Hear Me Out: This capitalist/traditional attitude towards dating radicalized men into the manosphere. For the last three years this anti-“modern women”/anti-feminism movement has been rising across the internet; and about 75% of their resentment is just about distaste toward dating apps and paying to take a girl out for dinner.
For years I was laughing at ( and then after they helped Trump’s re-election, ripping my hair out over ) their complete refusal/inability to see any other alternatives to connect with people besides the most shallow idea of a date. Perhaps these folks just completely unimaginative, or have no personality to offer, and nothing to provide besides the traditional chivalry of this generic “provider” fallback that is unfeasible for most in this economy.
I wish I could just sit down with one of these men, and just ask them “Why not find women elsewhere?”. Delete the dating apps and go find a hobby, join a volunteer organization. If you’re such a “traditional conservative masculine man”, go to a Catholic church or alt-right fascist rally. It’s a whole lot cheaper than flying abroad to sugar-daddy at a favorable exchange rate. (Passport bros)
Though… the article does say: “More than half of Gen Z adults reported spending $0 a month on dating in a 2025 Bank of America Better Money Habits survey.” and mentions folks rejecting dating apps because they prefer real interactions…so maybe folks are waking up.
Capitalism did ruin dating. I’m pretty sure the CIA does everything in it’s power to prevent you from seeing the problem is the fact that you depend on the market for everything.
I’ve been online for a loooong time. From my recollection: it hit its peak with the “anti-SJW” / “anti-feminist” rage during GamerGate in the mid 2010s. It was well on the decline until Andrew Tate and the TikTok manosphere accounts which copied him brought that rhetoric back; now targeting real world women instead of “woke” gamedevs and script writers.
I’m an elder millennial that has and continues to do all of this shit they are saying in other comments, I still meet more new people regularly that I actually want to talk to again through dating apps. Third spaces are dead and people have over the past 10ish years stopped being interested in expanding their circle by happenstance. I’ll even admit to this myself.
In general we don’t trust each other, and there’s a very real chance that any person you meet could be a fascist even in left leaning cities. This has understandably made women especially more leery of the men they meet even when men are explicitly feminist because the men that hate women lie about their beliefs exacerbating the underlying problems even more.
People don’t understand that we’re not just experiencing political and economic collapse, the culture we all grew up learning how to live in no longer exists. This is a symptom of that
most ‘liberal’ women I have dated the past 5 years were closeted conservatives. don’t assume men are the only secret MAGAs
anyone of them with half a brain knows they have to lie about it to get other people to like them. every closeted conservative woman I have met never told me until like date 3-5, usually after we had slept together and she could let her guard down.
entirely seconding the rest of this. I am actively social in hobbies and volunteering. I have never ever met anyone to date that way. Everything is apps, and the occasional random approach at an event or bar or etc. Dating and socializing are two very different things these days. The last time i dated a ‘friend’ i met through other friends I was in college, 20 years ago. as am adult it’s been nothing but dating apps for most people I know, and the other people met someone at their job.
Wasn’t trying to say it’s just men, it’s happened to me with maga women, although I would imagine the rate is much lower from that subset. Lots of white women liberals that don’t give a shit about intersectionality or capitalisms role in their own oppression .
But we’re on the same page overall, dating is broken, some will still get lucky but it’s bleak out here. Unless it’s explicitly for single people to meet each other.
it won’t get better until the economy gets better, which, as we know, nobody seems to want to fix. they just want to make it worse so the rich get richer and the rest of society gets worse.
historically marriage and child rates are follow economy. when the economy improves people get married and have kids, when it’s bad, coupling and children rates plummet.
He gave a couple good ideas, join a service group, take Salsa lessons, go to local events. There’s a tree planting event in my community this week. You won’t meet people if you go once, but if you keep going people will recognize you. This is called “making friends” and sometimes that leads to romance. Things in your community still happen like the olden days.
i actively volunteer for the past ten years. single people dont’ go to these things. it’s all married people. making friends doesn’t lead to romance, it leads to making friends with people who have no interest in dating you because they are already coupled.
it’s also time your spending not pursuing romance, which means less time for that. dating takes a lot of time and effort. it’s not magic, it’s more like exercise. yo uahve to be constantly exercising to stay in shape, and you have to be constantly dating and pursuing romance if you want romantic life.
