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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   27330 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 13, 2024

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I think you have your causality backwards. It's not that people don't bother asking people out in person anymore because they'd rather use the apps: it's that Western society has become massively atomised as a result of technological progress, which is a void that the apps have stepped in to inexpertly fill.

In the past, where would you typically ask out a girl in person? Common examples included i) a nice girl you met at church; ii) a colleague at work; iii) a classmate; or iv) a friend of a friend. Why i) is no longer viable is self-explanatory. Why ii) no longer works is explicable by the same dynamics Scott complained about in "Untitled": yes, workplace sexual harassment policies are written in an extremely sweeping fashion, and yes, men who are charming and socially adept and who are interested in one of their colleagues will probably just ask her out, without worrying about whether it's technically in violation of the policy or not. But conscientious socially awkward men will worry about this, as well they should given that they're the only men likely to be reported for violating it. (Yes I'm trotting out this meme again, I don't care: I was effectively shunned from an entire community and industry for the crime of politely asking a girl if she wanted to get coffee sometime and I'm still mad about it - anyone saying "just ask her bro, the worst she can say is no" is full of shit.) Regarding iii), some of the same dynamics as ii) apply, and you also run into the problem of a paucity of available women - if you're a socially awkward man in college, odds are good that you're pursuing a degree which is highly sex-segregated (computer science, engineering etc.).

That leaves iv). It's impossible to ask a friend of a friend on a date if a) you don't have any friends, or all of your friends are online friends; or b) all of your friends are people you met through an extremely sex-segregated common interest (Warhammer, D&D, coding, esports, rationalist-adjacent subreddit spinoffs etc.) - something that the internet and social media facilitates far too easily. (People self-segregrating into ideological echo chambers is only the tip of the iceberg: self-segregrating into echo chambers of people who like Obscure Hobby X or want to fuck toasters is the major underlying cause of the demise of any shared monoculture and the enshittification of Western society. I and everyone reading this are guilty of it.)

So you're left with cold approaches: going up to girls in bars or nightclubs. Again, not a problem for charming and socially adept men; big problem for the socially awkward millennials/zoomers you're criticising. Hard to blame them for making a beeline for the apps instead.

Of course it's easy to criticise Millennial and Gen Z adult men for not taking proactive steps to organically encounter single women in real life. Obviously talking to strangers halfway across the globe is not a great way to get laid in real life; nor is spending every day in your local Games Workshop. But the thing is, they didn't make this decision as adults: they made it when their parents gave them a smartphone as teenagers, and all the years of adolescence they should have spent ironing out the kinks in their patter have been squandered watching YouTube and Twitch instead. Gen Z boys are starting college barely more acquainted with the rules of social interaction IRL than Gen X 13-year-olds were, for reasons that are not entirely their fault: no one here thinks someone's life should be ruined because of a stupid decision they made when they were 12, a decision which directly harms only themselves and no one else (but indirectly harms society as a whole, obviously).

And your assumption that dating apps killed traditional courtship hinges on the questionable presumption that Millennial/Gen Z women are exactly as receptive to a stranger asking them out as Gen X women were in their youth. But I don't think they are, and I think the fact that they aren't is part of the problem. See this great article:

I mentioned to several of the people I interviewed for this piece that I’d met my husband in an elevator, in 2001. (We worked on different floors of the same institution, and over the months that followed struck up many more conversations—in the elevator, in the break room, on the walk to the subway.) I was fascinated by the extent to which this prompted other women to sigh and say that they’d just love to meet someone that way. And yet quite a few of them suggested that if a random guy started talking to them in an elevator, they would be weirded out. “Creeper! Get away from me,” one woman imagined thinking. “Anytime we’re in silence, we look at our phones,” explained her friend, nodding. Another woman fantasized to me about what it would be like to have a man hit on her in a bookstore. (She’d be holding a copy of her favorite book. “What’s that book?” he’d say.) But then she seemed to snap out of her reverie, and changed the subject to Sex and the City reruns and how hopelessly dated they seem. “Miranda meets Steve at a bar,” she said, in a tone suggesting that the scenario might as well be out of a Jane Austen novel, for all the relevance it had to her life.

See also (coming back to "Untitled" above) innumerable feminist comics about how it's creepy for men to ask a woman out in a coffee shop or in a library or in college or on the third moon of Venus or whatever. There are plenty of women who are far less receptive to being asked out by strangers than their mothers were, and make no secret of that fact. Obviously the women writing these comics don't represent all women, but the men reading and internalising these comics don't necessarily know that, and everyone ends up poorer for it. If you are demanding that men not interact with you, and the only men reading (or caring about) that demand are men who care about respecting your boundaries - it should come as no surprise when the only men who interact with you are men who don't care about respecting your boundaries. The typical "if you're reading it, it's not for you" dynamic.

