The Great Renunciation

Published on 06 December 2024

The most important sociological trend our time is the plummeting fertility rate. Empirically it is associated with women’s empowerment, their entry into professional life, etc. The standard feminist interpretation is that women much prefer being project managers to the drudgery of childcare.

The principal problem with this explanation is that there really does seem to be major issues in the dating market which are upstream of the fertility declines. Women spend a lot of time complaining about the disappearance of ‘good men’ and do not, in fact, seem all that thrilled with their new careers. The mainstream explanation is sometimes appended with the idea that men have always been terrible, but only recently are women sufficiently liberated to reject the choices on offer. I think this is a defensible position, although it’s not very convincing.

To return to the issue of the dating market, poor quality matching results in three things:

An increase in unmatched people (e.g. incels).
Stable monogamous matches, where they do occur, occur later in life (i.e. women have less time to have children).
Many matches, where they do occur, are simply worse quality (i.e. the partners aren’t especially compatible and their relationship is a weaker one than would have counterfactually occurred in a better dating market).

1 and 2 are well-documented and their impact on the fertility crisis can and has been quantified. 3 is virtually unmeasurable, people don’t realise their matches are bad because all the matches around them are equally bad, their expectations are lowered and so their partners continue to meet expectations in self-report data. While 3 is hard to prove empirically, it’s hard to see how the dating market could be operating badly (as demonstrated by 1 and 2) without a resultant deterioration in match-quality. Personally, I’ve seen a great many relationships where it’s clear that the individuals are settling because they abhor the experience of modern dating and being in a mediocre relationship is preferable to being alone. This undoubtedly impacts their decisions around having children, if they have mixed feelings about their partner in the first place.

Now the idea that there’s a dearth of good men is a reasonable starting point for explaining the matching issue, there’s ample evidence that men aren’t meeting women’s standards rather than vice-versa. The standard red-pilled take on this is that men are falling short of what women desire because women are hypergamous. As women’s status has risen relative to men, the opportunities for them to date up has shrunk dramatically. Hypergamy in this context this refers to dating up in terms of income and educational attainment.

There is a lot of evidence behind this, e.g. the classic paper showed biased reporting in the CPS where either men’s salaries were getting overstated or women’s understated so that wives wouldn’t earn more than their husbands. There’re reams of evidence showing women with colleges degrees are less likely to want to date men without a college degree than vice versa.

Indeed this is the traditional explanation for the ‘eligible bachelor’ paradox which long predates the manosphere. Even when women and men are equally matched ex-ante, if men are more willing to ‘date down’, then there’ll end up being a surfeit of attractive unmatched women at the end of the matching process. This has been exacerbated because women now out-earn degrees 3:2 and also tend to congregate in large metropolises (men are more dispersed due to their role in primary industries), where women under 30 actually out-earn men under 30.

While it’s undoubtedly true this is contributing to the problem it’s unlikely to be the sole driver. For one thing, if there were a global shortage of, say, men with college degrees then they’d be having a very easy time in the dating market which empirically isn’t the case. Besides which hypergamy is only a meaningful description in societies with clear status hierarchies, as social class once served. In contemporary culture there are competing hierarchies which confuse the issue, e.g. should a woman who wants to date ‘up’ date the hunky himbo, the nerdy tech-guy, the glib but amoral fin-bro, or the impoverished adjunct in literature? Perhaps the lack of an obvious answer is confounding women’s naturally hypergamous natures, in any case it renders the postulate so vague that it no longer has much value (you can infer ‘high status’ by what women want, but then you’re merely saying women want what women want).

Better clarity might be achieved by focusing more on the data. Here there’s really two very different interpretations. On the one hand, you can look at self-report which lends itself to a very blue-pilled take. Women typically say they like men who love puppies, advocate for women’s rights and go to a therapist. Self-report data is a terrible source though, and if those traits were what women really wanted then there should be a super-abundance of desirable men relative to past generations.

Alternatively you can look at what women appear to choose in practice (studies look at speed-dating, dating sites and past-choices). This lends itself to a more red-pilled evo-psych take. Here the evidence tends to suggest women want high-dominance men who are assertive, have good social skills and high-quality genes that can be passed on to their progeny. For the most part it appears that women typically choose traits which traditionally signal being high-status, more so than the status itself. So a tech-guy can add as many zeroes to his bank account as he wants, he’ll likely struggle to be attractive to women if he seems like the sort of guy who got bullied in school.

