It's Always Popular To Ask "why Is Dating So Difficult Right Now?" And The Obvious Answer Is To Gesture

it's always popular to ask "why is dating so difficult right now?" and the obvious answer is to gesture at the people asking this forever and perhaps rhetorically wonder why you would expect finding someone to share your life with to be easy, end of question.

but some people will plunge on and say it must be because young men have been misled by the manosphere and now they want the wrong thing or behave the wrong way or whatever, and that's such a tempting straw to grasp because Social Media Makes People Worse is a compelling hypothesis when we see it every day (and of course you can ask what all those makeup tutorials and true crime podcasts are doing to young women besides raising their suicide rate).

personally I don't think young men behaved better in the 1970s or the '90s or the early 2010s or whenever the supposed golden age of heterosexual dating was supposed to be, and while the manosphere is obviously a problem (in the sense that it's awash with ideas that are untrue, unkind, and unhelpful) I don't think it is the problem, it seems like a typical exaggerated social media response to other problems (gender segregation on social media doesn't seem more extreme than the gender segregation that ruled most of human history, so that can't be the entire story).

women will say that men don't want to commit (despite all wanting tradwives!) and men will say uh stuff about women that doesn't bear repeating to be honest but let's politely say that both sides will accuse each other of having unrealistic expectations or overly picky standards -- and of course that's a very real possibility, that people can be fixated on fantasies and find real life doesn't measure up; one of the original critiques of social media was that it could give a misleading impression of how good everyone but you is having it (until it became in vogue to post about your mental illnesses).

but if we want to look for material changes that could potentially have impacted the heterosexual dating market, there's no getting around the fact that staying single is a much better deal for women now than it was for much of the 20th century, and indeed the centuries before that, when the desirability of marriage was enforced by incentives that strongly penalised not settling for a man, in the worst case including institutionalisation for single mothers and even the forced sterilisation of unmarried women deemed promiscuous.

as the legal barriers and overt discrimination against women were dismantled in the 20th century, the wage gap followed: in the US prior to 1980, women earned about 60% of what men earned, but by 2002 this had risen to 80% (the rise has slowed, it's 82% today); this reduction in the pay disparity has the side effect of reducing the value of what a man would bring to the household.

it's not a good look for men but there's no denying that some of the value they used to bring to a relationship included privileges like:

access to higher paying jobs

protection from harassment by other men

ability to live independently of controlling parents or guardians

ability to have children without having them taken away

now that many of these privileges are extended to everyone in a more egalitarian fashion, having a man around is simply less necessary than it was; you would expect this reduction of privileges to push some relationships that were already marginal prospects into being nonviable.

and perhaps that's a good thing, for the relationships that survive to be mutually beneficial arrangements and less like hostage situations.

More Posts from Commodorepuddle and Others

1 month ago

this is such a profoundly stupid thing to be mad about but. i periodically think about how banksy made one of my single favorite pieces of art of all time, and everything else he's ever done has sucked. man, how did you nail it once

2 months ago

im cleaning out my phone and found that i have saved this tiktok no less than Five separate times

3 years ago
Me At Family Gatherings
Me At Family Gatherings
Me At Family Gatherings
Me At Family Gatherings

me at family gatherings

3 years ago

To everyone who's not mortally offended by subtitles, I highly recommend watching

THE SILENT SEA

It's 8 episodes, each one is just 50-ish minutes; and it really shines a light on where we as a race, and as a planet, are eventually headed.

Would definitely put it right up there with Squid Games. I seriously don't know why more people aren't talking about this.

1 month ago

hi, a lot of you need a perspective reset

the average human lifespan globally is 70+ years

taking the threshold of adulthood as 18, you are likely to spend at least 52 years as a fully grown adult

at the age of 30 you have lived less than one quarter of your adult life (12/52 years)

'middle age' is typically considered to be between 45-65

it is extremely common to switch careers, start new relationships, emigrate, go to college for the first or second time, or make other life-changing decisions in middle age

it's wild that I even have to spell it out, but older adults (60+) still have social lives and hobbies and interests.

you can still date when you get old. you can still fuck. you can still learn new skills, be fashionable, be competitive. you can still gossip, you can still travel, you can still read. you can still transition. you can still come out.

young doesn't mean peaked. you're inexperienced in your 20s! you're still learning and practicing! you're developing social skills and muscle memory that will last decades!

there are a million things to do in the world, and they don't vanish overnight because an imaginary number gets too big

1 month ago

Me: I don't get it. I thought I was doing a lot better than I was a few years ago. I'm like 10 times more on top of things than I used to be. How does everything feel terrible now?

The Tiny Me in OSHA-approved Hi-Vis Gear Who lives in my brain and pulls all the levers: Boss, it's the fascism. You're completely gunked up with cortisol due to the fact that your entire daily life is now underscored with a haunting awareness of the rapid erosion of your rights, dignity, and any and all social safety nets, and you're also bearing witness to the most vulnerable people immediately being persecuted. This creates a natural stress response that basically means you're going to continue having memory and organizational problems, as well as emotional imbalances.

Me: BUT I HAVE A BULLET JOURNAL AND I MEDITATE NOW.

Tiny OSHA Me: BOSS, THE FASCISM.

1 month ago

"There was an exchange on Twitter a while back where someone said, ‘What is artificial intelligence?' And someone else said, 'A poor choice of words in 1954'," he says. "And, you know, they’re right. I think that if we had chosen a different phrase for it, back in the '50s, we might have avoided a lot of the confusion that we're having now." So if he had to invent a term, what would it be? His answer is instant: applied statistics. "It's genuinely amazing that...these sorts of things can be extracted from a statistical analysis of a large body of text," he says. But, in his view, that doesn't make the tools intelligent. Applied statistics is a far more precise descriptor, "but no one wants to use that term, because it's not as sexy".

'The machines we have now are not conscious', Lunch with the FT, Ted Chiang, by Madhumita Murgia, 3 June/4 June 2023

1 month ago

God, I can’t tell you how much the “there’s not enough enrichment in my enclosure” joke has helped my mental health. Because, for some reason I can’t comprehend, pretending that I’m a zoo keeper caring for an animal (which is also me) just makes everything easier to comprehend. Like “Your head gets screwey when you’re apartment is messy” just doesn’t carry as much resonance as “The tiger becomes agitated when its enclosure is cluttered” because then I’ll be like, no shit? The tiger? I’ve gotta keep things nice and clean for the tiger.

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commodorepuddle - The Curious Lichen
The Curious Lichen

I am growing into my profile picture. Oh to be an opportunistic crow, building a nest of trash. Oh to be a hungry Mumbai crow, eating some more trash. Oh to question the universe, do I live in trash or am I made of trash?!

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