cars at me trying to proposition me. It was absolutely gross and demeaning. But guys also just talked to me about mutual interests (and I'd be completely unaware to their flirting) more too.
Yeah, I had a boyfriend in my 20s so I didn’t really want any approaches but most of the ones I did get I found flattering. If there had been a way to just get rid of the ones that were legitimately disgusting and predatory I would have. I guess my concern is that any guy like that is already so deviant that he probably wouldn’t listen to any changing social norms anyway! Like there was a guy who legitimately followed me down the street one time and I highly doubt he was listening to any content about respecting women lol
Exactly. I've been with my husband since I was 20 (16 years ago 😵) and even he sort of approached me for a date in a way that may get him cancelled now (white guy lusting over a black woman in black history month no less!) but was not really out of bounds then but the guy what yelled "hey, hey baby, HEY" out of the car wasn't reading Jezebel.
Yeah, I suspect that guys yelling shit from their cars are not doing that as a flirting strategy so much as an assertion of power - "I'm doing this because I can and there's nothing you can do stop me". It's street harassment, they're not trying to get a date. And my guess is they're pretty impervious to shaming and moral appeals.
Yeah, the entire goal is to either make your friends laugh or make women uncomfortable. I don’t think any of those men believe they’re actually going to find a girlfriend that way.
I don't think cold-approaching women actually helped anyone. It had like a pretty huge failure rate for all but a very small sliver of men, and convinced the rest that they were one cool pickup line from having a date. It used to be acceptable to slap men for using a bad pickup line but gen z men would probably file assault and battery charges.
It was more successful if you were kinda regular at some spot, or series of spots. And you both probably had nicknames for each other like "ski jacket" and "three-martini lunch". Your interest in each other was emissaried by friends, and your date zero was probably hanging out as a big group at one of your regular spots.
People aren't regulars anywhere anymore except work. There's not as much repeated contact that softens you up on friends or dates anymore.
Yes good point! I saw a post on Twitter where a guy was like "she's not hot, you just are around her a lot". Yeah dude, that's how this used to work! All of my friends from college that have married (I graduated in 2011) got with their future spouses this way. You can develop an attraction through a relationship but you can't develop a relationship from "I can't stand being around you and we have no mutual interests".
I find it surprising how much easier it is to make friends now that my kid's in school. I see the same moms and dads at school, at the same neighborhood events, at all the birthday parties. With some of the moms, I've made friends after about a year of seeing each other in these settings. Casual repeated contact is an important part of making new connections.
I don’t think it was a common thing even 20 years ago to hit people for saying something that wasn’t charming enough — like your original implication. I’ve literally never heard of it. I think even Will Smith slapping that man in the Oscars was a shocking deviation because it’s simply not normal. I also remember the furore when Zidane struck a fellow player during the World cup sometime in the 2000s. I don’t think it’s just a GenZ thing where this is considered a shocking reaction.
oh totally. Just saying I get where the desire to stop all men cold encountering you when you deal with this shit but it didn't necessarily stop these guys but stopped guys who *weren't* these guys
So all the maximalist hectoring was useless then. In fact it was genuinely a bad thing to convince 90% of decent men that men are trash. The 10% who are actual trash don’t care and catcall on the street and fuck around if they can anyway.
As a man who hasn’t been out in “streets” and met my wife literally 2 months before Tinder went live, I have no idea what it’s like out there for single men.
A good friend of mine is handsome, incredibly “popular”, 6 ft, owns a comm/res real estate biz, and does extremely with well with women (currently living a poly-esque lifestyle lol).
He claims opportunities for straight men to have one night stands / date are much greater than the 00s and 10s, bc so few guys go out and hit on straight women, and now the ratio significantly favors straight men. I believe he’s totally wrong and biased bc the cards are stacked in his favor.
From what I’ve heard from my less fortunate bros, is that way fewer people are going out in general, and while there are way fewer men hitting on women IRL, women’s standards have risen significantly / people aren’t as open to interacting with “strangers” nowadays so the odds for straight men are significantly worse.
I agree with you that your tall handsome friend is out of touch. Very attractive men seem to often lack awareness of how much they benefit from their looks.
My observation is that as approaching becomes less normalized, it’s harder to do it well enough for woman to be interested. Women aren’t expecting or hoping to be approached as much, so you really have to sell yourself make it work. It’s more likely to come off as awkward because it’s not the norm. They’re also not going to give signals to approach or do things to make themselves more approachable.
I don’t know where he gets the idea that gender ratios favor men when going out. My experience is bars and clubs have more men than women almost universally, especially the kinds of weekend party venues that would facilitate hookups and approaches.
To me, "incel" meant someone who has strong feelings of alienation towards relationships and sex, and lets that become a cornerstone of their identity, usually expressed either in raging outward misogyny or ironic adoption of terminology that gradually becomes normal. The not fucking part is almost incidental.
