Memes

Realistically, with the way that GSR (gossiping shaming and rallying) which is the female form of aggression has become prevalent, it's having a big effect on dating in general, and it's going to have long term effects on the human race. 45% of men between 18-25 have never approached a woman in the real world. Now you might go "good, we don't want to be approached", and fair enough, but there's consequences. The remaining 55% are going to be less agreeable, less nice people than those 45% who listened. Now you might be wondering what GSR has to do with any of this, well in this postmodern world of ours, instead of just saying "sorry I'm not interested" some women will take it to social media, and suddenly millions of women could know that you just struck out. That's a pretty big risk if it does happen, and all it takes is a threat to have that chilling effect.

So by default, we're already selecting for men who are more aggressive, less agreeable, and considerably more risk tolerant. Most of those guys are going to be not very good guys to date. Of the remainder, we know from data like the okcupid study that the top 1% of men in terms of attractiveness are going to do just fine wherever they go, especially online dating. Assuming an even distribution, that means that about 0.45% of good guys will be doing fine based on attractiveness alone.

So you've got 55% of the more loutish men, and 0.45% of super attractive good guys (and yes I know I'm making some assumptions about that 45%, but pretty much all of this is predicated on some level of assumption), so it really is like looking like playing a lottery for young women.

Now in the past, we would have taught that other 45%, how to participate while still being prosocial, but in between constant societal messaging saying that women don't want to be approached ever and the threat of GSR, many of those men just end up outside of the dating pool. And we see this in terms of plummeting amounts of men who have had sex, plummeting amounts of men who have been on dates, plummeting amounts of men who are getting married.

I'm lucky, I've been married for 15 years, and while I had to deal with some local gsr, it wasn't the sort of all encompassing thing that it became in the last decade. But the one thing that I definitely believe is that the way things are right now is leading to the worst possible outcomes for everyone. A lot of those 45% of men are exactly the sort of men who some of those 77% of women who want to be approached more would like to be approached by, the sort of men who are going to care about with their partner thinks, and will respect boundaries. Not all, but a chunk of those 45% who end up never approaching a woman are downright marriage material, and if the women got a chance to meet them, they would want to date them and want to marry them. Back 15 years ago, that's exactly what I discovered -- that I was someone worth meeting -- but it was a painful thing to do back then, and I think it's even more painful now.

Now let's consider the consequences of this over a number of generations. Fewer people are having kids in general, I think up to half of women in their thirties who wanted to have kids never have kids, and once you did have kids maybe had them with the 55% who are more aggressive, less pro-social, less nice. What does that do to the human race?

Anyway, I write a lot more about this in my book The graysonian ethic in the chapter on attraction. Human beings have a long lineage going back to this first single celled organism, it's fascinating to look at the world from that perspective.