There is absolutely a gender way. It's just incredibly one-sided, with one side beating, raping, assaulting, murdering and oppressing the other for thousands of years.
I'll tell you a secret. You weren't any of those women. He wasn't any of those men. When a person hides behind someone else's suffering, it means they don't want their own behavior looked at too closely.
I’ll tell you a secret. You have no idea if I’ve been beaten, raped, assaulted or oppressed by men. You have no idea if that man who takes pride in those things having happened has participated in them (though I can guess based on his attitude).
Actually, I do. I worked with trauma victims my whole career. They sound various. None of them sound like you. And you can't guess based on his attitude. He's just being a jerk. I also know the abusers.
You don't have to believe me or answer to me. You just have to be honest with yourself.
This thread is why we need to cheat on men…we need to hurt them…we need to enslave them maybe? We could? Idk. But we need a thousand years of history where women are the abusers….or like men to just play nice and be pleasant but that’s probably not going to happen. We should keep them in crates.
True enough, but dont you think all the hatred and algorithmic ragebait that creates positive feedback loops of disdain for the opposite sex is serving the wrong side of the war…?i dont even know if there’s a solution, i wanna say if men and women in our generation came together socially maybe it would help us fight this reactionary hateful bullshit, but im not even sure anymore.
Gen Z men are also dickless. You might not appreciate my use of masculine terminology here but I find it inseparable from the issue. Think about how many men from Gen Z genuinely think being purely friends with a woman is impossible “biologically” or something. As if we are too slavish to our desires to have a choice in the matter.
You may disagree, but i dont believe we will ever escape “masculinity” or “femininity” as a concept, not because they touch on incredibly significant differences between the genders necessarily, but more so because society defaults to its easiest ideological path, and what ideology seems more intrinsic and easily implementable than gender dualism?
What shouldve happened was a renarritivization of masculinity and femininity, the creation of feminine myth, the repackaging of these old concepts into a new framework, that still acknowledged the important sameness between the sexes (not that we are the same, but that what is most significant is how we are similar). Instead we attempted to flee from certain realities of the gender paradigm entirely, but unfortunately, this could never work.
Sorry for ranting, i never have coherent thoughts until i write them down.
1. Gen Zs polled on DatingAdvice.com surveyed 1,000 people, compared to your 136 responses. I appreciate the effort, but your personal experience in studying cheating attitudes across Gen Z on Substack doesn't hold a candle to established large-scale sample sizes. In fact, many other studies conclude the same, with even higher sample sizes. Regardless of such studies, the majority of Gen Z's incapability of being in monogamous relationships can be deduced from social phenomena like the alarming decline in birth rates, hyper-sexuality, the growth of platforms like OF, etc. To add to this, your Substack readers are likely to be the minority of Gen Z-ers that haven't fried their brain cells to read an article in its entirety in the era of 3-second tiktoks.
2. "i just hope they read long enough to see that data was pulled from ashley madison." I'm unsure about the point you are making here. Of all the platform users who have signed up to cheat on their respective partners, 59% were Gen Z, compared to millennials, for example. It looks to me that we are seeing a trend here consistent with Gen Z having a higher inclination to cheat.
3. "if you think indulging in sexual content is cheating, then sure, our generation is doing it at olympic-level standards" - this is a key issue in Gen Z's attitude towards dating, which has quickly evolved to absurd standards like physical and emotional cheating, with the latter considered 'actual' cheating among men. Every few decades, particularly in conjunction with technology and social attitudes, the goal posts keep shifting. What is considered cheating is now considered wildly subjective, which was largely objectively understood in the mid-1900s. For example, today, would it be considered cheating if your partner is sexting with ChatGPT? The convergence of extreme liberalism with bespoke technology, in my opinion, will only make matters worse.
Regarding points 1 and 2, the big difficulty with all of this is sampling bias. I spent a few minutes digging around on google and I couldn't find any info on who the gen Zs that datingadvice.com polled. If they were subscribers to datingadvice.com, then already you've got a problem. A certain type of person is likely to subscribe to a site like that, same as a certain type of person is likely to read long form content on substack.