Is there such thing as being an exurb-cel? Aka “everything is so exhaustingly far away that basic socializing feels like an insurmountable task?”
I still make time for it but mannnnn— it’s like you cross a county line on your commute and there isn’t a soul below the age of 55
But what I’ve also found is it’s harder to develop something meaningful. And that one or two awkward interactions (a very normal part of getting to know somebody) will have either party skedaddling.
Found my husband on tinder. We lived a few blocks apart, worked down the street from each other, and shopped at the same grocery store but we never would have met in a million years without the app or even considered each other seriously. Apps improved my life dramatically because while I was in male-dominated spaces, I felt a real lack of control over my love life. Just being on an app where everyone was single and looking and you'd know if there was mutual interest made the whole thing much easier.
The apps don’t work the way you imagine, especially Tinder. The reality is there are way more men looking for casual than women, so women looking for casual sex can have very high standards. To get casual sex off the apps as a man, you either have to dramatically lower your standards, or work very hard to craft a perfect profile and be very patient. It’s a very dispiriting experience.
Hard agree on the Gen Z entire class warping that happens when you make everyone an indoor kid when most kids should be outdoor kids
I can’t imagine spending so much time on a computer, even though I had work from home during the pandemic and got the brain worms we all got- I was eager to get out of there not stay trapped
Best part of my life is being in nature and the street all day, novel interactions, seeing and talking to strangers and being neighborly in small ways
I know a girl who runs a discord e-bar where the watch e-sports and have the same level of nerdy stats and player engagement with whatever the video game is that regular people might have with the NBA.
She has all these friends who she has never physically met and that’s crazy to me like, wdym every single one of your friends has spent less time in your home with your kid than me- pretty much a random tinder guy
Who helps you move your furniture? Who do you eat breakfast with like
there are a lot of reasons these roads and social pathways have atrophied but for so many younger people never getting to the on ramp is deeply disconcerting
As a esports guy, most of my main day one friends are all online. Video games and voice chat is enough to get deep meaning relationships rather than normie irl “how’s the weather “ types
Different friend, I want to spend time with and make a point to specifically sit down w them but all they are interested in is going onto discord and into Minecraft and sure that can be fun- it’s been years since I played the game when it was alpha
Sometimes gaming so much can be a retreat from life when you’re discouraged- this friend is pretty despondent bc miscarriages and infertility- lots of cases of IRL just withering rather than meeting expectations
what’s the right balance because so many people have no ability to fix the broken things irl so ig just make a nice little house in a game because real world houses start at an unattainable $1M and household median income is $105k but that’s 70 hours of work a week with no breaks for a working class person
wouldn’t the easier pathway be retreat from the physical world because the wealthy have squeezed the life out of real world physical space with scarcity and extraction
I used to play a LOT of World of Warcraft. But I would also get together with many of those guys at the local coffee shop, and actually met other out of towners in real life several times. We even did a week long Vegas trip together.
And I know some other people that met that way and got married,
Vol-incel was literally a status of mine for a long time until I actually started to get on apps 10 years ago.
I guess I am similar to tha guy in a sense that I had many friends both male and female but was too scared to ask out (and my college at 80-20 male female ratio too - which made me believe “all good ones are taken by chads”. This was not 100% wrong but also not 100% correct either)
And the observation that it is a self fulfilling prophecy is so accurate here. Bc I had very little romantic experience, I had very little skill at the beginning, which def turned to a lot of failed ones at the beginning. But the good news was, as I got used to it, I started to get the knack of it. I wonder many modern vol-incels jump to conclusions way too soon - and I kinda wonder many of manosphere are also kinda eugenics pilled in a sense that they consider their rizz to be something they are born with instead of learnable skill
Excellent analysis. I am of an older generation where this seemed less of a problem. There were always those guys buried in women and those that struggled but didn’t starve.
Given the opportunity heterosexual men and women like to jump on top of each other All other sexual orientations too
What is to be done?
There just needs to be more people to people interaction. Group activities. Book clubs to bike riding groups. Maybe sex workers with a new calling to save humanity? The destruction of social media would be nice but not in the cards. We are facing a species ending change in behavior
Anecdotally, as someone who has been on the other side of that debate, I very quickly got fed up with the constant goal post shifting. Not having any luck on the apps? You aren't really trying, have to approach in person. You did that, but none of the women you know are single? You aren't really trying, meet new people. You tried that, but the places you might go to do that are all male-dominated? You aren't really trying, get new hobbies (but of course pretend meeting women isn't why you are doing that). After a while I realized that no amount of effort would actually get anyone to admit that I was in fact trying.
This does remind me a bit of how people treat OCD- like there's no way you can still have OCD if you're in therapy or on meds, you must not be trying. The truth is so variable because it all depends on the person But many people *genuinely* are too scared to try.
