Blame the apps. None of this would be possible if it weren't for tinder and friends making hook up culture a thing. I would bet dollars to donuts that the folks thriving in this environment would not have the confidence to do the same thing in person.
Blaming the apps is an easy scapegoat. In the end "the apps" are just another vector for meeting someone. I know a few guys that area always going out on dates but have never touched one of the apps, likewise in my case, I almost exclusively get dates from the apps.
What people need to understand about "the apps" is that there are some major differences (at least at the start) between meeting someone off a dating app, and meeting someone in person. You have to set different expectations for when you meet someone off a dating app versus when you meet someone at a bar for example. Most of the complaints I hear about the apps is folks that don't realize the difference, and that you have to adjust your strategy.
Too easy to blame the apps IMO, although they're certainly making things worse. I went to college just before dating apps became ubiquitous and from my experience hookup culture was as much a thing as it is now, only people would first drink their inhibitions into submission before making bad decisions.
If I had to take a (very uneducated) guess I'd say as a society we're currently experiencing an epidemic of unhappiness, especially amongst young people, and what the article describes is just one of many symptoms.
Those kinds of apps appearing are due to circumstances that set the wheels in motion a long time before.
When religions like Islam, Judaism, and Christianity heavily control mixing between the genders, it's for a reason. Once the boundaries broke down and the so called "sexual revolution" took hold, it was only a matter of time.
I'm unsure about how the word 'feminism' is getting thrown around in this article. I can call a circle a triangle all I want, but at the end of the day it's still a circle.
Some of those seem positive to some christians. Some lutherans are advocating for porn as long as it's ethically sourced. Christian morality is a very broad tent to generalize about.
Though I am not one of those people. Porn is obviously missing the mark, literally, morally and ethically. It's disturbing what % of the population makes it's living off prostitution, digital or not.
The only issue i have with porn production is the lack of international regulations. And if the '50% of all internet is porn' myth isn't a myth, maybe people consume too much of something i find inferior (not strictly however) to erotica.
I think people should couple watch erotica movies or go to erotica conventions, i went early in my life when i was close too a group of LGBTQ+ people and it is probably the most foundational experience of my sexual life.
The last one is a serious problem in most Western countries. As the society gets older, there are fewer people who can work and actually sustain the rest of the population.
Fewer babies are the results of the disastrous labour, wages and housing policies in the west, making having a family and a home super expensive for young couples, so everyone spends the prime of their fertility studying and slaving away at shitty stressful jobs hoping to get a leg up in this insane economy.
Baby boomer made tons of babies because housing was cheap, and stable jobs requiring minimal education were plentiful. Both of those are gone now.
Tinder didn't cause this, our governments did and they have the power to fix it but don't want to because "house prices must go up" so speculators can get a return.
It's a longer term trend than even the "sexual revolution". My grandparents generation had plenty of families with 5-10 kids.
My parents generation had 2.5 kids, mostly in their mid to late 20s.
My generation will maybe start thinking about kids at 30.
You could maybe argue that women in the workforce is a social change that contributed to this, as one thing that did change at the beginning of this trend, but surely this as much a fault of the incentives of capitalism turning "Women can work now" to "All working age adults must work, no more stay-at-home parents". Casual relationships, LGBT acceptance, etc. are much later than this trend starting.
Surprisingly, it isn’t. Accounting for societal factors like the sexual evolution and the cost of living, researchers have found that the culprit is something else. Researchers found that starting in the 1950s, male fertility has been on a consecutive year after year decline in countries where enough industrialization has taken place. So far proposed culprits range from PFAS or endocrine disrupters like BPA, but there’s no definitive conclusion yet
I don't know about others, but in my circles very few couples don't have kids because they can't. Most of the time the decision not to have (another) baby is related to external factors such as high and rising costs of doing so.
According to the research even if the economic factors weren’t a roadblock, people still will have trouble having two children. There are reports about couples in their late 20s needing IVF
The developed nations may solve this problem by decoupling children from families a la Huxley’s Brave New World. Perhaps not via bottled babies, but through completely professional caregivers who will raise the children for everybody, leaving the biological parents to devote themselves completely to the production consumption system, as well as complete indulgence in satisfying desires without consequence.
A rich society has a billion existing options to fix this "problem".
Given the collective psychopathy of the majority, an immigrant has to be free and employable on day one to be acceptable while a state can pay the minimum it has to for a child but should be calculating how to make the child's parents suckers. If it goes over board on this calculation, working age population declines decades later which is politically very acceptable.
That is really the authors point. These things that the sexual revolution told us were “neutral to positive” and would bring freedom and lasting happiness ended up not being true. The author mentions the studies that have born this out, as well as many peoples experiences the author relates.
I joked to a younger friend who goes on about boomers, that boomers ruined the economy and millennials ruined sex. He agreed.