Wow… please don’t take this as an attack, it is not intended as one.
Your post made me seriously sad. I couldn’t imagine living a life where I had to treat dating and romance as “exercise” and something I have to plan into my calendar.
it’s not any different with jobs. you have to constantly be on the hunt for a new job and working constantly beyond and above to get new skills if you want to remain employable. the day of getting a job and sitting back for 30-40 years and taking it easy are long gone. we live in a hyper competitive society, esp in the major cities. dating is the same, everyone is endlessly trying to ‘upgrade’ their dating prospects and if you aren’t ‘improving yourself’ constantly you are seen as a loser who deserves to be alone, just like if you don’t have multiple degrees or training certs at your job you are considered under performing.
10-15 years ago things were different. now, if i don’t get 2-5 new certs each year at my job, I’m considered under performing and if you want a raise, you better be getting that 5, 2 is the bare minimum effort. did i mention that the certs now expire every 2-3 years now? they used to be considered ‘lifetime’ but they ended that in the late 2010s, so they can keep the gravy train going. in 2010 when i was hired, having 2 basic certs was considered really great, now if you have 2 for a starting job, you are considered a failure and unemployable, you need to have like 6-10 to even be considered. oh ad the starting pay is like 15% more than it was when I started 15 years ago, even though the COL is now 2.5x what it was.
We are all working 3x as hard, for half as much as we used to get. Dating is the same. dating is a job market for romance. in my city, women expect you to typically making 200-300K a year to be even considered ‘worth’ their consideration. even though statistically, men in my city have an median income of 80K. so you nee to be making triple median to be considered a ‘date worthy’ guy.
i make about 150K a year, own a place, volunteer, have run my own small business, have two advanced degrees, active hobbies, very fit endurance athlete, etc. and when I go on dates i basically get asked why i am not more successful in life and that I lack ambition and drive and that my life is too ‘lazy’ because I’m not working 80 hours a week. also get told I’m ‘cheap’ because I don’t like going on dates that cost more than $200. It’s insanely brutal dating market. but i really want a family so I keep trying, but every woman who is interested in me basically expects me to be a multi-millionaire who has no life outside of work and dating her.
Don’t get me wrong but I think we might live very different lives. I’m also dating people and also having romantic relationships but I never… considered that path you are taking. It sounds exhausting.
Things have changed especially because we all are becoming less social. Getting to know someone in person is still much more effective. Talking to strangers without pretense is however less accepted.
amen to that. even irl the level of presumption and pretense is insane. i quit a lot of social activities because i was becoming depressed dealing with the arrogant and delusion most people are living with about other people. I had so many occurrences of being going on rants about ‘people like you’ or bashing people who aren’t exactly like them. it was so miserable.
people were not like this 10 years ago. social media has warped their brains. people are so hateful and angry now.
I love to read. I used to have cool dates talking about books. I haven’t had one of those since 2018!
Now when I talk about books, I get lectured what a racist male supremacist I am for not reading Toni Morrison or similar. (I had this happen to be like 10x times in the last few years) It’s insane. I can’t even enjoy my hobbies anymore without them being weaponized against me for not being ‘woke’ enough or something. Or I get told reading anything other than business self-help books is ‘a waste of time because it is not productive’.
God forbid I just… enjoy books because I like stories and it’s fun. No, now if you read it has to be for some political virtue signalling thing or for ‘self improvement’.
But it doesn’t though. Dating is something you do to find people to be with IRL. Dating apps are made to keep you engaged and noy to lose customers. If you want to find someone to be with IRL, you gotta look IRL and it helps going somewhere, where people have similar interests
datings apps are how you use them. if you ask people out irl, and they say no or ignore you, the app has nothing to do with that. it’s the person on on the other end not being interested.