This. Male dating advice is awful if you have perfectionist tendencies. Nobody wants to just say maybe in some cases the world isn’t fair or you’ve simply had bad luck. You’re always doing something wrong if you’re unhappily single. It’s always a skill issue.
Some people do feel that way, I don’t think that it’s always a skill issue, but I think if you’ve never tried (like the guy in my example) it’s really hard to assess what the issue is. Clearly he has enough going for him that he’s developed relationships with multiple women online!
Oh yeah I agree in that case, sometimes it is a skill issue or a lack of effort and risk taking. I don’t think you give unreasonable advice, but I see this perfectionism in male dating advice more generally fairly frequently.
Male dating advice often turns into basically “have you considered completely remaking your lifestyle and personality, and also obtaining 90% percentile social skills, and building a giant mixed gender social circle of extroverted partiers?” People don’t explicitly say that, but that is the implication if you take all the advice seriously.
Maybe this is something else I should write about, but I wonder how this conflicts with female dating advice because I feel like if you were in my generation, you were told to basically make yourself the perfect girlfriend and obsess over beauty from middle school onward, and then there was a shift where we were told, we shouldn’t care what men think even in situations where we’re obviously doing something that isn’t helping us.
I’d be interested. I have noticed that contrast too where women’s dating advice focuses so much on self-acceptance and having ever higher standards than on the nuts and bolts of being more attractive or approachable. I didn’t realize this was a shift form previous generations though.
"I didn’t realize this was a shift form previous generations though."
I've seen multiple times people advance (to me) wild claims that women have never been told to change themselves for a man and it's only now occurring to me that some people didn't grow up watching romcoms from the 90s-00s.
Yeah I feel like male dating advice, for a lack of better words, tend to be very self improvement pilled and tend to standardize a lot of things - I guess in a sense, male dating advice feels very much like workout advice.
But in reality, a lot of dating is just pure luck and finding a place where you have high chances to meet more compatible ones and assess compatibility, which is almost polar opposite of standardized or checklist able skills
If your lifestyle and interests aren't putting you in a position where you are likely to meet someone AND meeting someone is really important to you, then yep, you will have to make those changes.
As I mentioned earlier, I had a really hard time talking to women, that's what alcohol is for, I spent years going out drinking to clubs trying to hook up.
What does one do if alcohol just makes him tired?
Add some cocaine?
Heard that from a friend of course...
Although I would be scared now with all this fentanyl crap. We didn't have to worry about that when I was raving in the late 90's
> Nobody wants to just say maybe in some cases the world isn’t fair or you’ve simply had bad luck
There's not a big constituency for hearing this, either.
Well, I think there's also a difficulty here in that we're all clearly talking about dating *discourse* which is more a political debate than an attempt at giving advice. People on either side will never allow that the people on the other side have any point bc polarization. Substack seems promising to me as a space which allows discussions outside of that dynamic.
Important, bc on another level - it's not simply that it is true that some things are not fair or outside of your control, but also requests that are technically fair or within your control are often super hard and discouraging, or force you to suppress aspects of yourself. It's totally "fair" and "in your control" (if incorrect) to say "men only like women with this size breast, so you just have to get a boob job," but we all know to reject that as silly advice because we all know about the secret caveat on "find a partner" which is "*who likes and affirms me" lol
I had the same thought and came here to mention that, Testname. I think the dating advice sphere needs to define “trying” in more specific ways. I have * my * definition of “trying”, but I once heavily offended someone by using the word flippantly, as it’s often used to move the goal post or suggest that the unsuccessful person has been sitting around doing nothing.
I agreed with this piece until close to the end. I don't ask my Gen-Z college and graduate students about their dating habits but I end up learning stuff anyway. Someone mentions a boyfriend in a conversation about weekend plans, someone's girlfriend stops by the lab, etc. The numbers show less sex/dating than in previous generations but it's still happening enough that if you are 24 and have never dated anyone, that's still strange and (if you put in reasonable effort) may reflect you being unattractive.
I think incel self-identification arose in substantial part because of romantically unsuccessful men basically being told their experiences weren't happening. A lot of people, mostly but not always women, seem to think it is easy to find a girlfriend and that if you can't, it's because you aren't trying or don't practice basic hygiene or have a truly horrible personality or something. The unattractive wanted to shout to the world "we exist, our experiences happened." What else is a Reddit forum good for anyway? Point is, the unattractive still exist, even if not dating is becoming more of a default.
At any rate the word "incel" is useless for self-identification now. I like Ozy Brennan's suggestion that the category be split into "love shy" (can't find a partner) and "blackpilled" (thinks Chads are taking all the Staceys because the 19th Amendment or whatever).
