The Cannibalistic Modern Dating Machine

No matter how tolerant we are on the surface, things like being ugly, short, & poor still matter to the opposite sex.

In fact, they matter more than ever. In the past, maybe you’d bump into and bond with; someone you’d never guess to be your “type”. But not today. Today your profile either looks like the ideal I have in my head, or I swipe you into obscurity.

Hook up culture allows us to observe something on the outside which is happening to us overall on the inside. Namely, what comes after commitment.

In a recent piece Mary Harrington explored how contraception and abortion killed feminism. Prior to that, first wave feminism existed to restore the agency women lost when daily life moved from the farm to the factory. After contraception and abortion however, it became something else all together. It was no longer a restoration of agency but a complete liberation from family as a source of meaning.

This reality continues to play itself out as dating becomes a increasingly nihilistic endeavor.

Two sets of rules.

We intuitively understand that there are two sets of rules. The ones we say we live by, and the ones we really live by. The more ruthless the real rules become, the more motivated we are to make our utopian rules a reality.

The ruthlessness of how disposable each of us feels escalates our need to matter. And in a post-Christian society there is no true authority to posit our significance.

Weather judging our romantic prospects or our existential significance, the only metric left is the social marketplace. And when you’re one click away from an eight-year-old Asian kid playing piano with his toes, it becomes harder and harder to feel like that little thing you worked on today is actually something.

It’s not hard to see why a generation of people who secretly operate on a extremely ruthless framework would then indulge and divinize themselves as a way to cope. It isn’t hard to see why the significance of racial bloodlines is rising.

If you believe there is no meaning, you’ll become like a child who never knew his parents. That is, If you don’t know where home is, you’ll look for it everywhere.

Modern dating encourages the worst excesses of both genders. It teaches both to be narcissists. It tells women to spit in the face of men’s need to provide and protect and tells men to spit in the face of women’s need to be secure. Broken and aimless, men are left trying to find meaning in sex alone and women are left trying to find it in “fighting the patriarchy.”

Modern life is openly antagonistic to every man’s deepest need. The need to feel wanted, to feel needed, to feel useful. Men do not “opt in” to being wired this way and they cannot “opt out”. Many feel this wiring is a curse. But we’re stuck with it all the same.

Let’s look at an old trope:

You know the old trope of a woman pretending not to know something?

Why is this universally irresistible to men? Is it because men are all evil tyrants? We are certainly told it is. But should cynicism be our only available lens?

In these scenarios, Both the man and the woman know she could figure it out herself. But in choosing to let the man feel useful, he feels loved.

It’s certainly true that women exist for more than just that. But the fact that it feels like nails on a chalkboard reveals just how much our highest value has changed.

In a society where love was our ultimate value, letting someone else be the expert occasionally would be seen as sweet, innocent, and charming.

In a society where power is the ultimate value however, anything other than constant self-assertion and dominance is weakness.

And by the way, we’re constantly told that women never had any power until the last few decades. But women have always had power. Even in traditional homes it’s not as simple as; man = all power, woman = no power.

As one comedian put it: “I may be the head of the household but my wife is the neck.”

Religious people intuitively understand this and so they’re naturally skeptical towards certain excesses of modern feminism.

True love is “To will the good of the other.” Regardless of gender, This value is incompatible with a power-centric worldview. In a power fueled society, If you have to use each other for sex, fine. But don’t commit. Don’t learn what needs the other has. Don’t sacrifice, Don’t love. Love was yesterday if it ever existed. All there is now is power.

As Mary brilliantly put it:

Among high-status men, this looks like Tinder hookups summoned as casually as a pizza. For the less fortunate it looks like the embittered life of a porn-sick ‘incel’. Among women, the same dynamic looks like classes for college freshmen on how to launch yourself on OnlyFans; like consenting reluctantly to violent or degrading sexual practices in the hope that it will make a boy like you enough to hold your hand in public.

For both sexes, it means an interpersonal landscape marinaded in pornography, actively hostile to intimacy, and governed by a false belief that male and female sexuality are the same. Under its rubric the pursuit of pleasure becomes a degraded search for thrills: one which leaves both sexes numb and jaded, scarred by having traded in love for violence.

This attitude is maintained by pretending we’re happy. But a society which does not want children is not a healthy society.

If you believe life itself to be so unredeemably empty, so unnecessary, so cruel, & so redundant; that to give it to the next generation is a punishment, don’t tell me you’re “living your best life”.