The other wrinkle here that makes things difficult is that older generations are just not online in the same spaces that zoomers are. Ashley madison might be populated by zoomers, but that doesn't necessarily tell you anything about attitudes/actions towards cheating. All it tells you is how cheaters of a certain generation like to cheat. I bet all the boomers and gen xers are using craigslist lol.
Regarding point 3, yeah, thats a tough subject. It deserves its own essay.
The same arguments you made regarding sampling bias also applies towards this poll made for the purpose of this article so I’m unsure how it makes it “pretty clear… that the increase in online rhetoric doesn't really correlate to an actual increase in cheating”
As I mentioned, you don’t even have to investigate such polls to conclude that Gen Z is much more inclined to cheat mainly because there are more than one ways to cheat which wasn’t the case until a few decades ago.
Secondly, there is more context required for boomers, Gen X. For example, while they are more likely to not be online, they are also the more religious compared to Gen Z which naturally leads to a decline towards these proclivities.
Right, we cant really draw any quantitative conclusions here. But when I talk about that correlation between IRL cheating and pro-cheating content online, I'm speaking categorically. You say gen Z is "much more inclined to cheat"; I'm saying that categorically, that increase does not linearly correlate to the amount of content that's being put out about cheating. The most meaningful piece of data in stephs piece imo is the question about how often you *hear* about cheating, because that significantly cuts through the sampling bias (people tend to have diverse social circles whether they want to or not). The fact that those numbers arent wildly high, while the uptick in content is wildly high, is what led me to make that statement about the correlation.
Categorically speaking, the phenomenon is more prevalent online than irl.
Regarding comparisons to other generations, i agree that the waters are too muddy to meaningfully draw many conclusions. I would imagine that regardless of cultural factors, young people are more inclined towards infidelity in general, just due to their libido and lifestyle.
Definitely not good stuff for either gender to see while going through any phase of their life, let alone early adolescence. Most of it's all negotiating tactics: overplay your hand in hopes of intimidating the other side into granting you your desired concessions. So the girl or guy who can barely flirt IRL becomes some swaggering libertine online.
There's so much complaint about being lonely and isolated for us who are Gen Z. And truth be told, with the rise of influencers, I think I'd jst like to add that it's widely established that Internet culture likes to feed off of people insecurities. And that's what these posts and influencers are doing. Like sure, some of these posts are going viral, but it's for attention. It's for views. It's for money. And its not just one side, it's both. These fresh & fit podcast guys, for example, I know they don't actually believe a word that they're saying. It's just for profit. Even Andrew Tate has back peddled a bit bc he saw that there was profit in it by doing so. (I want to make sure that people know I don't like those podcast guys tho, they still cause sm harm to young men's psyche and insecurity)
"No real gender war" lol, turns out normal people don't hate each other! Woo!
Interesting, nicely done on this piece. Regardless of whatever concerns people might bring up about sample size/bias, seems pretty clear from this that the increase in online rhetoric doesn't really correlate to an actual increase in cheating irl. A marginal increase in cheating is manifesting as a massive spike in cheating related content/discourse (or vice versa). Maybe the mismatch will close over time, as the social media brainwash takes effect and infidelity spikes... but I doubt it. The trend will probably die off as the people consuming all this content get older/wiser and realize that they don't want to hate the opposite sex their whole lives.
There are so many factors that contribute to someone's proclivity to cheat, it's always tough to try and correlate it to a single variable. I wonder what other fidelity-correlated factors gen Zers might be more/less exposed to, and how that fits in to gender relations for them as a whole. But that topic probably deserves its own piece...
Mutual consent for pumping is too often followed by unilateral dumping. Probably 70-80% men do the dumping of girls’ first sex partner BUT then the hot girls, having been dumped, often have no trouble dumping the good, not great, guys.
Promiscuity leads to excess dumping. It’s good to only sleep with someone who loves you.
Love is Lust+Commitment. Better a decade of too little casual sex in balance to 50 years of too much.
Interesting piece although I would point out that gen z are chronically on their phones. People who say social media is not real appear to not notice that people are glued to these devices and consuming its content 4-6 hours a day.
It can be true that 1. People spend huge amounts of time on social media and 2. It's not "real" in the same way as in-person interaction is. It really just depends on what definition you are using for 'real'.