This could be somewhat regional or class-oriented. The entiretey of Gen Z is not sexless, but they're far loneliner than millennials were at their age. I know marriage rates are lower among less educated and working class people, so that could be it? When I worked in tech, most of my Gen Z coworkers did have girlfriends and boyfriends.
I think you've hit on something here. In the bubble of the wealthy I do not see these trends in younger people I know. Maybe socializing frequently IRL has become another luxury good.
For married couples with young children having childcare at their disposal enables socializing with friends so those with that luxury are less likely to feel lonely.
When I used to wait tables it was quite common for us to all socialize together. much more so than I do now in my white collar job.
I’m glad you brought up the socialization gap as well. I think there’s a huge knock-on effect that wealth has on confidence/belonging/social comfortability that no one talks about here!
There's probably a fairly strong socioeconomic class aspect. My Gen Z daughter is in college, and most of her peers have boyfriends or girlfriends. And, she's a weirdo who hangs out with other weirdos, so it's not limited to just Stacies and Chads. But, I think college is one of the few places left where's its still OK to approach someone for a date.
In fact, before she decided on college, my daughter was considering becoming a hairstylist - and all I could think was "oh no, if she doesn't go to college, how will she ever meet anyone? It'll be all girls and maybe a couple gay dudes at hairstyling school..."
In my generation (Gen X), a lot of my friends met their significant others at work; but that's a big nope nowadays what with #metoo.
We also just met people randomly by striking up a conversation. These days, however, most of those icebreakers are obsolete. You can't ask someone what time it is, or for directions, because no one does that anymore, you just look at your phone or use the phone GPS.
Yes, I think it's very clear that going to college could still be worth it just from a meat market perspective. Doubly so for guys given the current ratio's.
I don't know what the numbers are but, say, a 30% drop in sexual partners is very big but still not so big that it is normal to have never had a girlfriend at age 24.
I feel like that’s definitely not the norm but it’s within the range of normal for today’s young people
I think we should also factor in the number of teenagers who were preyed on by older men and women. Now a lot more teens know it's wrong and gross.
On the quality of loneliness, it’s ambiguous because The Weeknd made a career out of singing about being a lonely sadboi but indulging a constant stream of sex & drugs. Ergo the 80% lonely stat doesn’t actually represent physical solitude
Haha, very accurate description of The Weeknd’s schtick there!
I’m always shocked at how ignorant most women are about men’s dating experiences. A lot of women seem to think as an average man you can fire up a dating app and have multiple dates lined up within a week, even if you’re looking for casual. They don’t realize that all but the most attractive men have to work really hard to get casual sex at all, and not super frequently even when they do get it, and that even men looking for something serious will have to have a lot of patience.
I also suspect that many of us, myself included, don't have a real good idea of what dating looks like for truly average women. I think I have a halfway decent idea of what high-demand and low-demand women's dating lives might look like, but average middle-of-the-pack ones? Not a clue.
Possibly unfair take: do women even think at all about men’s dating lives (besides CHH, god bless her big heart)? They know that the guys they’re mostly interested in mostly have other options. They know that some other dudes are predators. The rest of us there’s no reason to ever think about.
I want to say that’s more a geography problem. If you have good pics or show up to bar & “normal”, you can find someone average. But if you live in the middle of nowhere, you have less options
I think this is definitely true, because in general we tend to assume our own experiences are harder than the other side. We see our own specific challenges and think "wow it would be nice to not have THAT problem" and don't realize there's a whole other set we haven't considered.
On the other side, I also think men often envy women for being able to easily get casual sex, and fail to understand that women generally don’t *want* it.
Yes, the unattractive still exist but there are plenty of unattractive people of both sexes. The key is to have a realistic view of your own value, and then set your sights appropriately. I've seen plenty of unattractive/obese people that still end up married.
I was expecting to be annoyed (as I usually am with the use of the term), but found myself in furious agreement with most of the article. As I've been saying for years now, the term "incel" no longer means anything, and indeed equating lack of sexual/romantic success with misogyny just objectifies women. I'll also add that 99.9% of the discourse on incels isn't people identifying as such, but other people, usually progressives, using it as a slur. Incels are just a convenient boogeyman because our culture got stuck in high school, where it was cool to mock virgins.
A few years ago I saw someone on Twitter, I think Gabriel Rossman, point out that the default leftwing insult was "incel" and the default rightwing insult was "cuck". He pointed out that low sexual status men are the one category of people who have no protections, whom anyone can insult and it's okay.
Since he wrote this, the rightists have shifted to using racial slurs more, but you get the point.
Yup, masculine insecurities are eternal. It’s the exact equivalent of calling a woman online fat and ugly - it will hurt no matter how untrue it is, and it’s designed to.