I think the main thing that boomers and even elder Millenials might be missing is that literally EVERYTHING in Zoomer culture is in a constant state of molochian hypercompetition/red queen races thanks to the influence of social media and algorithmic ranking of every aspect of their performance in life.

I mean this literally. If you grew up playing video games, you probably remember online multiplayer as a casual fun thing to do, where the level of competition varied depending on the server you loaded into.

At some point in the past 15 years, the concept of RANKED MODE was introduced, and now every single player can be aware of their skill level relative to every other player at all times. So if you care about skill level at all, you have to play your hardest at all times to keep your rating up. Casual play is still allowed but you don't get the luxury of just hopping to a different server that's more your speed. People will judge you for your ranking constantly.

Or if you're a streamer, you are fully aware of how many viewers you're attracting at all times. So is everyone else. Only the top 1% break more than a hundred at a time.

Dating with the Apps makes things easy for that top 10-20% of males, and throws challenges to the rest of the men. A man now is judged against every male in a 20 mile radius rather than just the guys in his high school.

Top paying jobs draw applicants from across the entire planet, which means they get Extremely selective and have every more stringent criteria in terms of the degrees, experience, and candidates they accept.

These are sometimes gated by degree requirements, which brings me to the competition to get into these schools.

And of course the rampant cheating and adderal abuse that occurs for those trying to maintain high ranks.

If you go to a good school and get good grades you can walk into one of those top-tier jobs, but this is only applicable to the tippy-top, and everyone is generally aware of their status well before they graduate. If they get the right degree or know the right people they can be basically guaranteed access to elite social circles. Otherwise... may as well resign yourself to lifelong mediocrity.

Power law distributions rule EVERYTHING around you if you're younger and haven't had decades of time to cement your status and build a pile of wealth. And yes, this has almost always been true, but now its simply a known fact of life for the Zoomers. Its the air they breathe, the water they swim in. Every activity they could possibly participate in is subject to a panopticon of algorithms that will rank their performance and often publish it for easy observation, and they are surrounded by peers who are competing as hard as possible to not be left behind.

So perhaps the reason they decline to throw themselves at jobs or dating or developing GRIT is because the entire social environment is simply not conducive to chasing these endeavors unless you are one of those PSYCHOPATHS who doesn't mind abusing stimulants, exploiting every social loophole you can find, committing light fraud, and otherwise sacrificing health and happiness to actually compete for the most desirable positions out there.

In the past, where would you typically ask out a girl in person?

For many many years the main true answer was "the bar" -- zoomers are too scared to go in those either, and now they are dying.

As a 29 year old with primarily Zoomerish co-workers in my niche I think even 'the bar' isn't really what it was.

Alcohol's increasingly expensive in most urban areas, I think social dynamics in bars is more about 'I go to the bar with my group of friends to be somewhat near other groups' instead of as much interlocking as you'd get historically and frankly my younger co-workers just don't really drink that much.

(Yes I'm trotting out this meme again, I don't care: I was effectively shunned from an entire community and industry for the crime of politely asking a girl if she wanted to get coffee sometime and I'm still mad about it - anyone saying "just ask her bro, the worst she can say is no" is full of shit.)

Everyone knows women don’t care about looks, but it sounds like her feminine intuition and personality-detector correctly clocked you as the type of bigot who posts in a lair of racists, misogynists, and transphobes. So she bravely and rightfully got you excommunicated from a community and an industry to keep everyone safe *crosses arms and turns away indignantly*.

Yeah, women take it as an insult when a man she views as beneath her shoots his shot at her, as it offends their princess complex. “Ugh, you thought you had a chance with me? Gross.”

Usually (I hope) getting rejected by a girl doesn’t lead to immediate exile from community and industry, but realistically it at least means no other girl in her social circle will want you. And even the guys in your/her social circle will have their priors updated in the direction of you potentially being a social liability. A girl will eagerly spread the word and poison the well after rejecting you.

On the bright side, though, banging a chick greatly increases the chances you’ll bang other chicks in her social circle. Praise be the double-edged sword of female mate-choice copying.

I mentioned to several of the people I interviewed for this piece that I’d met my husband in an elevator, in 2001. (We worked on different floors of the same institution, and over the months that followed struck up many more conversations—in the elevator, in the break room, on the walk to the subway.) I was fascinated by the extent to which this prompted other women to sigh and say that they’d just love to meet someone that way. And yet quite a few of them suggested that if a random guy started talking to them in an elevator, they would be weirded out. “Creeper! Get away from me,” one woman imagined thinking. “Anytime we’re in silence, we look at our phones,” explained her friend, nodding. Another woman fantasized to me about what it would be like to have a man hit on her in a bookstore. (She’d be holding a copy of her favorite book. “What’s that book?” he’d say.) But then she seemed to snap out of her reverie, and changed the subject to Sex and the City reruns and how hopelessly dated they seem. “Miranda meets Steve at a bar,” she said, in a tone suggesting that the scenario might as well be out of a Jane Austen novel, for all the relevance it had to her life.