If real means "something that actually exists and people spend a lot of time doing that profoundly affects their life" then obviously social media is real.
But if it means "healthy and sustainable as ones main source of social interactions", probably not.
I believe social media is a magnfying glass. The idea that people spend hours on these devices and are not seeing the same things we (terminally online) is imo doubtful. Sometimes normie friends send me memes from instagram from alt-right and incel accounts not realizing where its from
I honestly cannot figure out what this has to do with what I said, but I can try to respond to it anyway since it's interesting on its own
>"I believe social media is a magnfying glass"
What did you mean by this? That social media provides a proxy estimate of what someone is interested in? That social media is a microcosm of culture at large? That social media blows things out of proportion :)?
>"The idea that people spend hours on these devices and are not seeing the same things we (terminally online) is imo doubtful"
There exist plenty of bubbles on the internet with minimal overlap with certain other bubbles.
I have completely moved between bubbles quite recently (~5 years ago I left the Mormon church) and the majority of things I see online are wildly different in content and perspective than when I was mostly exposed only to ultra-conservative/christian places.
The internet has far more content than we have time available to consume, so there is no reason why it wouldn't be possible to spend all or most of ones' time online exclusively in one or two areas
Does everyone do this? No, there is certainly a spectrum of how diverse different people's feeds are.
> "Sometimes normie friends send me memes from instagram from alt-right and incel accounts not realizing where its from"
All that means the algorithm thought that content would elicit engagement from them, and it was obviously accurate since they shared it with you.
Also I'm curious if the things they shared were specifically "alt-right" or "incel" type memes or if they were just regular memes shared by those types of accounts. Since your friends didn't notice I assume the actual content of the memes weren't crazy edgy hot takes.
Is it normal for many people when they get a meme to go track down the source and read other posts? I can't say I've ever done that. I don't really care *who* posted something unless it's a really good thoughtful article and I want to find what else that person has written.
Otherwise I don't care where memes I see come from because I don't follow people based solely on memes.
Not to be a dick but what is complicated about the argument “people say social media is not real life but it is in fact a reflection of the zeitgeist at a magnified scale” the implicit meaning here is that they represent human nature at its extreme yet reveals inner truthes about us and in turn society. I think this abstraction your getting into is pointless. Its not that complicated. No offense
I don't think we even have a disagreement, nothing you said seems incompatible with what I said
My main point in the first place was that there doesn't seem to be any inherent points of disagreement between your points and the people saying it's "not real" because you are both using the same words to mean completely different things
It's a classic case where any useful discussion needs to first define the terms they use or you end up talking past each other unless you already happen to use the same exact terms the same way, which is never a guarantee.
This may be the most common root cause of misunderstandings in general.
the reality goes something along the lines of: content creators and platforms have a decent understanding of the psychology driving engagement, and the flavours of sentiment on the menu are anxiety, spite, schadenfreude and desperate need for in-group validation.
people often simultaneously exist within several demarcated social spaces, each with a different (often mutually exclusive) hierarchy of values. they have to at least acknowledge, if not genuinely hold, multiple contradictory understandings of the world.
end result often looks a bit dissociative, compartamentalised, sometimes nihilistic or disengaged, focused on utilitarian-sociopathic ‘self-optimisation’ as whatever is left to exercise control over (wellness girlie, rules and lists, guinness book of records, doctors without borders, etc..)
none of this helps in fostering and maintaining quality interpersonal relationships, romantic or otherwise. the crisis of trust towards institutions is mirrored on this, more personal level as the inability to trust in good faith of another person.
Everybody spend so much time using big words to make themselves sound smart when really we’re just talking about: “I’m rubber, you’re glue.” Adult online playground style.
Vulnerability is GAY. REAL men bottle up their feelings and drink until they piss the bed.
Guy gets it
The online hyper “masculine” and hyper “feminine” that suggest gender wars are just closeted angry bisexuals
zoomers are having less sex, it only makes sense then that zoomers are cheating less, or at least not in the same ways as generations past
There is absolutely a gender way. It's just incredibly one-sided, with one side beating, raping, assaulting, murdering and oppressing the other for thousands of years.
when you put it that way i kinda feel like a winner 🏆 💪 🏅
Congratulations! You won the competition for worst kind of person. Not one I’d be proud of winning, but clearly you’re different.