Romanticism died in the mid-2010s. Being the knight who ventures into the world for the ideal love no longer works. The "bolt of lightning" style love is not enough to overcome economic and social pressures, people want more security in arranged and strategic marriages.
People who commit to a lust-driven lifestyle make tradeoffs on how they relate to potential partners. Porn has exploded and soaked up all the excess desire. People are working way too much to get time off to meet people and frequently compromise in exploring romantic connections at work.
Dating apps have turned dating into an image game and made a party lifestyle trivially easy. A lot of people have become cogs in a dating machine.
What makes people desirable in a relationship hasn't changed, it's just become way easier to give away what makes it work.
Finding desirable partners is much more difficult when everybody is falling for worldly errors. We need Christ to clean up sex. Star Wars is done, time for Sex Wars.
The author views are heavily tainted by her career: “I spent my entire professional life working on the issue of male violence against women—first in a rape crisis center, and later as a journalist and a media relations director for a legal campaign against sexual violence.” It’s easy to assume all men are predators when that’s the reality you face every day.
Then it's a bit weird that she dismisses "consent workshops". What's wrong with those? They explore patterns and scripts of social interaction that successfully remove the fiction of plausible deniability from outright predatory behavior, and enable others to recognize it and call it out easily. This is not something that should have obnoxious political connotations, it's just a straightforward improvement.
Yes we are, potentially, until we decide we are not. The brute force way we now know is suboptimal and rightly failing, and no matter what you think about OP, the femcel trend she's writing about is happening.
In response to that, a new generation of chivalrous Gentlemen will rise. Cheers to that!
I'm not sure if you're aware of this and trying to make a point, but quite a few self-described "chivalrous Gentlemen" have in fact been predators. The whole notion of polite, chivalrous, "Gentlemen's" behavior as inherently desirable is, shall we say, a bit discredited.
Codes of chivalry and "gentlemanly behavior" came about in the context of strictly class-oriented patriarchy. Those codes existed not to protect women but to reinforce male status within that hierarchy, with women being the currency of social transaction. And like the Bushido of the Samurai, most of the culture around it was a romanticized retcon of a brutal reality.
There's no historical evidence of a knight ever having rescued a damsel in distress, for instance. It was far more likely for a knight to kidnap women, rape them to "consummate marriage" and take legal possession of their property. And that was just a privilege afforded to noble women who had anything worth stealing.
That's a straw man. Speaking as a Muslim, Islam controls mixing between genders of people that are non-Mahrams (i.e. people who are able to get married to each other). The same applies to Judaism and Christianity. Interactions between the genders is controlled and under specific circumstances, based on necessity, and no such thing as "casual friendship" exists between the genders.
The reason of course, is that the natural desire of humans, as well as the influence of Satan, will cause things to end up badly, as we've seen time and time again. Wasn't there the "metoo" movement that we saw?
I have not seen any Muslim scholar declare men as defacto "predators".
Yeah, life isn't fair. The impression left by generations of blacks raping and assaulting women in a culture that defends, promotes and rewards predatory behavior means women might not automatically assume you're a paragon of virtue at first glance.
Boring article. OP is correct that the way young folks relate to each other socially is terrible these days, but trying to roll back the "sexual revolution" would do zilch to improve this. These things are not solely defined by sex, nor should they be.
Rolling back is never an option. We can learn from past mistakes, though. For example, as far as I can tell, men are more frustrated with dating apps, but they're not that happy either. Moreover, we're discussing a subject that is extremely subjective, so we might not even be able to reach a reasonable conclusion.
I don't have a lot of experience on this subject tbh, but apps weren't frustrating to me, a bit too game-ish imho but otherwise fine. The following relationship, however, felt a bit forced each time and i think overall was negative on my happiness.
The issues in this article are no excuse to back peddle or react with fear, if anything I see them as reasons to continue forward, keep the good, address the bad and keep moving.
This read like one long rant from my mother in law that starts with "I'm not racists, but Mexicans..." Except it's June Cleaver saying "I'm a feminist, but she was asking for it in that dress"
Victim or not, moving into a secure stance is good. Avoiding personal security for your daughter simply because you may sound like a victim-blamer to your son-in-law, isn't good policy.
How can you know without trying? Seriously? Humans are a blip in the evolutionary timeline and you not reproducing is not gonna affect humans in any way. I'm a guy who is 30 as well, and I'm brown, I know I don't have a chance in the dating apps in the west, but I don't want to complain, there's other avenues to dating, if that's what you want.
You are better off not being a relationship which hurts you, more than being in one just for the sake of it.
To blame dating apps, hookup culture, divorce rate etc is extremely easy. And I understand the personal frustration and as someone who has never been in a relationship, never had sex, I don't think I'm missing out on anything, yes, I do yearn those things, but honestly, you really can't force things to happen, and life is not a movie, nothing is guaranteed.