This is often wielded by women
I think the main two reasons for the incel/misogynist conflation are:
- The "incel" community on reddit had a specific ideology, it wasn't just a collection of men with romantic struggles
- Calling a misogynist a misogynist gives them power, like calling them mean. "Loser virgin living in parents' basement" stings a lot more, even though there's not really anything wrong with being that.
It's led to a strange phenomenon where discussing *anything* related to male social isolation makes people assume you're complaining that horrible men are being denied a god-given entitlement to sex. (of course, some horrible people do make this point)
But sex isn't a cure for isolation. The inceldom is a symptom of the social isolation, not the other way around.
Agreed all around
Plus, after the Santa Barbara and other similar shootings, the IRL world realized we were having to put up with nutcases with this ideology who were actually going out and killing people over it.
This is really interesting to me, as someone whose younger brother is a self-proclaimed "incel" who is in his 30's with no romantic experience but also has a combination of easily curable and incurable handicaps to his dating life. On one hand, he's tall, handsome and earning well into six figures as an optical engineer; on the other, he has pronounced autism and smells horrible in a medical way, and refuses to see a doctor to try and address that issue (we're unsure if it's a horrible rotting dead tooth or a hormone issue or what, but he's smelly enough that when he stays at my place I wash the sheets with vinegar when he leaves). He's also a raging misogynist who casually calls women "whores" and complains about "roasties" and loudly talks in public about how all single moms should be sterilized by the government before they spawn again. According to him, the sole reason he can't get a woman is because of the sexual revolution, because prior to that his paycheck would have been sufficient to lure in and keep a "good woman" because she wouldn't have other options.
I do feel like a lot of women either know or have encountered a man like my brother, and that becomes their idea of an incel: someone who finds it easier to blame women than to take simple steps towards becoming dateable. It's the utter resistance to any form of self-improvement and the externalization of that, making it everyone else's fault. There's an element of it that smacks of learned helplessness and hoping that by bitterly complaining enough, women will capitulate and lower their standards, that feels reminiscent of begging mommy to cut up their sandwiches for them because it's existentially unfair that the store still sells bread with the crust on. I'd say that in my social circles, THAT'S what the term "incel" refers to specifically, that infantile expectation that a man shouldn't have to put any effort into anything because women shouldn't have the option to fail to cater to men's whims. That's why people say Elon has "incel energy" even though he has baby mamas. It's the constant externalization of responsibility, the sense of entitlement to attention and praise, and the juvenile attitude towards self-improvement.
I don't think this is the platonic definition, but it does explain some of the definition-drift online.
Yes, whenever I see “6 foot, 6 figures” I’m like….ok that is just not enough info. Lots of other stuff could be going on.
Yeah, when my brother vents online about all the awful sluts who spurn him to debase themselves for a Chad he tends to leave out that he smells so bad that people won't go into enclosed spaces like cars with him! Which, to be fair, is something that probably wouldn't be easy to fix given how he's got relatively tidy hygiene practices, but really does change the entire context of the conversation.
Your brother is clearly someone who is richly deserving of being alone, and women are collectively doing exactly what they should by making sure he never gets to first base, but part of me also thinks that even when you’re an asshole, being unwanted probably still hurts like hell and does a number on you. I hope one day he realizes that he doesn’t have to be like this.
I'm doing my best, but I think the ship may have sailed on his ability to socialize with women (he called me a "fucking whore" at Christmas dinner this year in front of the family, so this has been on my mind a lot.) I have no doubt that he's in emotional and spiritual pain and because I love him and because I don't want to see anyone in pain, I wish I could fix it for him. I have my doubts that it would be easy for him to find a girlfriend even with a sparkling, extroverted personality because of the pungent odor. I don't know, percentage-wise, how much easier he could make his dating situation or how much he could actually change his attractiveness since I don't know why he smells that bad.
But I do know that right now he's not taking ANY efforts to improve his situation, be they trying to set up dates, talking to his doctor, or reading up on how to talk to women. Instead he just sits on incel discords all day complaining about foids, which makes him unattractive and makes the idea of introducing my single, interested lady friends to him a no-go. He's set himself on hard mode and doesn't seem to take any ownership of that.
Jesus, I’m so sorry! He’s lucky that you’re even talking to him at all, if he treats you that way.
Also, I had never even heard the word “foid” until today, but it’s the kind of word that you can tell right away involves absolutely bottomless contempt.
The "all misogynists are incels" false equivalency is funny. I've seen someone on Reddit call Elon Musk, a man who has been married three times and fathered 14 children that we know about, an "incel". Whatever you think about his relationship with women, this is not celibacy.
He seems to have IVF'd the babies though. Even his first set of kids were IVF.
So like he's a father in the loosest way possible. He doesn't love any of the moms. Isn't married to any of them now. The kids were conceived in a lab. It's possible he didn't even ejaculate for the recent ones and used frozen sperm from when he was younger. He doesn't raise the babies. That's done by nannies. It would be totally fine to call him an incel I think.
