A reader asked what my prognosis is for gender relations in the next decade. Is dating dead or on the verge of a renaissance? Are the gender wars heating up or abating? Who will find love? So, it's THREAD time. Epistatus: my best guess, blend me with others for best results.
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We're seeing a lot more pushback against cancel culture, Justine Sacco and Louie CK are working again, etc. Even as some parts of academia and media continue playing out their death spirals, even sympathetic voices like the NY Times are settling on some non-insane version.
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The same is happening on the manosphere side, which seems to be refocusing lately on male wellness, celebrating fatherhood, etc. This means that 90%+ of men and women can go on dates without worrying as much about being caught up on the latest gender war terminology.
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Trend #2: online dating is being digested. Apps were a massive disruption to how people meet and date, with 40%+ of new couples today having met online. That means that people who grew up before the internet suddenly had to build an "online presence" - a dating profile.
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People sucked at it. Most profiles and app choices are bad and not aligned with a person's goal. Everyone got sucked into Tinder with its awful dynamic of women messaging only the hottest guys, resulting in men being ignored and women being ghosted after a one-night stand.
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I see two reasons for optimism. 1 - with experience people should get better at dating online, and realize that it's part of your overall online persona along with Twitter, Facebook, blogs, forums, etc. The internet is for dating too, OkCupid is not a separate magisterium.
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2 - There's plenty of room for apps to get better. I predict ML-based apps that match people based on their entire online presence, not just a lazily-filled profile. Facebook is best positioned to do it for Millenials, and maybe (through Instagram) for Zoomers too.
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Trend #3 - the economic swing in the working class. For many years now, male-dominated blue-collar jobs (e.g. transportation) have been disappearing while female ones (e.g. personal care, healthcare) are booming. I expect this to continue in the 2020s.
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Aside: Ironically, this is part of the measured wage gap. Men have a higher average wage in part because blue-collar men are dropping out of the labor force and so aren't counted in the full-time wage statistics, while women can work in either high or low-wage jobs.
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This is bad for dating. Women don't want to date unemployed/broke guys, especially if these men don't tend to make up for it by doing more housework or childcare. It's a catch-22: men need to "feminize" to be economically useful, but that can hurt their romantic appeal.
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A solution would be to frame fatherhood and jobs like physiotherapist as the epitome of wonderful manhood, but I don't think that our culture is moving there. If anything, antinatalism is on the rise even as Western birth rates are catastrophically dropping.
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A return to religion or community-based life can help the non-rich and urban find good dates, but there are two issues with it: 1. God doesn't exist. 2. Netflix and video games do, and they're often more fun than going out to deal with people.
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To wrap it up: I think that dating will actually get better for the online and the educated, as they learn to leverage the internet for meeting like-minded people offline. I literally have a personal blog with a "date me" button, 10 years from now it may not seem unusual.
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But the offline and blue-collar have a big cultural mountain to climb, especially the men. A lot of them will choose to go their own way, as will the casualties of the gender wars of the 2010s that had their brains permanently poisoned against the other gender.
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P.S. This was all about heterosexual dating. Gay dating is probably as great as its ever been with legal marriage and matching apps. But once the euphoria passes, they may also have to deal with issues of economics, their place in the culture, and integrating online with offline.
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