It’s worth emphasizing here the ‘dominance’ aspect, there’s a society-wide taboo in acknowledging this fact. The best-selling book of the last decade, by a big margin, is “Fifty Shades of Grey”. The most voracious consumers of violent degrading pornography which humiliates women are women. There’s tentative evidence that women are behind the choking during sex fad, and myriad other lines of evidence (see the research on rape fantasies even). But dominance extends well beyond the bedroom, being able to dominate in a social setting is likely more important still. Similarly, traits which confer dominance, like intelligence and physical strength, are also found attractive. Perhaps the single-most important trait found lacking in young men today (even in the blue-pilled self-report data) is simply ‘confidence’ which isn’t quite dominance but is certainly associated with it. Zoomer men are increasingly diffident, no doubt as a result of their low station in modern society, which is a tremendous turn-off for young women.

This brings me to the next point; men are not responding to their inadequacy by redoubling their efforts in the dating market. In fact they’re doing the opposite, they’re not approaching women, they’re putting less effort into dating in general, they’re less willing to pay for their date’s meal, and so on and so forth. The traditional view is that young men are infinitely horny and will do anything to get laid, but this is not borne out by the data. They’re giving up in record numbers and I expect this trend to accelerate over time. Indeed the central point of this post is to try to explain why is it happening. So far observers have scarcely come up with anything better than ‘maybe zoomer men are just pussies’ which isn’t a very good explanation for such an important phenomenon. In particular, there’s two reasons which haven’t been hitherto given much notice.

The first is role incongruence. Women, freshly liberated from the patriarchy, with all the bargaining power in the dating market, are looking to satisfy their romantic and sexual fantasies rather than merely settling down with an adequate suitor. Young men, on the other hand, are increasingly demoralised, living with their parents, sexually inexperienced, constrained to low-status jobs, blamed for all the wrongs in the world, their self-esteem wrecked by an incredible mountain of rejection delivered to them on a daily basis by dating apps. Even physically they’re inadequate, judging by the alarming decline in testosterone rates and increasing body dysmorphia. At this point they’re expected to role-play as a Lothario, a Mr Darcy, or Christian Grey (the protagonist in fifty shades), in a date with some girlboss who likely outearns them and has more experience in dating and sex. And if the man is unwilling to play the role, there are dozens of actors waiting in the wings willing to give it a shot.

This incongruence between the role young men are expected to play to succeed in dating and their own self-concept creates an uncomfortable dissonance which makes dating psychologically unbearable. To illustrate this in a more general setting; people like compliments, but they don’t like compliments if they’re sufficiently at odds with their own image. E.g. if you think you’re terrible at cooking, and someone says you’re an amazing cook, that will often make you feel worse. People want to be perceived by others in the same way they perceive themselves. Herein lies the danger of being asked to play a role diametrically opposed to how you see yourself.

And even if you successfully ‘woo’ her through role-playing, it means only that she’s fallen for the façade you had to create to participate in the dating market, not your authentic self. At this point the man will have to slowly lower her expectations by consistently letting her down, in the hopes that she’s already invested too much into the relationship to return back to the dating market.

There’s always been a subset of men willing to learn how to role-play to, at least temporarily, fulfill women’s fantasies as a means of bedding them. But this subset were known-womanizers, and most men found it distasteful to learn all the various ways of exploiting women’s sexual psychology in the hopes of manipulating them. But as the dating market becomes ever-more unfavourable to men, these tactics being marketed by a burgeoning group of PUAs are becoming a necessity even if one merely wants to settle down in a monogamous relationship. Many men no doubt perceive though that learning such tactics will breed contempt for women in general, and that having learned said tactics there’ll be no pressure for them to ever settle-down, they’ll be glutted with options. So there’s of a devil’s deal on offer, you can only find a girlfriend if you’re willing to manipulate women to the point at which you’ll have lost all respect for them. Many men, the nicest of them, will instead opt out of the market entirely.

Our courtship rituals only worked when men were much more powerful than they are now, which enabled them to behave in a manner more attractive to women without requiring such a charade. Expecting men to get ever-better at faking what women want is not working. It might be possible to socially-engineer ourselves out of this predicament but no-one is attempting to. Feminists, who dogmatically assert that women and men are identical, nonetheless recoil at the idea of getting women to ask men out or to buy men drinks. They wish to have their cake and eat it too, but it may be the case that you can only have 2 from girlbosses, fifty shades of grey, and a sustainable fertility rate. And this is the optimistic take, social engineering might not work at all, perhaps the reason all civilisations are patriarchal is that all other societies cease to reproduce at a sustainable rate.

Weininger prophesied that women, given their naturally sexually submissive nature, would only be truly liberated when men choose to abstain from sex. So far as I can tell this isn’t happening, cliques of young single women are instead creating feedback loops of neuroticism rather than empowerment. And while many men will abstain, there will always be some men willing to do whatever it takes to sleep with lots of women. Instead we might see, if anything, an ever-greater intensification of the gender wars as the nicest men refuse to date so that women mostly end up in contact with the small cadre of dishonourable men who are willing to play the dating game.