They are statistically not made for actually finding someone. If they were they wouldn’t be profitable. The goal is always to keep people using the app and spending money. If you are straight, the ratio of men to women on the average dating app is skewed against you if you are male and in your favor if you are female.
Dating apps are just the way for capitalists to make money off dating
Cool, then why is that more the half of new couples meet on dating apps?
You don’t use apps. You don’t know what you are talking about. It’s not a conspiracy. They are free. I don’t pay for any apps and I regularly get dates from them. Do most women who message me, not meet up with me? yeah, because they aren’t interested in me. That’s their choice.
If i only did in person dating, I might go on one bad date a year. at least with apps I get way more dates, and half of them are decent, even if they don’t go anywhere. i went on like 20 dates last year, a few were bad, but 18 were from apps, and one of them became a short term thing for a month, but we were not politically or financially compatible so I stopped seeing her, plus she hated my cat.
How are dating apps still a business if they are made to lose their customers?
I don’t think they would still exist or be profitable for the companies owning them if they were actually good at getting people together.
I think more than half of the new couples meet on dating apps because the opportunities to meet people IRL have been heavily reduced since the pandemic.
they sell your data. they sell ads. they have optional features you can extra for that are expensive and some people use them. i have been using dating apps for 15 years now. they haven’t changed that much. it’s just that they are all swipe apps on your phone now. but the business model has been the same since the 2000s, it’s basically freemium service like free to play online games are. and it’s profitable because while the vast majority never pay, the small number who do, spend a lot, and are called ‘whales’. the business model is all about getting the whales. people like me, who have never paid once in a 15 years, aren’t really making them any money.
again, you clearly dont’ use apps and you’re just making stuff up.
I’m not an expert on manosphere but I think it’s just a radical manifestation of a broader anti-feminism movement that spans beyond the internet, beyond young people and beyond dating. It’s not attitudes towards dating that radicalized men but a more general feeling of losing power and privileges. Listen to conservative men of all ages and they will complain that you can’t molest women anymore, you can’t date rape and you have to very careful because people now tend to believe women when they accuse of you of abuse. The manospere is just how the push back against those changes manifests on the internet. In real life it’s one of the issues fueling the surge of far-right parties.
Dating has been a big gateway for the manosphere though. Women can actually support themselves now, on a large scale, even to the point where women are surpassing men in education and getting better paying jobs out of school than many men are getting.
So, in a real sense, for possibly the first time in history, men are actually having to be more than just a stable provider to attract women. And many are choosing to become bitter and resentful instead of doing things that might actually improve their chances. The manosphere offers a “lose 15 lbs in 3 days fraud diet” but for dating. And people look for shortcuts constantly.
I generally agree but you think dating means asking women out and trying to prove to her you would be a good life partner while for a lot of man dating meant getting some girl drunk and fucking her in the dorm bedroom or spiking her drink at a club and fucking her in a bathroom stall. This is the dating they have lost because of feminism and progress and now want to get back to.
Remember Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing and Micheal Wolff’s accusations? Kavanaugh tried to rape her and absolutely nothing happened to him. This is the power man used to have and now are trying to get back. The manosphere sect leaders can’t say it out loud but it’s the core of it and all the anti-feminist movements.
Reading these last three comments — I was taking “dating” to mean forming a stable relationship because they’ve been throwing out words like “stability” and whine about divorce; but you’re probably right. The “GamerGate” rage that funneled into the manosphere has very rapey vibes, and that’s about fictional video game women. Seeing the rise in misogyny-inspired attacks; increased joking about rape and abuse; and that online rape guide CNN did a report on… I’m very scared for our future, especially for the future of feminine Gen Z and Gen Alpha folks.
Hear Me Out: This capitalist/traditional attitude towards dating radicalized men into the manosphere. For the last three years this anti-“modern women”/anti-feminism movement has been rising across the internet; and about 75% of their resentment is just about distaste toward dating apps and paying to take a girl out for dinner.