Obviously none of the stuff about being a bad father and having bad relationships with the mothers relates to celibacy in any way. Seriously, would you call a guy "celibate" because he leaves behind a string exes who hate him and children he ignores??
If they're all IVF babies, that does mean that we don't have _conclusive_ proof that he had sex. However, when a woman is willing to marry a man and be impregnated with his sperm, she is frequently willing to have sex with him as well. I also think that he had sex with his unmarried baby mamas, certainly at least two of them. A simple google search finds a video of him and Shivon Zilis attending a wedding less than 3 weeks ago at Mar-a-Lago.
The only way it is fine to call a man an incel when he is currently attending weddings with a woman who bore 4 of his children, is if "incel" is now a generic insult without any connection to its original meaning.
I seriously doubt that ol' Elon is at a loss for female attention.
After seeing what happened to his latest e-girl, I doubt it.
I find it hard to imagine that he’d have trouble getting a woman to sleep with him if he’s able to get multiple women to agree to get pregnant with his sperm.
In a previous article where you mentioned that most women wish men would approach them more often, one commenter (I think Lila Krishna) said that too often, the reality of that is you end up having a hard time extricating yourself from a painfully awkward conversation with a dude with zero social skills. The famous "hello, HR?!?" viral comic also comes to mind. Like, sure, almost everyone enjoys being approached - by the right person.
I will say that when I was younger, I found approaches flattering, even if they came from people that I was not attracted to, but I drew the line when someone couldn’t take a hint or was being really inappropriate about it.
Yeah, and that's obviously inacceptable. It's a line that *should* be drawn.
When I was growing up, you would see lots of movies and TV shows that would show not taking no for an answer as being an asset. You're not giving up! You're being perseverant! Going for the goal! And in most areas of life, perseverance *is* a great quality! But when consent is required, if you're getting signs of lack of interest, you should absolutely point your perseverance at someone else.
My wife regularly criticizes this aspect of rom coms - the guy who never gives up. IRL, as you say, the guy arguably *should* give up. My wife’s point is that, IRL, the guy *would* give up - 100% of the time. Constant rejection is very off putting and painful for most people.
It's also fascinating how often elderly women will describe how they met their long-time partner in those terms - "I had no interest at first, but he kept trying and he eventually wore me down", and they're saying it with genuine affection, not in a "yeah, I finally gave in to that fucker and I never should have" kind of way. I suspect there may be an element of "permission to be horny" somewhere in there, though.
I think it's mostly permission to be horny combined with courtship over time. But the image of persistence has also changed. @casualsex has written about how there's a knack to casually propositioning someone for sex and I think a similar thing applies here - the guy who has a winsome attitude of "you'll love me eventually" but is clearly actually going to treat you the same regardless of your decision is very different than the guy who keeps asking in angrier tones of voice and starts stalking you.
Yeah, I think (as with discourse over metoo) people really overestimate the number of dudes who were annoyingly persistent who were influenced by romcoms lol. Being a lout doesn't really correlate with watching chickflicks.
Haha, I’m not a very persistent person under the best of circumstances, so that has saved my ass at least a little in the past, but I think there was more of an ambient “if at first you don’t succeed” vibe (sometimes executed in a seductive way and sometimes not) that is a lot less acceptable today.
Yeah... frankly, it gets worse with each rejection, not better.
Oh yeah, when all you’ve experienced is rejection, then each new failure compounds all the previous ones. It’s brutal.
In the vein of "there are no solutions only trade-offs", totally agree that telling people not to approach folk in public did maybe help to make creeps more identifiable, maybe ladies felt safer but it led to less coupling.
now maybe that trade off is worth it to you. I used to hate the amount of disgusting guys who'd yell out of their cars at me trying to proposition me. It was absolutely gross and demeaning. But guys also just talked to me about mutual interests (and I'd be completely unaware to their flirting) more too.
Yeah, I had a boyfriend in my 20s so I didn’t really want any approaches but most of the ones I did get I found flattering. If there had been a way to just get rid of the ones that were legitimately disgusting and predatory I would have. I guess my concern is that any guy like that is already so deviant that he probably wouldn’t listen to any changing social norms anyway! Like there was a guy who legitimately followed me down the street one time and I highly doubt he was listening to any content about respecting women lol
Exactly. I've been with my husband since I was 20 (16 years ago 😵) and even he sort of approached me for a date in a way that may get him cancelled now (white guy lusting over a black woman in black history month no less!) but was not really out of bounds then but the guy what yelled "hey, hey baby, HEY" out of the car wasn't reading Jezebel.
Yeah, I suspect that guys yelling shit from their cars are not doing that as a flirting strategy so much as an assertion of power - "I'm doing this because I can and there's nothing you can do stop me". It's street harassment, they're not trying to get a date. And my guess is they're pretty impervious to shaming and moral appeals.
