There’s a few factors working together to cause it. There’s really two main ones: pressure to have sex and romantic connection, and an inability to be able to make those connections.
There’s tons and tons of pressure out there about being in a relationship and having sex. In modern day, a good example is Andrew Tate and the like, directly linking your self worth to having sex. Back when I was a male teenager during the days of rage comics and advice animals, it was memes about the friend zone. The core idea is the same, being alone is something to be ashamed and upset about. Being rejected is something that reflects badly upon you as a person. Young men are constantly being bombarded with messaging about how being a man revolves around sex and romance, and lacking these things makes you less of a man. In addition, so much media portrays sex both as this amazing thing on a pedestal and as something that’s not just commonplace but as something that everyone’s expected to be doing.
So young men are believing that everyone except them are all in relationships and/or fucking all the time, and believing that them not doing those things makes worth less as a human being.
The other problem is actually making romantic or otherwise meaningful connections. So much more socializing is online these days, and there are a lot fewer women on the internet than men. It’s difficult to make organic connections with single women online, as random social media is by far mostly male and more direct closer friend groups tend to be made of single men and people in relationships (this is very arbitrary and circumstancial, it’s just what I’ve noticed). So, your odds of finding a single and compatible friend of a friend of a friend online aren’t great, and dating apps are complete trash for pretty much anything other than gay hookups. So, there’s not really a way for many young men to find romantic partners. Straight up hookups are easier, especially if your standards aren’t too high, but it’s an area a lot of young men aren’t socially comfortable with because it’s not something they’ve done a lot of, which makes everything much harder.
In the end, if there wasn’t so much pressure to be dating and having sex, then the difficulty of doing so in the modern day wouldn’t matter so much.
Personally, I’ve basically only had sex with men, because it’s so much more straightforward and the dating pool isn’t crazy lopsided. Though that’s at an end now too, because I’ve transitioned too much to be appealing to gay men anymore and haven’t transitioned nearly enough to be appealing to straight men or gay women.
lordnikon@lemmy.world 5 days ago
You make very good points also to add women in online spaces have incentives to pretend to be male or be ambiguous and not bring attention that they are women online to reduce the harassment they get. I’m pulling numbers out of the air but I feel 10% the internet that is male are assholes or children that don’t have any social skills yet and the other 90% get lumped in with them because we don’t reach out at all as to not come off as creeps like the other 10%. So you don’t hear about the polite respectful ones.
My hypothesis for this comes from the fact that most men I meet in real life are polite social people that respect women with about 10% being weird assholes. I also don’t blame women being guarded of all men as that 10% are true nightmare. I mean if there was a 10% chance a strange man you meet out in public was going to be Jason Voorhees. I would mace every man that came up to me as well. That’s how those assholes ruin it for everyone. Well except the grifrers that make it worse that is.
Also I’m married but we met online before tinder broke dating sites. So take what I say with a grain of salt just from an old man that sees the struggle of young people of all genders go through and I have empathy for them.
pixeltree@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 days ago
Seeing Lemmy’s reaction to the bear made me want to crawl under a rock to be honest, so many people demonstrating that they’re exactly the reason why women don’t feel safe. A lot more than 10% of men on the internet are weird assholes, they just mask it well until they feel insulted. I’ve had a cis woman friend have to change her screen name because she’d occasionally get clocked and harassed, and a trans friend is really split on the progress she’s making with her voice, because now she’s also getting harassed when using voice chat in games.
Sorry mostly unrelated tangent, it just feels like gender relations have been backsliding
Blaze@sopuli.xyz 4 days ago
That was definitely hard to witness
pixeltree@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 days ago
Like, I get it, it’s upsetting to be judged a predator based off of your gender alone. That’s something I struggle with being trans, seeing how seemingly half the country thinks trans people are just perverts and child predators. But with the whole bear situation, men need to realize that it’s not a reflection of them as individuals but a reflection of society. Being upset about it is normal and rational, but you should be upset at the society that allows women to be treated in such a way that women have to be suspicious and fearful, instead of being upset at the women making them confront this ugly truth.
Discussing gender relations like this should be done carefully with empathy, telling a bunch of male teens and young men that they’re all predators can be quite damaging in and of itself, both to the men directly and to the greater discussion and understanding of the problems we face as a society. God knows being on reddit as a teenager and hearing that really hurt me and contributed to mental issues I haven’t and probably will never fully resolve.
IncogCyberspaceUser@lemmy.world 3 days ago
I’m out of the loop, what bear situation are you referring to?
Caboose12000@lemmy.world 3 days ago
it was something like, there was a viral tweet asking if women would rather be alone in the woods with a bear or with a man, and most women said they’d pick the bear, and many many many men were very gross about this in response
pixeltree@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 days ago
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_or_bear
Basically women expressing they’d be more comfortable in the woods knowing that there’s a bear roaming around than knowing there’s a random man roaming around