Let’s rewind by about 20.000 years.

You are part of a tribe.

The best hunter gets a lot of sex. He brings in protein.

The most socially connected man gets a lot of sex. The man who knows how to nip conflicts in the bud by communicating.

The most knowledgeable man gets a lot of sex. He can maybe save your child with plant medicine. He probably knows how to design a spear that you can throw further and more accurately.

The most gifted story-teller gets a lot of sex. His myth building helps with the tribal glue and his stories form a safe training ground. He takes young people on adventures where they learn without risking anything physically.

All the women of the tribe compete to have sex with the top guys. Say 20 percent.

The others are backup options at best or cuckolds. Maybe a woman can get impregnated by the top hunter or a top strategist or a top tool maker, but she can use one of the other guys with a much lower profile as a cuckold. She will bear the children of a guy in the top 20 percent of the tribe with social capital and one of the less important ones will stand by her side and be loyal. His only chance of also getting some sex.

After some time there is a risk of a social revolution. The sexless majority of men can turn on the minority of men who gets most of the women.

Solution? Monogamy!

It was always a scam, but by enforcing monogamy officially, almost any chump eventually gets married and gets at least some sexual action. Women still cheated and some men still went on to raise children that weren’t theirs, but monogamy creates social stability. The sexless men don’t team up and raid other tribes to drag off women and don’t attack the men with the sex monopoly inside their own tribe.

Dating apps, social media and narratives in mainstream stories as to what a woman should seek in a man, are recreating this situation. But with an important difference: sexless men are being sedated by porn, games, hobbies, work work work work, alcohol, food, etc. There is no risk of social revolution. Many men are angry, lonely frustrated, but they vent this rage online or suffer privately in isolation. In offline public life they appear as moving vegetables. Even to their therapist they find it hard to open up on how their masculinity has been whacked.

Why is this happening?

On dating apps most of the likes and matches go to the top 10 percent of male profiles.

This is because women are much more selective in their swiping, profiles need to really stand out for the majority of women to like the profile. The algorithm then rewards success. It functions like the Matthew Principle. Those who get, get more, those who don’t get, get even less.

So for most men today dating apps are starvation, rejection, isolation and at best: matching with women who have absolutely no chance with the top ten percent of men all the women want. They are stuck with the least popular leftovers. A man swiping on dating apps will almost certainly end up going out with women who are not their dream women at all. They are settling for what they can get and isn’t totally terrible. But this IS terrible. A man should never settle for a woman because he thinks he can’t get his dream gir. It inevitably breeds resentment in the relationship. Both overt and hidden. Most of it hidden.

Because women get male attention so every easily on social media, especially Instagram, women no longer have an incentive to get male in public spaces. She never needs to go out anymore to get compliments or attention. Men throw attention on her without any risk to her online.

It’s like air dropping crates of top quality food on a hunter gatherer society. Of course they will stop hunting and gathering, the food just comes to them. This will over time ruin their viability as a hunter-gatherer society, but the human brain is not wired to reject short term comfort for long term resilience and strength.

You have seen this with your own eyes. Flirting has collapsed. Spontaneous interactions in public? Almost entirely gone. People are frozen staring at screens listening to podcasts in their earpods about… how to connect with anyone… or to hear why they feel so lonely.

One of the effects is that men aren’t fucking.

They are having a lot sex even when they are in a relationship than say 20 or 30 years ago. Stress, endless comparison, chat affairs (affairs where partners sneakily talk to someone online, but often without even meeting up), distrust, fear of vulnerability, alarming lack of knowledge when it comes to emotions, sexuality, intimacy… all contribute. Plus, women have absorbed, from social media, and movies, a certain image of men that the men they are with fail to live up to. On top of that men’s consumption of porn gives them entirely the wrong idea as to what women’s real sexual needs.

We live in a climate that is practically designed to make relationships fail.

Single men are scared of women, terrified that women have ruled them to be worthless, they feel unseen, they stopped bothering. They cowardly hide in apps, hoping, hoping, hoping that maybe a match will come. They gamify their profiles in the hopes of getting more matches or to be noticed on social media. They are frozen when they meet women in real life. They are afraid of being seen as needy, predatory, clumsy, vulnerable, stupid, etc.

At the same time women ALSO feel unseen. Online they are often bombarded by likes and private messages, but offline men have retreated. Nobody flirts with her, men stare, but don’t engage, offline she doesn’t get invitations, there is no romance, there is no wooing and COURTING a woman, the classic way, with time and patience and orginality, is gone too. Rare is the woman who meets a man and feels desired for who she is. Women now often feel like they are desired as tools to fix a man’s self-image. That is highly unattractive to a woman. She will always sense it.

Women have put their guard up and in public are increasingly armored, while strangely also curating a more pornified look. The ‘hot’ professional. She can handle it all, is aloof, and looks like  – or tries to – the icon of some luxury brand. This makes men even more timid. The women get even less real life attention, so she armors up even more. This leads men to think that only billionaires stand a shot with modern women (a very common feeling I hear among men these days). Yet I also hear women constantly say they are NOT looking for billionaires, but for men who know what they want and don’t hide it.

The result of these dynamics are unmistakable.

Women are attracted to the men with options, who are not needy, and those use them. Leading to pain.

They ignore the needy ones, cause they are unattractive. Leading to pain.

When they eventually settle for what they can get, when they are running out of them, they are not satisfied and keep thinking they could have done better. Leading to pain.

The modern dating market is set up to be brutally painful.

Even the idea of dating as a ‘market’ tells you that dating involves tactics, marketing, deceit, monopoly creation, supply and demand factors, hostile competition, undercutting rivals, overpromising, manipulation and exploitation, a few winners and a lot of losers…

There are strategies to avoid the worst of this dynamic, but I first wanted to sketch what the sexpocalypse is.

In a future post I can explain how to thrive in the era of this sexpocalypse.

You can let these forces quitely castrate you OR you can take these same forces and treat them like a forge to reinvent yourself as a man.

I can also write in detail what happens to man when he is touch starved, psychologically and physically, and why it’s literally a matter of survival to never allow such a situation.

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