Yeah, the entire goal is to either make your friends laugh or make women uncomfortable. I don’t think any of those men believe they’re actually going to find a girlfriend that way.
I once saw a garbage man do that while hanging off of a garbage truck. I don't think he was looking for a positive response.
I don't think cold-approaching women actually helped anyone. It had like a pretty huge failure rate for all but a very small sliver of men, and convinced the rest that they were one cool pickup line from having a date. It used to be acceptable to slap men for using a bad pickup line but gen z men would probably file assault and battery charges.
It was more successful if you were kinda regular at some spot, or series of spots. And you both probably had nicknames for each other like "ski jacket" and "three-martini lunch". Your interest in each other was emissaried by friends, and your date zero was probably hanging out as a big group at one of your regular spots.
People aren't regulars anywhere anymore except work. There's not as much repeated contact that softens you up on friends or dates anymore.
Yes good point! I saw a post on Twitter where a guy was like "she's not hot, you just are around her a lot". Yeah dude, that's how this used to work! All of my friends from college that have married (I graduated in 2011) got with their future spouses this way. You can develop an attraction through a relationship but you can't develop a relationship from "I can't stand being around you and we have no mutual interests".
I find it surprising how much easier it is to make friends now that my kid's in school. I see the same moms and dads at school, at the same neighborhood events, at all the birthday parties. With some of the moms, I've made friends after about a year of seeing each other in these settings. Casual repeated contact is an important part of making new connections.
Women were slapping men for bad pick up lines? Was this in a movie? Where was this happening?
I did it.
I don’t think it was a common thing even 20 years ago to hit people for saying something that wasn’t charming enough — like your original implication. I’ve literally never heard of it. I think even Will Smith slapping that man in the Oscars was a shocking deviation because it’s simply not normal. I also remember the furore when Zidane struck a fellow player during the World cup sometime in the 2000s. I don’t think it’s just a GenZ thing where this is considered a shocking reaction.
"How can she slap?"
Do those guys not exist anymore? Does no one get cat called anymore?
oh totally. Just saying I get where the desire to stop all men cold encountering you when you deal with this shit but it didn't necessarily stop these guys but stopped guys who *weren't* these guys
So all the maximalist hectoring was useless then. In fact it was genuinely a bad thing to convince 90% of decent men that men are trash. The 10% who are actual trash don’t care and catcall on the street and fuck around if they can anyway.
It reduced to a great, great extent for sure.
Loved this!
As a man who hasn’t been out in “streets” and met my wife literally 2 months before Tinder went live, I have no idea what it’s like out there for single men.
A good friend of mine is handsome, incredibly “popular”, 6 ft, owns a comm/res real estate biz, and does extremely with well with women (currently living a poly-esque lifestyle lol).
He claims opportunities for straight men to have one night stands / date are much greater than the 00s and 10s, bc so few guys go out and hit on straight women, and now the ratio significantly favors straight men. I believe he’s totally wrong and biased bc the cards are stacked in his favor.
From what I’ve heard from my less fortunate bros, is that way fewer people are going out in general, and while there are way fewer men hitting on women IRL, women’s standards have risen significantly / people aren’t as open to interacting with “strangers” nowadays so the odds for straight men are significantly worse.
Does anyone have thoughts on this?
I agree with you that your tall handsome friend is out of touch. Very attractive men seem to often lack awareness of how much they benefit from their looks.
My observation is that as approaching becomes less normalized, it’s harder to do it well enough for woman to be interested. Women aren’t expecting or hoping to be approached as much, so you really have to sell yourself make it work. It’s more likely to come off as awkward because it’s not the norm. They’re also not going to give signals to approach or do things to make themselves more approachable.
I don’t know where he gets the idea that gender ratios favor men when going out. My experience is bars and clubs have more men than women almost universally, especially the kinds of weekend party venues that would facilitate hookups and approaches.
And of course, the lack of awareness is itself attractive!
“…lack awareness of how much they benefit from their looks…”
Too many dicks on the dance floor!
Oh man, I forgot that.
I think it's incredibly hard to pick women up at a bar now unless you are very attractive
To me, "incel" meant someone who has strong feelings of alienation towards relationships and sex, and lets that become a cornerstone of their identity, usually expressed either in raging outward misogyny or ironic adoption of terminology that gradually becomes normal. The not fucking part is almost incidental.
This is wild to me.
I should add, you're not the first person I've met that had this conception of the word, but is wild to me every time I encounter it.
Incel as someone who doesn't get laid vs. Incel as an identity.
Is there such thing as being an exurb-cel? Aka “everything is so exhaustingly far away that basic socializing feels like an insurmountable task?”
