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Gen Z’s Sexual Apocalypse. The Case for Marriage. And: Is It Time to Ditch the Apps? Oliver Wiseman

Published

11 months ago

February 14, 2024

(Photo by Brandon Bell/Getty Images)

This Valentine’s Day, spare a thought for Sam, a single 25-year-old graduate student living in Washington, D.C. Not because he’s a graduate student. Or because he lives in D.C. (Though each is its own burden.) But because he’s a young man looking for love in the year 2024. Even worse: he’s a straight “non-MAGA Republican” looking for love in the year 2024.

“Dating right now is just walking on eggshells, honestly,” he tells fellow Zoomer Rikki Schlott. In her story for us today, Rikki explains how the growing political divide between young men veering right and women leaning left has left Gen Z facing a sexual apocalypse—with some men resorting to desperate measures, like pretending to be woke. As one young male libertarian told Rikki, “A guy’s gotta get laid.”

But unless her peers drop their political hang-ups, Rikki warns, the future will be loveless, childless, sexless—and hopeless.

“Politics has taken over our lives in recent years—and now it’s taken over our bedrooms, too,” she writes. “Your hot takes won’t keep you warm at night.”

Read Rikki’s piece “When It Comes to Sex, My Generation Is Screwed”:

Free Press Fight Club: Delete the Apps!

As well as the political divide, another thing single Zoomers—and anyone else on the dating scene—must grapple with these days are “the apps.” Talk to anyone on Raya or Hinge or Bumble or—God forbid!—Feeld and they will have their fair share of horror stories: disappointments and ghostings and unsolicited pictures, and more. But those who complain about algorithmic matchmaking are still logging on. So which one is it? Are the apps the modern-day Cupids we need, or a romantic Frankenstein’s monster that’s making users miserable? In other words: Is it time to delete the apps?

Here to hash it out, for our Valentine’s Day edition of Free Press Fight Club, are Suzy Weiss, who says yes, the apps must go, and Ben Kawaller, who sticks up for the algorithm.

Here’s Suzy:

This Valentine’s Day, do yourself a favor and forgo the least romantic technology conceived by man: applications that categorize people by demographics.

If you can muscle through the profiles—gauzy with layers of virtue signaling, desperate attempts at irony, and suspiciously dated pictures—and actually make it onto a date, it’s more likely to end with a split check than fireworks. Constructing a lovable character online is one thing; performing it for the duration of IPAs and a margarita flatbread is another.

I’m no secret Boomer. I’ll never say Just look up from your phone or Go up to someone you think is cute and ask them out or Start volunteering. That would be insane. Instead, I suggest asking people you know, especially the ones in relationships you admire, if they know anyone for you. Setups are time-tested, and, because there’s a tether to the outside world through whoever made the match, good behavior is enforced by the iron law of mutually assured reputation destruction.

Other ideas for the post-app single: if you’re short, ask for help getting something from a tall shelf at the grocery store. Ask a person at the bar if they went to the University of Michigan, because they look familiar. And if all else fails, pretend you’re having a seizure and see who saves you.

And now here’s Ben on why swiping right beats faking a seizure:

Suzy sure must think the world of her powers of seduction. Would that we all possessed a level of confidence (egomania?) that allows us to wander about the physical world ensnaring passing strangers with the very magnetism of our being. Must be nice!

There are those who say finding a soul mate is as easy as ordering food delivery. But my dating profiles suggest otherwise. I’ve poured hours of literary energy into my personae on Tinder, OKCupid, Match.com, Grindr, and JSwipe—certainly more than I’ve ever spent on a piece of publishable journalism. I can’t exactly get those hours back now, can I, Suzy? Delete the apps and then do what? Just waltz up to strangers and say, “Jew here, looking for a pretty boy to make fun of me”? I would look crazy.

Anyway, it’s not as if I’ve walked away with nothing. Once, for instance, a stranger from the internet with magnificent hair arrived in my apartment and within twenty minutes told me he loved me.

Suzy suggests outsourcing the search to friends. Look, I’d like an arranged marriage too, but I live in Los Angeles. I’d trust these people to recommend a cosmetic dermatologist, not a life partner.

