Why Men Don't Date Woke Women

The cultural dating divide is a simple risk analysis

As a relatively newly single man in the 2023 dating scene, I have seen from the inside how politics impacts the dating marketplace. As the culture war continues to bifurcate the country, these wounds extend into mating behavior. Some women don’t understand why men shy away from dating them once they discover their political or cultural opinions. Hopefully this article explains to woke women in part why men choose not to date them.

Herein, we will look at some of the more recent studies on how politics impacts the dating market, and the mathematics of what that means. Then instead of handwaving away the details, we will look specifically at how emergent woke morality dynamics manufactured the elephant in the room. An elephant with the face of Brett Kavanaugh.

Red Blue Dating Math

In June of this year, Lyman Stone and Brad Wilcox published an article in the Atlantic about how political polarization impacts marriage in the United States. The article is relatively objective, and presents several graphs characterizing an overall trend. Male conservatives are on a slight rise, female conservatives are on a slight fall, male liberals are on a slight fall, and female liberals are skyrocketing. This graph excludes folks in the middle:

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They go on to talk in admirably impartial terms about the benefits of marrying someone of similar political beliefs, called “homogamy,” which you might expect because of shared value systems. A “heterogamous” relationship would be one across ideological lines, which you might expect to be less strong. Then they present a related graph, where they back-calculate “implied heterogamy rate,” which is the ratio of heterogamous relationships necessary to match all the singles in the pool.

same source

This is bad for marriage in general, because the number of weaker marriages will increase. But that’s not the full story.

Noah Carl dug more of the story out for Unherd:

A 2019 Pew Research survey revealed that 43% of Democrats and 24% of Republicans wouldn’t date someone from the opposing party. A 2020 YouGov poll found that 45% of Democrats and 38% of Republicans would be unwilling to date across party lines. And the 2020 American Perspectives Survey revealed that 79% of Democratic women and 48% of Republican men would be unwilling to date someone with a different view of Trump. 

Several other surveys have found similar results. The numbers aren’t directly comparable as they asked slightly different questions, but averaging them still provides a reasonable gauge of people’s preferences. Encouragingly, the mean and median were similar for both groups: 63% and 66% for Democrats versus 36% and 35% for Republicans. 

So almost two-thirds of Democrats aren’t willing to date a Republican, and more than one third of Republicans aren’t willing to date a Democrat. Since the more intolerant group’s preferences determine the level of matching, only about a third of surplus partisans could match with someone from the other side. 

Not only we will have a increase in the relative ratio of marriages between people of different ideologies, as The Atlantic supposes, but we will also have fewer marriages over all, or even dates. Combining these numbers into rough estimates, we find this:

• 21% of females are blues who won’t date outside of their ideology, but only 19% of all males share their ideology.

• 5% of males are reds won’t date outside their ideology, but only 6% of females share their ideology.

These margins are razor thin, and if you have any traitors in the mix who decide to date moderates, the number of people who get left out in the cold may grow. This has led to a wealth of articles such as the American Enterprise Institute talking about the Rise of the Single Woke Female, red columnists claiming that Woke Women are Killing Marriage and Dating, and blue bloggers bemoaning the Dangerous Rise of Men Who Won’t Date Woke Women. Lots of the pundits like to blame all of this on Trump, because Trump drives clicks, but nobody seems to identify the elephant that blundered into the room in 2018.

The Kavanaugh - Weinstein Nexus

Hollywood, California is an awful place where everyone is constantly raping each other for influence and fame, and Harvey Weinstein was the King Rapist until the New York Times broke through his veil of influence and victim suppression to expose him early in October of 2017. Since Americans love movies, Weinstein’s rape schemes made much more viral headlines than similar criminals in the past, and social media platforms such as Twitter spawned the #MeToo movement, which peaked a year later exactly during Justice Kavanaugh’s supreme court confirmation. Let’s look at this.

credit: google trends

#MeToo was originally a rape awareness movement from 2006, with the admirable goal of destigmatizing rape among women who were ashamed to admit they’d been raped. The Harvey Weinstein case provided the juice it needed to go viral, as certain actresses started #MeTooing Weinstein. Many or most of these actresses were innocent victims, but one of the more prominent leaders, Asia Argento, had been allegedly raped by Harvey Weinstein in 1997 but then groomed an underage boy, sexually molested him, manipulated her boyfriend Anthony Bordain to pay him $380,000 in hush money, cheated on Bordain, and then taunted Bourdain on Instagram hours before he hung himself. Despite her being an awful person, her effort to organize eighty allegations in a giant #MeToo list was arguably a noble cause.

Her shenanigans failed to drag down the viral movement, which spread like the ice bucket challenge through female social spaces for the following year, as women who had been raped went public with their experiences, and “Believe Women” became its slogan.

This created a kind of a sisterhood among women who’d experienced prior sexual trauma, converting the shame dynamic into a pride dynamic. “Believe Women” became the slogan for several reasons. First, it required no proof. This allowed many women who’d been raped to speak freely because the burden of proof was not on them anymore, and in many cases proof of rape simply doesn’t exist. This enhanced the slogan’s virality and made it a good rallying point. But second, it also allowed women who hadn’t experienced sexual trauma to the level of forcible rape to get into the sisterhood. Rape became a spectrum, viewed in the eye of the beholder. And as the social media feeds filled up with women #MeTooing, this broadened spectrum made it seem like forcible rape was a nationwide epidemic, causing a kind of a hyper awareness of it.