I'll tell you a secret. You weren't any of those women. He wasn't any of those men. When a person hides behind someone else's suffering, it means they don't want their own behavior looked at too closely.
I’ll tell you a secret. You have no idea if I’ve been beaten, raped, assaulted or oppressed by men. You have no idea if that man who takes pride in those things having happened has participated in them (though I can guess based on his attitude).
Actually, I do. I worked with trauma victims my whole career. They sound various. None of them sound like you. And you can't guess based on his attitude. He's just being a jerk. I also know the abusers.
You don't have to believe me or answer to me. You just have to be honest with yourself.
It’s so funny to interact with men who are completely certain they know you better than you know yourself. All audacity, no evidence.
winners often are, babe
Are you just completely content with the fact that you’re a bad person?
something about that that you find appealing?
This thread is why we need to cheat on men…we need to hurt them…we need to enslave them maybe? We could? Idk. But we need a thousand years of history where women are the abusers….or like men to just play nice and be pleasant but that’s probably not going to happen. We should keep them in crates.
True enough, but dont you think all the hatred and algorithmic ragebait that creates positive feedback loops of disdain for the opposite sex is serving the wrong side of the war…?i dont even know if there’s a solution, i wanna say if men and women in our generation came together socially maybe it would help us fight this reactionary hateful bullshit, but im not even sure anymore.
Gen Z men are also dickless. You might not appreciate my use of masculine terminology here but I find it inseparable from the issue. Think about how many men from Gen Z genuinely think being purely friends with a woman is impossible “biologically” or something. As if we are too slavish to our desires to have a choice in the matter.
You may disagree, but i dont believe we will ever escape “masculinity” or “femininity” as a concept, not because they touch on incredibly significant differences between the genders necessarily, but more so because society defaults to its easiest ideological path, and what ideology seems more intrinsic and easily implementable than gender dualism?
What shouldve happened was a renarritivization of masculinity and femininity, the creation of feminine myth, the repackaging of these old concepts into a new framework, that still acknowledged the important sameness between the sexes (not that we are the same, but that what is most significant is how we are similar). Instead we attempted to flee from certain realities of the gender paradigm entirely, but unfortunately, this could never work.
Sorry for ranting, i never have coherent thoughts until i write them down.
Interesting read but:
1. Gen Zs polled on DatingAdvice.com surveyed 1,000 people, compared to your 136 responses. I appreciate the effort, but your personal experience in studying cheating attitudes across Gen Z on Substack doesn't hold a candle to established large-scale sample sizes. In fact, many other studies conclude the same, with even higher sample sizes. Regardless of such studies, the majority of Gen Z's incapability of being in monogamous relationships can be deduced from social phenomena like the alarming decline in birth rates, hyper-sexuality, the growth of platforms like OF, etc. To add to this, your Substack readers are likely to be the minority of Gen Z-ers that haven't fried their brain cells to read an article in its entirety in the era of 3-second tiktoks.
2. "i just hope they read long enough to see that data was pulled from ashley madison." I'm unsure about the point you are making here. Of all the platform users who have signed up to cheat on their respective partners, 59% were Gen Z, compared to millennials, for example. It looks to me that we are seeing a trend here consistent with Gen Z having a higher inclination to cheat.
3. "if you think indulging in sexual content is cheating, then sure, our generation is doing it at olympic-level standards" - this is a key issue in Gen Z's attitude towards dating, which has quickly evolved to absurd standards like physical and emotional cheating, with the latter considered 'actual' cheating among men. Every few decades, particularly in conjunction with technology and social attitudes, the goal posts keep shifting. What is considered cheating is now considered wildly subjective, which was largely objectively understood in the mid-1900s. For example, today, would it be considered cheating if your partner is sexting with ChatGPT? The convergence of extreme liberalism with bespoke technology, in my opinion, will only make matters worse.
