Solo hit me up with an interesting question once:
There’s been lot of threads popping up lately of how technology/social networking has changed dating, I know I’m a bit younger then most, however I truly didn’t start dating till the mid 2000’s (by then texting and Myspace had already taking full flight)
What was dating like in the 80’s? 90’s? or hell even the early 2000’s? Was Attention Whoring in clubs/bars as astronomical as it is now? Was flaking an epidemic in the 90’s?
I talked to a guy who use to be a vendor for a sales company I worked at. He told me the biggest difference in the 90’s was that the cost of dating was cheaper and it was easier to go bareback with a girl.
In 1993 a number close was actually significant because it meant she was giving you a personal landline number you could call, not a nebulous cell phone number with caller ID. I think guy’s these days still think a number close means something, it doesn’t. In 1995 a kiss close was somewhat significant, but not a guaranteed lay or implicative of anything beyond a flirtation. Now it’s almost necessary for a girl to make out with a guy in order for him to get the message.
There are a lot of 80’s and 90’s era dating holdovers that young men still think are applicable today. Which is kind of silly when you think about it. I would’ve laughed my ass off if a 40 year old guy told me that dating rituals in the 70’s were still applicable in the 90’s back then. I met Mrs. Tomassi at a gig I was playing in 1995 (you know, at a club, the place every white knight tells you you’ll never find a ‘quality woman™’). No cell phones, no IM, no internet. Compared to 2012 that was the wild west as far as dating was concerned. There was no manosphere, and if you owned a book titled “How to Pick Up Girls” you were obviously a loser who’d mail ordered it from an ad in the back of Hustler (analog porn was still all there was). Basically you were on your own to figure things out.
The Wild West
In the 90’s feminization had reach it’s apex. I know that comes off as a bold statement, and probably a lot of guys would disagree with me because of the dating environment they find themselves in now. However, I say that because it was the wild west and feminization was unchecked and normalized, and there was very little any guy could realistically do to unplug himself. Go back and watch any of the sitcoms or movies from that era and pay attention to the mannerisms of men and women. Seinfeld, Friends and Fraser are good ones to observe. All the time you do, remember there is no internet, there is no global consortium of men comparing experiences about women’s observed behaviors and their motivations, and there is no way to unplug from the Matrix beyond one’s own upbringing, character and insight. Compared to the mid 90’s, the mid 2000’s was the age of enlightenment for Men.
The most tragic reminder of this era being feminization’s apex can be summed up in the suicide of Kurt Cobain. The archetypal self-loathing, tortured-artist beta marries the era’s archetypal fem-warrior, attention whore slut. In hindsight, was there any doubt there’d be a casualty? Aint love grand?
Women flaked and Attention Whores were present, but not in such identifiable ways as now. With the rise of the internet and social media it was proven to me that ALL women are attention seeking to varying degrees, and they’ve always been so. However now the technology is such that they can more actively indulge in their attention obsession from both sexes, so it appears as if women have become more self-important. I’d argue they were always this way, but lacked the outlet to entertain it. It’s ironic that the girls in the 80’s and 90’s who were so repulsed by the nerdy computer geeks are the same 40 somethings sitting in front of their computers for hours at work soaking in the attention of their “Friends” on FaceBook today.