For years I was laughing at ( and then after they helped Trump’s re-election, ripping my hair out over ) their complete refusal/inability to see any other alternatives to connect with people besides the most shallow idea of a date. Perhaps these folks just completely unimaginative, or have no personality to offer, and nothing to provide besides the traditional chivalry of this generic “provider” fallback that is unfeasible for most in this economy.
I wish I could just sit down with one of these men, and just ask them “Why not find women elsewhere?”. Delete the dating apps and go find a hobby, join a volunteer organization. If you’re such a “traditional conservative masculine man”, go to a Catholic church or alt-right fascist rally. It’s a whole lot cheaper than flying abroad to sugar-daddy at a favorable exchange rate. (Passport bros)
Though… the article does say: “More than half of Gen Z adults reported spending $0 a month on dating in a 2025 Bank of America Better Money Habits survey.” and mentions folks rejecting dating apps because they prefer real interactions…so maybe folks are waking up.
Capitalism did ruin dating. I’m pretty sure the CIA does everything in it’s power to prevent you from seeing the problem is the fact that you depend on the market for everything.
anti woman sentiment online has been around far longer than three years
I’ve been online for a loooong time. From my recollection: it hit its peak with the “anti-SJW” / “anti-feminist” rage during GamerGate in the mid 2010s. It was well on the decline until Andrew Tate and the TikTok manosphere accounts which copied him brought that rhetoric back; now targeting real world women instead of “woke” gamedevs and script writers.
can confirm
This has been going on for much longer than just three years.
This is the same vibe as “go hand out your resume in person”. I’m old enough to remember when most people didn’t have dial up. Things have changed.
I’m an elder millennial that has and continues to do all of this shit they are saying in other comments, I still meet more new people regularly that I actually want to talk to again through dating apps. Third spaces are dead and people have over the past 10ish years stopped being interested in expanding their circle by happenstance. I’ll even admit to this myself.
In general we don’t trust each other, and there’s a very real chance that any person you meet could be a fascist even in left leaning cities. This has understandably made women especially more leery of the men they meet even when men are explicitly feminist because the men that hate women lie about their beliefs exacerbating the underlying problems even more.
People don’t understand that we’re not just experiencing political and economic collapse, the culture we all grew up learning how to live in no longer exists. This is a symptom of that
most ‘liberal’ women I have dated the past 5 years were closeted conservatives. don’t assume men are the only secret MAGAs
anyone of them with half a brain knows they have to lie about it to get other people to like them. every closeted conservative woman I have met never told me until like date 3-5, usually after we had slept together and she could let her guard down.
entirely seconding the rest of this. I am actively social in hobbies and volunteering. I have never ever met anyone to date that way. Everything is apps, and the occasional random approach at an event or bar or etc. Dating and socializing are two very different things these days. The last time i dated a ‘friend’ i met through other friends I was in college, 20 years ago. as am adult it’s been nothing but dating apps for most people I know, and the other people met someone at their job.
Wasn’t trying to say it’s just men, it’s happened to me with maga women, although I would imagine the rate is much lower from that subset. Lots of white women liberals that don’t give a shit about intersectionality or capitalisms role in their own oppression .
But we’re on the same page overall, dating is broken, some will still get lucky but it’s bleak out here. Unless it’s explicitly for single people to meet each other.
it won’t get better until the economy gets better, which, as we know, nobody seems to want to fix. they just want to make it worse so the rich get richer and the rest of society gets worse.
historically marriage and child rates are follow economy. when the economy improves people get married and have kids, when it’s bad, coupling and children rates plummet.