Then Kavanaugh got nominated for the Supreme Court. Liberals who were angry that their “blue judge” slot was stolen by the reds in 2016 saw the court about to flip, threw the kitchen sink at preventing it, and one element of that kitchen sink was a 35 year old rape accusation by Christine Blasey Ford. The result was the most absurd culture war outburst of my lifetime, and it continues to haunt the dating scene today, because of how woke morality dynamics work.

The #MeToo sisterhood had adopted, by slogan, the idea that women are to be automatically believed, because that made the movement more viral. This is harmless until it’s not. It’s harmless when women band together over a shared experience to promote awareness, it’s not harmless when it leads to “guilty until proven innocent” in a court of law. The entire Kavanaugh hearing was an exercise in whether Kavanaugh could prove his innocence, or whether he should even have to do so in the absence of evidence of his guilt. And the fault lines had already been drawn a year before, by the Hollywood rape cult.

The #MeToos of 2018 would all go on to become The Woke of 2020, and the men who feared being tagged with a false rape accusation, as well as perhaps their mothers and wives, went on to become the anti-woke of 2022.

Emergent Morality Dynamics

The central feature of Woke morality mandates that they grant virtue to the marginalized commensurate to their level of marginalization as a way to promote equity. This virtue may be in the form of preferential academic admissions, such as in the case of affirmative action. This virtue may be granted through increased visibility, such as characters in Disney movies or acting slots in advertisements. It may be promulgated in Diversity Equity and Inclusion training in the workplace, or simply in who is allowed to speak at movements or gatherings. The woke believe that by distributing virtue unevenly based on race, gender, or other defining characteristics of marginalization, they can make the world equal, and repair systemic inequity and historical social damage. And within the woke system, having been raped qualifies as one of these defining characteristics.

One of the drawbacks of this moral framework is “virtue climbing,” the act of trying to game the virtue system by accumulating more marginalized qualities. This is why Rachel Dolezal “identified as black,” it’s why Jussie Smollett staged his own hate crime, it is probably partly why the LGBTQ numbers at Brown University doubled since 2010, and it’s probably driving some non-zero amount of the increase in youth transgender identification nationwide. While Dolezal and Smollett were obviously posers, many transgender folks and folks at Brown aren’t. But some nonzero number are in it for the virtue points - points that are also available for rape vicitims. Which means this:

Within the woke morality system, there is a social incentive to falsely accuse someone of rape, and social virtue to be gained by levying that accusation without proof.

This has been true since Kavanaugh. The inflection points on the graphs above show this date clearly. The breaking point nobody speaks about was the Kavanaugh trial. The elephant in the room.

True Tinder Parable

Every man in the dating world has, at one point, connected with a woke woman. They’re very easy to identify. Like this snapshot from my phone in 2020:

This lady was nice, and cute, and successful, and I chose not to date her. I chose not to do so because she was woke, and I have decided that dating woke women is not worth risking my and my family’s safety. I explained it to her like this.

Imagine if you will, there exists a culture somewhere that grants social virtue to rapists. Certainly not all men in this culture are rapists, some are certainly great people who would make good husbands. But some are rapists, and those rapists are granted increased social virtue by that culture. A woman would be a fool to date any man from that culture, not because every man is a rapist, but because the odds of drawing a rapist from the pool go way up. The risk isn’t worth the reward when there are men from other cultures they could date, who don’t applaud and encourage rapists. Every woman should agree with this.

Now invert the genders and replace “rape” with “false rape accusation.” That culture is the Woke. Once a man understands how woke morality dynamics work, the man’s choice to not date woke women makes a tremendous amount of sense. For these men, the risk is not worth the reward.

Is a false rape accusation worse than actual rape? It’s arguable that it does more social damage if less physical damage, and these two things are not directly comparable because they impact people in different ways. But the comparison doesn’t matter because there is no culture on Earth as far as I’m aware that grants social virtue to rapists.

Epilogue

While the rubber band seems to have snapped back on the Woke somewhat in 2022 and 2023, with corporations scrapping their DEI initiatives, the pushback against CRT in grade schools, anti-Asian discrimination in universities being ruled unconstitutional, and people generally drinking less Bud Light, this dating problem is going to get worse instead of better with the next crop of teenagers.

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Although many pundits claim Generation Z to be the most-woke generation yet, finer grained analyses shows that on net Gen Z isn’t moving more progressive as a block, they’re separating by gender as shown in the graph above. They’re also having less sex. Only one third of them are sexually active, as opposed to the rip roaring 50% numbers posted in my day by Generation X. We may be following the fertility rate trend of Singapore and South Korea, which some researchers attribute partly to politics. But even without political fallout, falling birth rates stand to be a global trend in the future, even in the third world. Nobody really knows how that’s going to work, neither economically, nor for the future of cities, towns, and real estate. It may be an economic disaster while simultaneously being an environmental boon.

And while the fertility rate fall cannot be blamed solely on woke politics or angry conservatives or blue haired feminists, I think I’ll find a certain palpable irony that the thing truly got kicked off here by a Hollywood serial rapist raping another Hollywood rapist.