I am a writer who spends all day alone, except for when I go to the gym, where I am surrounded by available men who meet or exceed every physical qualification I have decided are prerequisites for romantic involvement. You would have me, what, saunter up to one of these people and offer myself up for conversation? You think I haven’t tried this? I’ve said everything from “Are you using this bench?” to “Gosh, you’ve been on this machine for a while” to “You’re lifting it wrong.” Not one of these approaches has yielded me a husband.

Have the apps given me lasting happiness? No—but that doesn’t mean they won’t. I have some rewrite ideas for my Hinge profile that I’m really excited about. It may be my best work yet.

Here’s Another Idea: Get Married

If you’re single and reading this, you might be ready to give up on love altogether. Well, Brad Wilcox is here to tell you to stick with it. Why? Because getting married is—contrary to what some claim—actually pretty great.

Brad has just published a new book, Get Married, in which he lays out the data that shows, whether you’re a man or a woman, getting married is a recipe for a happier, more prosperous, and more meaningful life.

In an essay for The Free Press adapted from his book, Brad takes on the naysayers doing marriage down—both on the liberal left and in the “manosphere” of the online right.

One of the popular myths Brad busts is the idea that ambitious women should stay single if they want to focus on their careers. “This individualistic message is entirely at odds with the evidence,” he argues, noting that, according to 2020 census data, the median family income of married mothers aged 18 to 55 was more than double the income of childless single women in the same category.

Read his case for marriage in full:

Rob Henderson’s Advice for Finding Love:

Ready to find The One? Free Press columnist Rob Henderson, a pro-marriage millennial and a frequent critic of his commitment-phobic generation, has some advice for you. I asked Rob for dating tips for young men. But to be honest, this is good advice for everyone:

1. Take care of your health, fitness, and personal hygiene. It sounds obvious. But a surprisingly large segment of the population—especially the male side—is now run down by drugs, obesity, and other effects of a permissive physical life. Ignore Instagram and observe what real people look like now. All you have to do is exercise regularly, get a decent haircut, and wear clothes that fit to enter the top 10 percent of physical attractiveness.

2. If you’re a guy, go ahead and pay. Researchers recently surveyed 552 heterosexual college students and found that young men paid for all or most of the dates around 90 percent of the time. On average, both men and women in the sample expected the man to pay. If, on a first date, the check arrives and there’s any awkwardness, just say, “Let me get this. You can get the next one.”

3. Stop listening to attention-seeking weirdos on TikTok, X, and YouTube. You wouldn’t take business advice from people who have failed in business, but you regularly see romantic failures amass a following on social media platforms by dispensing inept dating advice. Relatedly, make sure you know what you’re optimizing for. If you’re seeking a committed monogamous relationship, ignore the influencer living in a polycule who shows you only a small slice of his or her life.

Rob’s new book, Troubled, is out later this month. Pre-order it here.

Free Press Lonely Hearts Club

Unfortunately, the Free Press dating app—working name UnHinged—isn’t quite ready yet, but we couldn’t let that stop us from playing Cupid this Valentine’s Day. Instead, we’re taking an old-school approach to matchmaking.

If you’re a Free Presser looking for love, send an email to cupid@thefp.com that includes your name, age, hometown, and what you’re looking for. For a little Free Press twist on the usual lonely heart ad, we also want you to tell us about a recent time you changed your mind—and why. Also let your suitors know the best way to reach out to you, whether by email, X, Signal, or carrier pigeon.

We’ll include the best entries in our email this Saturday.

And if you know anyone in the D.C. metro area who might be open to dating a 25-year-old non-MAGA Republican, drop us a line. We got you, Sam!

Oliver Wiseman is a writer and editor for The Free Press. Follow him on X @ollywiseman.

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TGIF: Hard Pivot Nellie Bowles

Published

3 hours ago

January 17, 2025

admin

Welcome back. This is where, once a week, for a special reprieve, we look at the news and tell jokes. If you’re here for spiritual guidance, I can’t help you (but just in case: yes, you are forgiven your sins).

