I did see the writing on the wall throughout my college years (2001-2005) that inceldom was going to become common.
One of the things I saw on campus is that most men who tried to live the "player" lifestyle and seduce numerous women were generally sexless men. When I say generally sexless men, I'm referring to both men who were completely sexless (the worst cases) or men who often failed to get sex but would occasionally have same night sex from an approach at a college party/bar or another instance of shorter term sex. It was clear to me that a good portion of men on many "Hot Girl U" party campus were invisible/barely visible to women. I didn't have a phrase to explain it then but what I was seeing was the Pareto Principle in action. That's the 80-20 rule.
Most men outside of the Top 10-20% had to get some sort of girlfriend while on campus in order to get regular access to sex or they would be watching internet porn. This is something both
@Jesse Pinkman and I have mentioned on the college threads below in the past.
I thought I'd share this as someone who went to a party school and was in a fraternity there as well. Not wanting to give too much about myself but I went to UGA and graduated a few years ago. While Athens has its hot girls, I do feel like the quality got worse every year due to the admission...
www.sosuave.net
Looking back at it, I am amazed at how big the hype around college truly was. Maybe my boy @CornbreadFed and @SW15 could speak on this but I speak with so many guys who seem to have peaked in college and don't realize how beautiful life can get after it. FWIW, I was in a fraternity in college, a...
www.sosuave.net
I started to see the erosion of social skills as early as my freshman year dorm when I saw a lot of people using AOL Instant Messenger (a precursor to text messaging) be widely used for communication. MySpace and Facebook started to come in around my senior year in the 2004-2005 school year and changed this more. Online dating websites weren't commonly used by college students when I was on campus as they were de-stigmatizing more so for the 20s/30s post-college crowd at that time.
That chart only illustrates the changes in men 18-29 reporting no sex since their 18th birthday. That isn't a measurement of virginity but a measure of incel status. It's possible respondents had sex prior to age 18 and incel status common means one year or more without sex involuntarily.
The chart is more of a measure of late Millennial sexlessness than Gen Z sexlessness, as the chart ends in 2018. In 2018, the oldest Gen Z's were only 21. 22-29 year olds in 2018 were Millennials. Sexlessness and incel status took root during the Gen Y/Millennial generation and has persisted into Gen Z. It would be interesting to see where long term sexlessness is now in 2023-2024.
The simplistic answer to the skyrocketing since 2008 would be the smartphone. Apple's first iPhone was released in 2007. The first generation iPhone was not the first overall smartphone but it was the first smartphone to change the overall cellular phone market. The popularity of the iPhone starting in 2007 made it necessary for men to have smartphone to ask women out in person by 2010.
Around 2010, if you were in the field doing approaches and you didn't have a smartphone when collecting digits for the first time, the woman would be repulsed and she would seriously consider ending the interaction then or maybe giving the digits then ghosting. That's how important having a smartphone became. Additionally, if a guy set up a date on a website then (like Match, Okcupid, or Plenty of Fish), he'd still be expected to have a smartphone. Sooner or later (likely during the first or second date), the woman would see what cell phone he owned and if he didn't own a smartphone, she would ghost.
The smartphone gaining popularity a lot of things about the mating atmosphere but a lot of those trends were already in motion.