It amuses me that, even in the showerthoughts, daydreams, and fantasies of presumed PMC(-aspirant) #GirlBosses, such women are comically hypoagentic and can’t muster up a fraction of the courage and initiative that men regularly exhibit. The thought of themselves making The First Move is outside of their personal Overton Window. If a given man doesn’t read her mind and approach her after she performs the physical and emotional labor of sitting, standing, or existing near him... k fine whatevs, it’s his loss.

If a man does successfully pick her up in a bar, elevator, bookstore, breakroom, subway, or wherever and a long-term relationship ensues, it’s retrospectively revised on her part to be “omg it just so happened that we met” rather than “he assessed the costs/benefits, initiated the conversation, led the conversation, drove the interaction forward, and I just followed along” such that she can claim that she Did Her Part as an equal partner rather than being a bystander in her own narrative.

Why ii) no longer works is explicable by the same dynamics Scott complained about in "Untitled": yes, workplace sexual harassment policies are written in an extremely sweeping fashion, and yes, men who are charming and socially adept and who are interested in one of their colleagues will probably just ask her out, without worrying about whether it's technically in violation of the policy or not. But conscientious socially awkward men will worry about this, as well they should given that they're the only men likely to be reported for violating it. (Yes I'm trotting out this meme again, I don't care: I was effectively shunned from an entire community and industry for the crime of politely asking a girl if she wanted to get coffee sometime and I'm still mad about it - anyone saying "just ask her bro, the worst she can say is no" is full of shit.) Regarding iii), some of the same dynamics as ii) apply,

I believe you when you say you've been treated unfairly but I think this is an exaggeratedly bleak depiction of modern in-person dating. I'm a milenial and I've asked out colleagues, classmates, hit on girls in public or who I've only met once etc and *I've never been reported to the authorities for it (that I know of). And I'm definitely closer to the bottom guy than the top one in that meme - I'm sitting here posting on the Motte after all.

*Never faced any serious social consequences for it (edit)

To clarify, I've never been reported to the authorities for asking a girl out either. I'm not arguing that any man who's less than maximally attractive who asks out the wrong girl will inevitably end up with his career destroyed and his life in ruins - that's preposterous. I'm merely arguing that there has been a concerted effort among feminists to stigmatise male dating behaviour which would have been seen as perfectly innocuous a generation ago; that the most severe consequences for a social media cancellation campaign can be disastrous for men targeted by them (e.g. the Shitty Media Men List, the more recent "Are we dating the same guy?" Facebook groups); and that this produces an inevitable chilling effect on the behaviour of socially awkward men who are aware of the new norms (which is most of them). Much as cancellers cancel people who contradict woke orthodoxy in order to send a message to onlookers, the cancellation of men for being "creepy" (i.e asking out a woman who isn't interested) is intended to send a message to socially awkward men. It may well be that the risk of professional/social repercussions as a result of a particular socially awkward man asking out the wrong girl are only 1 in 1,000, or 10,000, or 100,000 - but if the knowledge that he might face these repercussions makes him 10 or even 5% more risk-averse (and if every socially awkward man is making the same calculation) that will have massive knock-on effects on the dating economy, the loneliness/sexlessness epidemic and the fertility rate.

To clarify, I've never been reported to the authorities for asking a girl out either.

Edited my post so it was a bit less facetious on this point than I realise it might have looked (not that it really changes much of what either of us are saying)

It's actually worse than all that.

Due to demographic implosion, families and friends' circles are smaller, so your friends and their friends have fewer or no sisters, nieces, cousins and other friends to introduce to you even if they want to help you out. Also, boys who have no sisters and no female cousins will tend to develop dumbass ideas about girls because they don't see how they actually behave normally as humans. It also happens with the sexes reversed, I assume.

Widespread use of social media abetted the decline of nightclubs in general, which the COVID lockdowns also heavily contributed to.

Strict enforcement of the 21-year drinking age means that young people over 21 and those under 21 have basically no access to social venues where they can interact.

Atomized societies normalize heightened social mobility for young singles, which means you'll pretty much lose your entire social circle if you have to move to another town after graduation to get some job.

I was effectively shunned from an entire community and industry for the crime of politely asking a girl if she wanted to get coffee sometime and I'm still mad about it - anyone saying "just ask her bro, the worst she can say is no" is full of shit.

To be fair, it's not full of shit as long as there's no overlap between your social circle and hers.

