The New Horrors of Modern Dating: Golden Penis Syndrome

Everything in life goes through cycles at one point or another and let’s just say that where we are in that cycle in modern dating leaves a lot to be desired compared to past generations. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that the challenges are insurmountable, that it’s unworkable, or that you should give up and marry a Waifu pillow:

However, things have gotten significantly tougher than they used to be. Mostly, it’s men complaining about this, but as you are about to see, women are impacted as well. Over at Evie, they wrote a story about one of the difficulties that women are having that has the catchy name of, “Golden Penis Syndrome.”

The article itself is one long whine about “Golden Penis Syndrome,” but there’s very little real discussion or understanding of how that came to be a “problem.” However, this is worth talking about because if you understand the dynamics of what created this situation, you’ll start to get a much better understanding of why dating sucks for so many people these days.

Let’s start with Evie describing, “Golden Penis Syndrome”:

Earlier this month, The New York Post did an exposé on these dire dud dating conditions plaguing large swathes of young women on college campuses: “Just 40.5% of college students in the United States are male, according to the National Student Clearinghouse, meaning they’re in short supply and high demand when dating on campus. A lack of competition has led these men to develop “golden penis syndrome” — an arrogance that stems from the assumption that a steady supply of females will be sexually interested in them.”

...As a dating and relationship coach, I’m very familiar with this “golden penis syndrome” phenomenon as it relates to the many young women I assist in sorting through their dating doldrums.

It goes something like this: “I met Chad. Chad is really hot and sexy. He’s super popular and so many girls like him. I slept with him and fell in love and now he’s stopped texting me. How do I get him back?”

Meanwhile, three or four other girls are active on his phone as of 7 pm, with one naked by his side and 300 more neatly filed away among several obscure messaging apps.

Through my countless hours of labor and research in helping these women reconcile their heartbreak, I’ve come to the conclusion it’s entirely impossible for women to make a comeback from this “walk of shame” blunder and regain Sir Golden Penis’ fleeting interest. Once he’s gotten his fill of unattached sex, he’s gone.

He’s been lavished with attention, idolization, emotional investment, and finally, sex, in exchange for essentially nothing on his part — bare minimum effort with a few sparse texts, brief initial stage love-bombing, a swift top bunk liaison, and she’s left high and dry with some ghosting. This is all too commonplace.

...Many have dubbed it a consequence of “The Pareto Principle” wherein the top 20% of masculine men are monopolizing detached sex with the top 80% of women. The mimetic term “alpha widow” applies here too where an unsuspecting young woman gets a night with Chad and is “ruined forever” for every other man. She’s said to have gifted him with lifelong emotional investment thus no other man will live up to her standards based on her short-lived situationship with Chad.

So, the first thing you have to understand is that online dating has become the main way that people meet these days. Not the only way, but the main way:

Online dating tends to be a very visual medium. In other words, who does the best in online dating? Not the kindest, smartest, funniest, or most generous people, but the best-looking people. It really couldn’t be any other way. From a male perspective, after you’ve read the 50^th female profile talking about how they “love to laugh” and “don’t want to play games,” what else can you judge women on other than how they look? And let’s face it, if anything, men’s profiles are probably even LESS imaginative than the ones women put up.

Another little quirk of online dating is that women find most men online to be unattractive. Yes, really. Here’s a classic chart from OkCupid showing how the distributions work:

In other words, a relatively small slice of men at the very top of the pyramid are in high demand by women, while the vast majority of men are considered average at best or unattractive at worst. Now, couple that with the relatively new way many women view the point of being in a relationship.

For a long time in America, a relationship was a financial necessity for women. Most women didn’t work or go to college, welfare programs as we know them today didn’t exist and ladies NEEDED men to support them and their children. Today? Being married to a man is a take-it-or-leave-it proposition for women. More women go to college than men, they make their own money, it’s no longer taboo to have sex outside of marriage and even if ladies have kids on their own, they’ll still be able to make it via child support or government programs. On top of this, even the women who want to get married are doing it later than ever:

Put another way, many women in their early to mid-twenties are not looking for their “forever man,” they’re looking for “Mr. Right Now.” A very good-looking, exciting, high-status guy who will impress all of her girlfriends. If that sounds pretty shallow it’s because, well, it’s pretty shallow.

With these men, the normal dynamic of dating in America is flipped on its head.

You see, in America, attractive women are currently the ones that are overloaded with options. They post decent pictures of themselves on Instagram and get legions of men telling them how beautiful they are. They get on an online dating site and hundreds of men write them. This leads to a lot of bad behavior from women – and it’s not just me saying that. Here’s the famous ex-pick-up artist Roosh describing what the dating market is like for a lot of men these days:

“It would be great if you met a pretty girl in a bar, had a long conversation with her that ended with a kiss, got her phone number, and then arranged a date for a few days later. Unfortunately, the likelihood of this scenario is shrinking, resulting in huge amounts of frustration for just about every man who meets girls at night. Here is the worst-case reality: if you get phone numbers from girls you don’t kiss, you’ll need ten to eighteen numbers to get one date... With the exception of approaching, the most frustrating part of the game is contacting girls, either via voice call or by texting. Girls no longer have basic manners when communicating with men they’ve shown an interest in, so you’ll repeatedly be disappointed when interactions that seemed to be strong and genuine fade to silence. The strong connection you feel is fleeting in the mind of the modern girl who wants to continually experience a smorgasbord of excitement and adventure. She will love you one moment and treat you worse than a homeless bum the next. This is why I advise that you push the interaction as far as you can while a girl is in your presence.”

This is how many women who are deluged with options tend to behave with men.

Of course, women are not men. What they’re calling “Golden Penis Syndrome” is just the male version of the female behavior Roosh discusses. Men tend to view sex as an end unto itself, so how do men who have hordes of attractive female simps interested in them behave? They go out with any woman they’re sexually attracted to, sleep with them if they have the option, and unless they’re really blown away for some reason, they move on to the next woman relatively quickly.

If you want to know how to fix all this on a culture-wide scale or take us back to a better, saner dating market, there are no obvious solutions. These changes have been driven by powerful societal changes in economics, morals, and technology. There’s no way to roll back the impact of the birth control pill, online dating, government welfare, and women entering the workforce among other changes and few people would want to do those things anyway.

That being said, can understanding all of this be helpful on the individual level?

Absolutely, because the better you understand reality as it is, not as you wish it to be or it used to be, the better off you’re going to be.

If you’re female, you don’t have to be some good-looking guy’s 10^th easy lay of the semester. You can be the one looking for your “forever guy” when you’re younger if you want.

If you’re a decent-looking guy and you can upgrade your hair, style and lose 10 pounds to get to washboard abs, maybe you’ll decide to go ahead and do it in order to be one of those guys with large numbers of options.

On the other hand, if you’re not the best-looking guy in the world, maybe you’ll start looking for ways to meet girls somewhere other than on an extremely visual dating app. That doesn’t mean it will be easy, but at least you won’t be at the sort of competitive disadvantage you’ll face on POF or Tinder.

Knowledge is power. What you do with that power is up to you.

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