https://thepointmag.com/examined-life/doomers-in-love/
‘I think of the notion of boysobriety—celibacy, in other words, rebranded with an infantilizing TikTok neologism. The desire to sober up from love and sex is pervasive among the first generation (mine) to fully combine the mores of free love with the more, more, more impulse of dating-app culture. Drowning in opportunities but dying for dignity, people my age and younger don’t want a relationship they can DoorDash. The turn to “trad” dating norms, Marxist-feminist theories and TikTok lifestyle advice reflects the desperation for a social or moral framework that gives them the permission and the confidence to say, without feeling too conspicuous or weird, “I’ve had enough.”’
…
‘..there is a reason that these seemingly arbitrary standards [about sex and dating] hold such appeal. The new technologies, we’re told, give us more freedom and choice, and they do. Yet they also undermine the moral and practical heuristics we need to know how to make a good choice. In the absence of norms or models, however imperfect, we turn each relationship into an elaborate contract dispute. Without a clear path or end goal we inspect little red flags along the road as signals for whether to end things, searching for decisive forks in a missing trail. Amid the collapse of authority on sex and gender, and in this radical freedom, we are all forced to become existentialists in dating, in blue-bubbled messages, on our endless social media feeds and in strained conversations: What do you want? Where are we going? What are we?’
NYT on lookmaxxing and gen Z’s world of sex and dating:
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/the-incels-veto-and-other-observations
‘We’ve handed the sexual imagination of an entire generation of young men over to people who are profoundly and perhaps deliberately wrong about the nature of women and desire and human worthiness, and the cost isn’t just that those men are lonely. It’s that we’ve made sex and love feel like a rigid and robotic hierarchy when they are, at their best and most real, the most radical available argument against hierarchy altogether.’
https://archive.is/yj9xx (Shadi Hamid):
‘Over two-thirds of young adults have either not dated at all or only gone on a few dates in the last year. One of the main reasons? They lack confidence and don’t know how to approach the opposite sex…Henry Weng created Date Drop, a matchmaking platform that has swept through elite campuses. The premise is simple: answer a lengthy questionnaire about your values, preferences and political views, and the algorithm assigns you a single match weekly. No swiping, no infinite menu of options. Just one name…As the Wall Street Journal recently reported, roughly two-thirds of Stanford’s undergraduate population signed up…Only 1 in 3 young men say they feel comfortable approaching someone they’re attracted to, according to the dating recession report. And barely more than one-third of young adults say they can pick up on social cues during a date.’