→ Biden says goodbye: President Joe Biden gave his farewell address Wednesday night, leaving with ominous warnings about dark forces (billionaires) exerting too much influence on American politics. “Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power, and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms, and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead.”

I agree there is a new oligarchy of rich people who manipulate our political landscape, and I, for one, am glad that our president finally sees the danger of MacKenzie Scott and George Soros, billionaire political donors propping up untold numbers of causes. He’s never criticized MacKenzie Scott (formerly Bezos), but I’m sure he was thinking of her, the woman who has thrown $19 billion at activist nonprofits to sway American politics. I’m sure when he just recently gave the Presidential Medal of Freedom to George Soros, he was thinking this is the dangerous oligarch I will speak of soon.

No, I’m being silly. Obviously he means the other side’s dangerous oligarchs! When a billionaire oligarch is throwing money at your own team, they’re just a concerned citizen doing what they can with what they have. Me, I’m balanced, moderate: I love all our oligarchs, on both sides. I want more oligarchs and less democracy. I want our political battles to be fought on warring yachts off the coast of Croatia. See, California lets voters vote on everything, and I’ve seen what too much democracy looks like, and I think that Penny Pritzker and Peter Thiel could sit with each other and come up with something better for us.

Biden continued: “President Eisenhower spoke of the dangers of the military-industrial complex. . . . Six decades later, I’m equally concerned about the potential rise of a tech-industrial complex that could pose real dangers for our country as well. Americans are being buried under an avalanche of misinformation and disinformation, enabling the abuse of power. The free press is crumbling. Editors are disappearing. Social media is giving up on fact-checking. The truth is smothered by lies told for power and for profit. We must hold the social platforms accountable to protect our children, our families, and our very democracy from the abuse of power.”

First of all, Mr. President, The Free Press is doing great. But I love that Biden’s final address to the nation, his farewell, was about the need for Facebook fact-checkers. It was a presidency built around calling the refs, making us feel bad for any criticism (Hunter is a baby boy), and then if that didn’t work, just banning whatever the staff didn’t like that week.

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January 16, 2025 Heather Cox Richardson

Published

6 hours ago

January 17, 2025

admin

In his final address to the nation last night, President Joe Biden issued a warning that “an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power, and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms, and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead.”

It is not exactly news that there is dramatic economic inequality in the United States. Economists call the period from 1933 to 1981 the “Great Compression,” for it marked a time when business regulation, progressive taxation, strong unions, and a basic social safety net compressed both wealth and income levels in the United States. Every income group in the U.S. improved its economic standing.

That period ended in 1981, when the U.S. entered a period economists have dubbed the “Great Divergence.” Between 1981 and 2021, deregulation, tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, the offshoring of manufacturing, and the weakening of unions moved $50 trillion from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1%.

Biden tried to address this growing inequality by bringing back manufacturing, fostering competition, increasing oversight of business, and shoring up the safety net by getting Congress to pass a law—the Inflation Reduction Act—that enabled Medicare to negotiate drug prices for seniors with the pharmaceutical industry, capping insulin at $35 for seniors, for example. His policies worked, primarily by creating full employment which enabled those at the bottom of the economy to move to higher-paying jobs. During Biden’s term, the gap between the 90th income percentile and the 10th income percentile fell by 25%.

But Donald Trump convinced voters hurt by the inflation that stalked the country after the coronavirus pandemic shutdown that he would bring prices down and protect ordinary Americans from the Democratic “elite” that he said didn’t care about them. Then, as soon as he was elected, he turned for advice and support to one of the richest men in the world, Elon Musk, who had invested more than $250 million in Trump’s campaign.

Musk’s investment has paid off: Faiz Siddiqui and Trisha Thadani of the Washington Post reported that he made more than $170 billion in the weeks between the election and December 15.

Musk promptly became the face of the incoming administration, appearing everywhere with Trump, who put him and pharmaceutical entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy in charge of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, where Musk vowed to cut $2 trillion out of the U.S. budget even if it inflicted “hardship” on the American people.

