I've been rolling some ideas around in my head and just wanted to get them down on paper so to speak for people to critique. I consider myself a leftist politically speaking with very progressive viewpoints. Most of the time I don't agree at all with the conservative right leaning viewpoints on things especially when it comes to social politics. However I do think that one place that conservatives have been correct about is the precariousness of the nuclear family and marriage with the advent of birth control, the sexual revolution, women entering the workforce, and no fault divorce. Mind you I don't consider any of those individual things as evil or things that should be eradicated but I do look at them as things that will have knock on effects far into the future that we don't fully understand yet. Those effects may turn out to be a net negative for society. I am a firm believer that humans are no different than animals other than the fact that we can rationalize our way through life and try to put as much distance between us and our animalistic instincts. Many times this can be done through individual behavior, sometimes it requires mores and laws and a societal structure that reinforces behaviors that are distinctly different and more sustainable for humans to coexist compared to how animals behave.

A case in point would be mating. Without society and with no rules other than might makes right, humans would simply mate based on opportunity. This is exactly how most animals mate. The female of the species either mates one of two ways. She selects the most desirable mate and they have sex or a less desirable mate finds her and forces her to have sex. The males continue this process of finding females to mate with, in whatever manner they can. You end up with a select few males that are able to procreate regularly from multiple females and you also end up with a lot of suboptimal males that try to take mating opportunities via rape or live in perpetual frustration.

It is my contention that as society has progressed we have tried to distance ourselves from the animal Kingdom and change our behaviors to be very far removed from what our initial instincts might be. Whether it be prevention of murder, sharing of resources, performing work for others in exchange for goods, or linking up in monogamous relationships that ideally last a lifetime. Of course all of these behaviors again are reinforced through laws and societal expectations and peer pressure.

The modern liberation of women and their sexual freedom has essentially undone centuries of society attempting to rein in our animal instincts for mating. Women have a prerogative to want what they instinctually desire. A desire to mate with only the best the gene pool has to offer while having as many resources as possible to raise their young with as much safety as possible for their physical defense. Dating apps have essentially completed this ultimate goal that they have been seeking. It has increased their reach to help them find the best possible genetics of all that is available. However this does not happen in a vacuum and as women have been pushing to try to get back to their instinctual desires for mating by tearing down the societal constructs that attempted to control that behavior Men are also being forced to confront their own instinctual desires and returning to perhaps a more natural state of the male existence.

How is this state of male existence manifested? Well you're seeing it in a number of ways. First of all you have a increasingly smaller number of men with the best of genetics and resources having their pick of mating opportunities. Many of these men will refuse to settle down as there are simply too many opportunities to spread their seed. This is exactly how it would be in the animal kingdom except for a few cases of species that mate for life. You also have the less than desirable men struggling to find anybody to mate with. How does this manifest itself in the animal kingdom? Well usually either through forced copulation or a desire to challenge and take out the males that do manage to mate. We still live in a society with laws and thus these two behaviors are strongly controlled against under penalty of imprisonment or death. Obviously you will still have some men that will utilize these options but most are well aware of the cost of such actions. So instead you have a lot of men being denied their own natural instincts on how to deal with the current situation. This is embodied through the frustration that we are now seeing. On a spectrum it shows itself as men becoming incels with a complete hatred of women and a desire to destroy everything women want with their mating imperatives through rape or wanting to control their access to resources. In the less extreme cases you just end up with a lot of men who are either frustrated or sad and simply voice their concerns about it.

In conclusion I think the frustration of the current dating market is the fact that a small percentage of men and most of women are able to live in their most natural instinctive states for mating behavior while the majority of men are being left behind and being forced to control their own instinctive state for mating. Ironically society has progressed so far and created advanced technology only to return us to a more naturalistic state of our biological condition for mating. What knock on effects will this have?