And yet quite a few of them suggested that if a random guy started talking to them in an elevator, they would be weirded out.

Well, duh. If you ask them about a RANDOM GUY, of course they'll react like that, because they don't see 'random' guys as attractive.

The cherry on top is the recent fracas with Bumble, who got in hot water and profusely apologized for the offensive insinuation that some women may desire sex.

Hadn't heard of this so did some googling, ended up reading USAToday's coverage of the issue which contains this gem:

“Bumble doing a campaign attempting to shame celibacy/abstinence is an unserious way to tell the public y'all are nervous,” Cindy Noir wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter. “It’s also a very offensive way to tell your female customers that you’re profiting off of their legs being open.”

How does she think dating sites are making their profits?

Due to demographic implosion, families and friends' circles are smaller, so your friends and their friends have fewer or no sisters, nieces, cousins and other friends to introduce to you even if they want to help you out.

True. "I married my sibling's friend" was a pretty common route of courtship in generations past, which largely doesn't exist anymore as a result of smaller family sizes.

To be fair, it's not full of shit as long as there's no overlap between your social circle and hers.

Neatly encapsulating why men and women alike complain about all the bad behaviour on dating apps. If there's no overlap in social circles between you and the person you're dating, there are no social consequences for bad behaviour, so feel free to ghost to your heart's content. It's not that the people who use dating apps are necessarily uniquely shitty people, or that dating apps select for people who are uniquely shitty (though both of these are true to some extent, particularly the latter): it's that dating apps don't incentivise people to behave pro-socially.

You're also gesturing at precisely the "social atomisation" thing I'm describing: a few generations ago, asking out a girl with whom you have no overlap in social circles simply wasn't an option. A hundred years ago, if you lived in a town of a few thousand people and tried to ditch a girl after getting her pregnant, her father would be hammering on your front door with a shotgun before the day was out. Nowadays if you do that, she has no recourse.

It does make one rather cynical about human nature when you realise that a lot of people (not a majority or anything, just a lot) are operating on the basis not of "I should treat this girl with respect because it's the right thing to do and it's how I'd like to be treated" but "I should treat this girl with respect, because if I don't she'll tell everyone and it'll come back to bite me in the ass". The sexual revolution is basically a prolonged experiment in what happens when you take away the personal incentive not to be shitty to girls that you want to fuck but don't want to wife.

Well, duh. If you ask them about a RANDOM GUY, of course they'll react like that, because they don't see 'random' guys as attractive.

I don't know if the author would have gotten a different answer if she'd specified "How would you feel if an attractive man you don't know started talking to you in an elevator?"

You're also gesturing at precisely the "social atomisation" thing I'm describing: a few generations ago, asking out a girl with whom you have no overlap in social circles simply wasn't an option. A hundred years ago, if you lived in a town of a few thousand people and tried to ditch a girl after getting her pregnant, her father would be hammering on your front door with a shotgun before the day was out. Nowadays if you do that, she has no recourse.

I think this is also a large part of the non-stickiness of online dating relationships. You meet somebody, have a fairly good click but the thread drops or there's some light friction for whatever reason and there's essentially nil chance of randomly bumping into them again in person at a mutual friend's social event or however else people tended to get over light cases of 'the ick' historically. I, a few years ago, went through a hell of a lot of app dates and have since come out the other side with a longterm partner and a child. I still had a lot of time to formulate crotchety opinions about the dynamics in a lot of these things.

Now if somebody gets even slightly peeved at the other party, you've got one or maybe two DMs to try and rekindle things then you're dead in the water. Without even getting into the 'there is an unlimited supply of shiny new toys being served up via app' element.

The sexual revolution is basically a prolonged experiment in what happens when you take away the personal incentive not to be shitty to girls that you want to fuck but don't want to wife.

But isn’t the increased social atomization caused by changes in technology? I don’t think the sexual revolution is what broke down regular social connection

Yes on both counts. The sexual revolution and the free love movement promoted the idea that casual sex should be consequence-free (which that generation of Westerners fully internalised, for the most part) - then technological developments caused social atomisation which actually removed most of the indirect social consequences for bad behaviour among "cads" and "rakes".

It's possible to imagine an alternate history where we had the same technological developments in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries that we had, but not preceded by the dramatic social liberalisation of the sexual revolution. In this counterfactual world, social atomisation still happens, but sexual misconduct (e.g. impregnating a girl and running off on her) remains so aggressively stigmatised that most men refrain from it of their own accord. What I'm describing actually sounds fairly similar to modern Japan and Korea, in which less than 10% of live births are out of wedlock, as opposed to the West in which they're 30% at the absolute minimum (granted, more abortions are carried out in South Korea than in the US or UK per capita, so it's not quite as rosy as I'm making it out to be).

I imagine that yes, the answer would be different.

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