News broke earlier this week that Musk, who holds government contracts worth billions of dollars, is expected to have an office in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building adjacent to the White House. And the world’s two other richest men will be with Musk on the dais at Trump’s inauguration. Musk, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and Meta chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg, who together are worth almost a trillion dollars, will be joined by other tech moguls, including the CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman; the CEO of the social media platform TikTok, Shou Zi Chew; and the CEO of Google, Sundar Pichai.

At his confirmation hearing before the Senate Committee on Finance today, Trump’s nominee for Treasury Secretary, billionaire Scott Bessent, said that extending the 2017 Trump tax cuts was “the single most important economic issue of the day.” But he said he did not support raising the federal minimum wage, which has been $7.25 since 2009 although 30 states and dozens of cities have raised the minimum wage in their jurisdictions.

There have been signs lately that the American people are unhappy about the increasing inequality in the U.S. On December 4, 2024, a young man shot the chief executive officer of the health insurance company UnitedHealthcare, which has been sued for turning its claims department over to an artificial intelligence program with an error rate of 90% and which a Federal Trade Commission report earlier this week found overcharged cancer patients by more than 1,000% for life-saving drugs. Americans championed the alleged killer.

It is a truism in American history that those interested in garnering wealth and power use culture wars to obscure class struggles. But in key moments, Americans recognized that the rise of a small group of people—usually men—who were commandeering the United States government was a perversion of democracy.

In the 1850s, the expansion of the past two decades into the new lands of the Southeast had permitted the rise of a group of spectacularly wealthy men. Abraham Lincoln helped to organize westerners against a government takeover by elite southern enslavers who argued that society advanced most efficiently when the capital produced by workers flowed to the top of society, where a few men would use it to develop the country for everyone. Lincoln warned that “crowned-kings, money-kings, and land-kings” would crush independent men, and he created a government that worked for ordinary men, a government “of the people, by the people, for the people.”

A generation later, when industrialization disrupted the country as westward expansion had before, the so-called robber barons bent the government to their own purposes. Men like steel baron Andrew Carnegie explained that “[t]he best interests of the race are promoted” by an industrial system, “which inevitably gives wealth to the few.” But President Grover Cleveland warned: “The gulf between employers and the employed is constantly widening, and classes are rapidly forming, one comprising the very rich and powerful, while in another are found the toiling poor…. Corporations, which should be the carefully restrained creatures of the law and the servants of the people, are fast becoming the people’s masters.”

Republican president Theodore Roosevelt tried to soften the hard edges of industrialization by urging robber barons to moderate their behavior. When they ignored him, he turned finally to calling out the “malefactors of great wealth,” noting that “there is no individual and no corporation so powerful that he or it stands above the possibility of punishment under the law. Our aim is to try to do something effective; our purpose is to stamp out the evil; we shall seek to find the most effective device for this purpose; and we shall then use it, whether the device can be found in existing law or must be supplied by legislation. Moreover, when we thus take action against the wealth which works iniquity, we are acting in the interest of every man of property who acts decently and fairly by his fellows.”

Theodore Roosevelt helped to launch the Progressive Era.

But that moment passed, and in the 1930s, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, too, contended with wealthy men determined to retain control over the federal government. Running for reelection in 1936, he told a crowd at Madison Square Garden: “For nearly four years you have had an Administration which instead of twirling its thumbs has rolled up its sleeves…. We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace—business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering. They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.”

“Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today,” he said. “They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred.”

Last night, after President Biden’s warning, Google searches for the meaning of the word “oligarchy” spiked.

—

Notes:

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2025/01/15/remarks-by-president-biden-in-a-farewell-address-to-the-nation/

https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/great-disparity/

https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w31010/w31010.pdf

https://prospect.org/economy/2023-07-10-bidens-unheralded-war-on-poverty/

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/unitedhealth-lawsuit-ai-deny-claims-medicare-advantage-health- insurance-denials/

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/13/us/politics/elon-musk-white-house-trump.html

https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/which-big-tech-ceos-will-be-at-trumps-inauguration-see-the-full-list/6110692/

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trumps-us-treasury-pick-bessent-says-extending-tax-cuts-top-priority-2025-01-16/

https://www.thedailybeast.com/searches-for-what-is-an-oligarchy-spike-after-bidens-warning/