He gave a couple good ideas, join a service group, take Salsa lessons, go to local events. There’s a tree planting event in my community this week. You won’t meet people if you go once, but if you keep going people will recognize you. This is called “making friends” and sometimes that leads to romance. Things in your community still happen like the olden days.
i actively volunteer for the past ten years. single people dont’ go to these things. it’s all married people. making friends doesn’t lead to romance, it leads to making friends with people who have no interest in dating you because they are already coupled.
it’s also time your spending not pursuing romance, which means less time for that. dating takes a lot of time and effort. it’s not magic, it’s more like exercise. yo uahve to be constantly exercising to stay in shape, and you have to be constantly dating and pursuing romance if you want romantic life.
Wow… please don’t take this as an attack, it is not intended as one. Your post made me seriously sad. I couldn’t imagine living a life where I had to treat dating and romance as “exercise” and something I have to plan into my calendar.
I hope you find what you are looking for.
it’s not any different with jobs. you have to constantly be on the hunt for a new job and working constantly beyond and above to get new skills if you want to remain employable. the day of getting a job and sitting back for 30-40 years and taking it easy are long gone. we live in a hyper competitive society, esp in the major cities. dating is the same, everyone is endlessly trying to ‘upgrade’ their dating prospects and if you aren’t ‘improving yourself’ constantly you are seen as a loser who deserves to be alone, just like if you don’t have multiple degrees or training certs at your job you are considered under performing.
10-15 years ago things were different. now, if i don’t get 2-5 new certs each year at my job, I’m considered under performing and if you want a raise, you better be getting that 5, 2 is the bare minimum effort. did i mention that the certs now expire every 2-3 years now? they used to be considered ‘lifetime’ but they ended that in the late 2010s, so they can keep the gravy train going. in 2010 when i was hired, having 2 basic certs was considered really great, now if you have 2 for a starting job, you are considered a failure and unemployable, you need to have like 6-10 to even be considered. oh ad the starting pay is like 15% more than it was when I started 15 years ago, even though the COL is now 2.5x what it was.
We are all working 3x as hard, for half as much as we used to get. Dating is the same. dating is a job market for romance. in my city, women expect you to typically making 200-300K a year to be even considered ‘worth’ their consideration. even though statistically, men in my city have an median income of 80K. so you nee to be making triple median to be considered a ‘date worthy’ guy.
i make about 150K a year, own a place, volunteer, have run my own small business, have two advanced degrees, active hobbies, very fit endurance athlete, etc. and when I go on dates i basically get asked why i am not more successful in life and that I lack ambition and drive and that my life is too ‘lazy’ because I’m not working 80 hours a week. also get told I’m ‘cheap’ because I don’t like going on dates that cost more than $200. It’s insanely brutal dating market. but i really want a family so I keep trying, but every woman who is interested in me basically expects me to be a multi-millionaire who has no life outside of work and dating her.
Don’t get me wrong but I think we might live very different lives. I’m also dating people and also having romantic relationships but I never… considered that path you are taking. It sounds exhausting.
Things have changed especially because we all are becoming less social. Getting to know someone in person is still much more effective. Talking to strangers without pretense is however less accepted.
amen to that. even irl the level of presumption and pretense is insane. i quit a lot of social activities because i was becoming depressed dealing with the arrogant and delusion most people are living with about other people. I had so many occurrences of being going on rants about ‘people like you’ or bashing people who aren’t exactly like them. it was so miserable.
people were not like this 10 years ago. social media has warped their brains. people are so hateful and angry now.
Less tolerant, I also notice it with myself.
I love to read. I used to have cool dates talking about books. I haven’t had one of those since 2018!
Now when I talk about books, I get lectured what a racist male supremacist I am for not reading Toni Morrison or similar. (I had this happen to be like 10x times in the last few years) It’s insane. I can’t even enjoy my hobbies anymore without them being weaponized against me for not being ‘woke’ enough or something. Or I get told reading anything other than business self-help books is ‘a waste of time because it is not productive’.
God forbid I just… enjoy books because I like stories and it’s fun. No, now if you read it has to be for some political virtue signalling thing or for ‘self improvement’.