I still make time for it but mannnnn— it’s like you cross a county line on your commute and there isn’t a soul below the age of 55
But what I’ve also found is it’s harder to develop something meaningful. And that one or two awkward interactions (a very normal part of getting to know somebody) will have either party skedaddling.
Just spitballing in my sleep deprived state
welcome to the yimby movement
I went exclusive with the woman who became my wife in 2008 - so I've been off the market for many years. No regrets.
But I did always wonder what it would have been like to use those apps (Tinder) where self-selected horny people could find each other.
It has surprised me - but maybe it shouldn't - that sexual activity has declined just as technology should be making it easier to find someone.
My guess is that technology *has* made it dramatically easier - for a small minority that was not lacking for opportunities in the first place.
Found my husband on tinder. We lived a few blocks apart, worked down the street from each other, and shopped at the same grocery store but we never would have met in a million years without the app or even considered each other seriously. Apps improved my life dramatically because while I was in male-dominated spaces, I felt a real lack of control over my love life. Just being on an app where everyone was single and looking and you'd know if there was mutual interest made the whole thing much easier.
The apps don’t work the way you imagine, especially Tinder. The reality is there are way more men looking for casual than women, so women looking for casual sex can have very high standards. To get casual sex off the apps as a man, you either have to dramatically lower your standards, or work very hard to craft a perfect profile and be very patient. It’s a very dispiriting experience.
And none of the typical dating advice you get really helps with app based dating
Hard agree on the Gen Z entire class warping that happens when you make everyone an indoor kid when most kids should be outdoor kids
I can’t imagine spending so much time on a computer, even though I had work from home during the pandemic and got the brain worms we all got- I was eager to get out of there not stay trapped
Best part of my life is being in nature and the street all day, novel interactions, seeing and talking to strangers and being neighborly in small ways
I know a girl who runs a discord e-bar where the watch e-sports and have the same level of nerdy stats and player engagement with whatever the video game is that regular people might have with the NBA.
She has all these friends who she has never physically met and that’s crazy to me like, wdym every single one of your friends has spent less time in your home with your kid than me- pretty much a random tinder guy
Who helps you move your furniture? Who do you eat breakfast with like
there are a lot of reasons these roads and social pathways have atrophied but for so many younger people never getting to the on ramp is deeply disconcerting
As a esports guy, most of my main day one friends are all online. Video games and voice chat is enough to get deep meaning relationships rather than normie irl “how’s the weather “ types
I used to do a lot of WoW and Starcraft II. I agree you can develop good friends like that.
I still maintain though that actual RL friends are important too.
Different friend, I want to spend time with and make a point to specifically sit down w them but all they are interested in is going onto discord and into Minecraft and sure that can be fun- it’s been years since I played the game when it was alpha
Sometimes gaming so much can be a retreat from life when you’re discouraged- this friend is pretty despondent bc miscarriages and infertility- lots of cases of IRL just withering rather than meeting expectations
what’s the right balance because so many people have no ability to fix the broken things irl so ig just make a nice little house in a game because real world houses start at an unattainable $1M and household median income is $105k but that’s 70 hours of work a week with no breaks for a working class person
wouldn’t the easier pathway be retreat from the physical world because the wealthy have squeezed the life out of real world physical space with scarcity and extraction
I used to play a LOT of World of Warcraft. But I would also get together with many of those guys at the local coffee shop, and actually met other out of towners in real life several times. We even did a week long Vegas trip together.
And I know some other people that met that way and got married,
Vol-incel was literally a status of mine for a long time until I actually started to get on apps 10 years ago.
I guess I am similar to tha guy in a sense that I had many friends both male and female but was too scared to ask out (and my college at 80-20 male female ratio too - which made me believe “all good ones are taken by chads”. This was not 100% wrong but also not 100% correct either)
And the observation that it is a self fulfilling prophecy is so accurate here. Bc I had very little romantic experience, I had very little skill at the beginning, which def turned to a lot of failed ones at the beginning. But the good news was, as I got used to it, I started to get the knack of it. I wonder many modern vol-incels jump to conclusions way too soon - and I kinda wonder many of manosphere are also kinda eugenics pilled in a sense that they consider their rizz to be something they are born with instead of learnable skill
Just interesting food for thought having decided to be ok w not being on the apps
Was writing a thing on that and will have to consider
Excellent analysis. I am of an older generation where this seemed less of a problem. There were always those guys buried in women and those that struggled but didn’t starve.
Given the opportunity heterosexual men and women like to jump on top of each other All other sexual orientations too
What is to be done?
There just needs to be more people to people interaction. Group activities. Book clubs to bike riding groups. Maybe sex workers with a new calling to save humanity? The destruction of social media would be nice but not in the cards. We are facing a species ending change in behavior
"*I’m being informed “chopped unc” is now chopped and unc-coded."
Look, I'm sure your readership skews this direction anyways. We're all chopped uncs here.