Regarding points 1 and 2, the big difficulty with all of this is sampling bias. I spent a few minutes digging around on google and I couldn't find any info on who the gen Zs that datingadvice.com polled. If they were subscribers to datingadvice.com, then already you've got a problem. A certain type of person is likely to subscribe to a site like that, same as a certain type of person is likely to read long form content on substack.
The other wrinkle here that makes things difficult is that older generations are just not online in the same spaces that zoomers are. Ashley madison might be populated by zoomers, but that doesn't necessarily tell you anything about attitudes/actions towards cheating. All it tells you is how cheaters of a certain generation like to cheat. I bet all the boomers and gen xers are using craigslist lol.
Regarding point 3, yeah, thats a tough subject. It deserves its own essay.
The same arguments you made regarding sampling bias also applies towards this poll made for the purpose of this article so I’m unsure how it makes it “pretty clear… that the increase in online rhetoric doesn't really correlate to an actual increase in cheating”
As I mentioned, you don’t even have to investigate such polls to conclude that Gen Z is much more inclined to cheat mainly because there are more than one ways to cheat which wasn’t the case until a few decades ago.
Secondly, there is more context required for boomers, Gen X. For example, while they are more likely to not be online, they are also the more religious compared to Gen Z which naturally leads to a decline towards these proclivities.
Right, we cant really draw any quantitative conclusions here. But when I talk about that correlation between IRL cheating and pro-cheating content online, I'm speaking categorically. You say gen Z is "much more inclined to cheat"; I'm saying that categorically, that increase does not linearly correlate to the amount of content that's being put out about cheating. The most meaningful piece of data in stephs piece imo is the question about how often you *hear* about cheating, because that significantly cuts through the sampling bias (people tend to have diverse social circles whether they want to or not). The fact that those numbers arent wildly high, while the uptick in content is wildly high, is what led me to make that statement about the correlation.
Categorically speaking, the phenomenon is more prevalent online than irl.
Regarding comparisons to other generations, i agree that the waters are too muddy to meaningfully draw many conclusions. I would imagine that regardless of cultural factors, young people are more inclined towards infidelity in general, just due to their libido and lifestyle.
hi
Definitely not good stuff for either gender to see while going through any phase of their life, let alone early adolescence. Most of it's all negotiating tactics: overplay your hand in hopes of intimidating the other side into granting you your desired concessions. So the girl or guy who can barely flirt IRL becomes some swaggering libertine online.
There's so much complaint about being lonely and isolated for us who are Gen Z. And truth be told, with the rise of influencers, I think I'd jst like to add that it's widely established that Internet culture likes to feed off of people insecurities. And that's what these posts and influencers are doing. Like sure, some of these posts are going viral, but it's for attention. It's for views. It's for money. And its not just one side, it's both. These fresh & fit podcast guys, for example, I know they don't actually believe a word that they're saying. It's just for profit. Even Andrew Tate has back peddled a bit bc he saw that there was profit in it by doing so. (I want to make sure that people know I don't like those podcast guys tho, they still cause sm harm to young men's psyche and insecurity)
"No real gender war" lol, turns out normal people don't hate each other! Woo!
Interesting, nicely done on this piece. Regardless of whatever concerns people might bring up about sample size/bias, seems pretty clear from this that the increase in online rhetoric doesn't really correlate to an actual increase in cheating irl. A marginal increase in cheating is manifesting as a massive spike in cheating related content/discourse (or vice versa). Maybe the mismatch will close over time, as the social media brainwash takes effect and infidelity spikes... but I doubt it. The trend will probably die off as the people consuming all this content get older/wiser and realize that they don't want to hate the opposite sex their whole lives.
There are so many factors that contribute to someone's proclivity to cheat, it's always tough to try and correlate it to a single variable. I wonder what other fidelity-correlated factors gen Zers might be more/less exposed to, and how that fits in to gender relations for them as a whole. But that topic probably deserves its own piece...
enjoyed reading this as a gen z guy
My crusty millennial ass is here for hurting men back. So much to learn from genZ
Mutual consent for pumping is too often followed by unilateral dumping. Probably 70-80% men do the dumping of girls’ first sex partner BUT then the hot girls, having been dumped, often have no trouble dumping the good, not great, guys.
Promiscuity leads to excess dumping. It’s good to only sleep with someone who loves you.