But it doesn’t though. Dating is something you do to find people to be with IRL. Dating apps are made to keep you engaged and noy to lose customers. If you want to find someone to be with IRL, you gotta look IRL and it helps going somewhere, where people have similar interests
datings apps are how you use them. if you ask people out irl, and they say no or ignore you, the app has nothing to do with that. it’s the person on on the other end not being interested.
They are statistically not made for actually finding someone. If they were they wouldn’t be profitable. The goal is always to keep people using the app and spending money. If you are straight, the ratio of men to women on the average dating app is skewed against you if you are male and in your favor if you are female.
Dating apps are just the way for capitalists to make money off dating
Cool, then why is that more the half of new couples meet on dating apps?
You don’t use apps. You don’t know what you are talking about. It’s not a conspiracy. They are free. I don’t pay for any apps and I regularly get dates from them. Do most women who message me, not meet up with me? yeah, because they aren’t interested in me. That’s their choice.
If i only did in person dating, I might go on one bad date a year. at least with apps I get way more dates, and half of them are decent, even if they don’t go anywhere. i went on like 20 dates last year, a few were bad, but 18 were from apps, and one of them became a short term thing for a month, but we were not politically or financially compatible so I stopped seeing her, plus she hated my cat.
How are dating apps still a business if they are made to lose their customers?
I don’t think they would still exist or be profitable for the companies owning them if they were actually good at getting people together.
I think more than half of the new couples meet on dating apps because the opportunities to meet people IRL have been heavily reduced since the pandemic.
they sell your data. they sell ads. they have optional features you can extra for that are expensive and some people use them. i have been using dating apps for 15 years now. they haven’t changed that much. it’s just that they are all swipe apps on your phone now. but the business model has been the same since the 2000s, it’s basically freemium service like free to play online games are. and it’s profitable because while the vast majority never pay, the small number who do, spend a lot, and are called ‘whales’. the business model is all about getting the whales. people like me, who have never paid once in a 15 years, aren’t really making them any money.
again, you clearly dont’ use apps and you’re just making stuff up.
Nobody in this thread has posted any sources and until then everyone is just making stuff up.
I’m not an expert on manosphere but I think it’s just a radical manifestation of a broader anti-feminism movement that spans beyond the internet, beyond young people and beyond dating. It’s not attitudes towards dating that radicalized men but a more general feeling of losing power and privileges. Listen to conservative men of all ages and they will complain that you can’t molest women anymore, you can’t date rape and you have to very careful because people now tend to believe women when they accuse of you of abuse. The manospere is just how the push back against those changes manifests on the internet. In real life it’s one of the issues fueling the surge of far-right parties.
Dating has been a big gateway for the manosphere though. Women can actually support themselves now, on a large scale, even to the point where women are surpassing men in education and getting better paying jobs out of school than many men are getting.
So, in a real sense, for possibly the first time in history, men are actually having to be more than just a stable provider to attract women. And many are choosing to become bitter and resentful instead of doing things that might actually improve their chances. The manosphere offers a “lose 15 lbs in 3 days fraud diet” but for dating. And people look for shortcuts constantly.
I generally agree but you think dating means asking women out and trying to prove to her you would be a good life partner while for a lot of man dating meant getting some girl drunk and fucking her in the dorm bedroom or spiking her drink at a club and fucking her in a bathroom stall. This is the dating they have lost because of feminism and progress and now want to get back to.
Remember Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing and Micheal Wolff’s accusations? Kavanaugh tried to rape her and absolutely nothing happened to him. This is the power man used to have and now are trying to get back. The manosphere sect leaders can’t say it out loud but it’s the core of it and all the anti-feminist movements.
Reading these last three comments — I was taking “dating” to mean forming a stable relationship because they’ve been throwing out words like “stability” and whine about divorce; but you’re probably right. The “GamerGate” rage that funneled into the manosphere has very rapey vibes, and that’s about fictional video game women. Seeing the rise in misogyny-inspired attacks; increased joking about rape and abuse; and that online rape guide CNN did a report on… I’m very scared for our future, especially for the future of feminine Gen Z and Gen Alpha folks.