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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 28, 2022

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I'm maybe a few years younger than you, and my personal experiences broadly align with yours. Zoomer girls do seem more standoffish to me even in everyday social context, but that might well just be due to the 10-year age gap.

That being said, if I rack my brain for concrete changes that are not confounded by my shifting relation to the group in question, it seems to me that among my younger acquaintances it's become much more common to observe girls dating out of their friend group. Where in my bracket the most common dynamic was to have ever-shifting couplings within a clique and perhaps at most including people at its periphery, among younger people I often observe (and sometimes hear the lamentations of the guys) scenarios where the girls snub the guys in their group and then randomly turn out to have a new boyfriend they picked up who-knows-where (in one case I knew a bit more about, it was a two-week internship at some random bank), who doesn't fit in and doesn't really make an effort to integrate with their home group.

As far as I could tell from the few cases where I got to hear the girl's side of the story too, this is not the case of heavensent spontaneous human connection either; in fact with several of those relationships I was taken aback by how little the girl seemed to know or understand about the personality of the guy she picked up, which would have been a bad sign even in an otherwise-"normal" relationship but was outright baffling in the context of her getting on track to ditch all her friends for this guy.

To the extent to which there is a new tendency, it seems very tempting to interpret it along the lines of "knowing less is better"; that is, at least at some crucial stage of relationship formation, the girls are incapable of feeling attraction towards guys in their circles as they actually are, and can only sustain it by projecting some counterfactual quality into the gaps of their ignorance towards a stranger.

If this is true, of course, the interesting question is why this is. Without having time to expand on the thought as much as I'd like to, I'm actually reasonably sympathetic to the idea that the "incel mindset" may contribute to the problem. The male resentment that is amply represented in this thread seems to be a natural counterpart to the "feminist mental health" cluster of views among women (like, the people who post opossum memes all day and launch slickly worded petitions to make the university administration spend more on therapists and set up an anxiety hotline), and I know I find the latter both viscerally and rationally undateable. (Why would you put up with someone whose every interaction with the world is coloured with resentment and who is always a few inferential step away from considering you to be an agent of what brought about that resentment?) At the same time, I find all the incel material to be fascinatingly infohazardous; I can't ever read much of it without finding myself nodding a long and feeling some of that righteous resentment well up in myself, and that's even though it is about as relatable to me as the laments of African orphans are to Silicon Valley EAists. A good half+ of college-educated zoomer women seems to have at least a latent infection with the "patriarchy gave me mental health issues" memeplex; what fraction of zoomer men have one with the "matriarchy wants me to pay for raising chad's bastard" one? If you are infected with it, wouldn't it be easier to hide from a stranger for a few weeks than it would be to hide it from the people you normally interact with?

To the extent to which there is a new tendency, it seems very tempting to interpret it along the lines of "knowing less is better"; that is, at least at some crucial stage of relationship formation, the girls are incapable of feeling attraction towards guys in their circles as they actually are, and can only sustain it by projecting some counterfactual quality into the gaps of their ignorance towards a stranger.

I think it's more the perceived infinite universe of potential male partners provided by online dating makes it easier to essentially write off males in the friendgroup as triggering whatever 'ick' and/or compare real people against curated dating app images of strangers. I'm also curious how female sexuality has evolved with the modern slate of choices, since even going on Tiktok/IG generally provides a lot of examples of 'I was into X until he did Y that gave me incurable 'Ick'' and it's like... the vast majority of women to live have had vanishingly small pools of possible suitors which makes me skeptical that they were able to operate on such terms.