Love is Lust+Commitment. Better a decade of too little casual sex in balance to 50 years of too much.
Interesting piece although I would point out that gen z are chronically on their phones. People who say social media is not real appear to not notice that people are glued to these devices and consuming its content 4-6 hours a day.
Why not both?
It can be true that 1. People spend huge amounts of time on social media and 2. It's not "real" in the same way as in-person interaction is. It really just depends on what definition you are using for 'real'.
If real means "something that actually exists and people spend a lot of time doing that profoundly affects their life" then obviously social media is real.
But if it means "healthy and sustainable as ones main source of social interactions", probably not.
I believe social media is a magnfying glass. The idea that people spend hours on these devices and are not seeing the same things we (terminally online) is imo doubtful. Sometimes normie friends send me memes from instagram from alt-right and incel accounts not realizing where its from
I honestly cannot figure out what this has to do with what I said, but I can try to respond to it anyway since it's interesting on its own
>"I believe social media is a magnfying glass"
What did you mean by this? That social media provides a proxy estimate of what someone is interested in? That social media is a microcosm of culture at large? That social media blows things out of proportion :)?
>"The idea that people spend hours on these devices and are not seeing the same things we (terminally online) is imo doubtful"
There exist plenty of bubbles on the internet with minimal overlap with certain other bubbles.
I have completely moved between bubbles quite recently (~5 years ago I left the Mormon church) and the majority of things I see online are wildly different in content and perspective than when I was mostly exposed only to ultra-conservative/christian places.
The internet has far more content than we have time available to consume, so there is no reason why it wouldn't be possible to spend all or most of ones' time online exclusively in one or two areas
Does everyone do this? No, there is certainly a spectrum of how diverse different people's feeds are.
> "Sometimes normie friends send me memes from instagram from alt-right and incel accounts not realizing where its from"
All that means the algorithm thought that content would elicit engagement from them, and it was obviously accurate since they shared it with you.
Also I'm curious if the things they shared were specifically "alt-right" or "incel" type memes or if they were just regular memes shared by those types of accounts. Since your friends didn't notice I assume the actual content of the memes weren't crazy edgy hot takes.
Is it normal for many people when they get a meme to go track down the source and read other posts? I can't say I've ever done that. I don't really care *who* posted something unless it's a really good thoughtful article and I want to find what else that person has written.
Otherwise I don't care where memes I see come from because I don't follow people based solely on memes.
Not to be a dick but what is complicated about the argument “people say social media is not real life but it is in fact a reflection of the zeitgeist at a magnified scale” the implicit meaning here is that they represent human nature at its extreme yet reveals inner truthes about us and in turn society. I think this abstraction your getting into is pointless. Its not that complicated. No offense
None taken haha
I don't think we even have a disagreement, nothing you said seems incompatible with what I said
My main point in the first place was that there doesn't seem to be any inherent points of disagreement between your points and the people saying it's "not real" because you are both using the same words to mean completely different things
It's a classic case where any useful discussion needs to first define the terms they use or you end up talking past each other unless you already happen to use the same exact terms the same way, which is never a guarantee.
This may be the most common root cause of misunderstandings in general.
Lmaoo
the reality goes something along the lines of: content creators and platforms have a decent understanding of the psychology driving engagement, and the flavours of sentiment on the menu are anxiety, spite, schadenfreude and desperate need for in-group validation.
people often simultaneously exist within several demarcated social spaces, each with a different (often mutually exclusive) hierarchy of values. they have to at least acknowledge, if not genuinely hold, multiple contradictory understandings of the world.
end result often looks a bit dissociative, compartamentalised, sometimes nihilistic or disengaged, focused on utilitarian-sociopathic ‘self-optimisation’ as whatever is left to exercise control over (wellness girlie, rules and lists, guinness book of records, doctors without borders, etc..)
none of this helps in fostering and maintaining quality interpersonal relationships, romantic or otherwise. the crisis of trust towards institutions is mirrored on this, more personal level as the inability to trust in good faith of another person.
Everybody spend so much time using big words to make themselves sound smart when really we’re just talking about: “I’m rubber, you’re glue.” Adult online playground style.