heading of washington post Something that caught my eye this week was, “Online dating is a personal nightmare. But it’s a very good thing for society.” The article below lives up to its title. “Multiple studies have found that most people who date online don’t like it. But there are also clear benefits…Couples who meet for the first time online are more likely to meet online than couples who meet for the first time offline. more likely to be biracial and biracial.”
Read again: People dating online I do not like it. Admittedly, dating apps are by all accounts a pretty grim place on the internet, with more horror stories reported than success stories.but washington post I want you to know that it doesn’t matter what people like, certainly not when racial equality is at stake. If you’re single and consider yourself anti-racist, you should start swiping.
It should be noted that even if by chance, it is not at all clear whether dating apps themselves are directly responsible for the change in attitudes towards interracial relationships.of post The reporter cited two studies, one of which found that “couples who first met online were more likely to be interracial and interracial than those who met offline for the first time.” (It’s unclear how many of these couples met on dating apps rather than social media.) Another concludes that “locations in the United States with better internet access have higher rates of interracial marriage.” In the mid-1990s, with the advent of the first online dating sites, general support for interracial marriage among Americans rose sharply, but this rise coincided with the rise of the Internet itself. and the latter has become a catalyst for radical social upheaval. Perhaps dating apps may claim as much credit as they make up the online world, but no more.
There is a lot of dissatisfaction among users that is being caused by dating apps. Indeed, there is ample evidence that unlimited profile choices that extend far beyond an individual’s real-life social circle foster greater selectivity and bias. This is not surprising. In the form of shopping for friends, the user becomes a consumer as well as the product being consumed. Not only do dating apps foster bias, likes and dislikes, and unrealistic expectations, but less than 2% of conversations on dating apps lead directly to a date. For successful people, a recent study from Arizona State University found that those who met online were more unhappy in their marriages than those who met naturally.
There’s no denying that the Internet has changed the way people date, but it’s done so in many more subtle ways than attitudes toward interracial relationships. The question is whether, taken as a whole, these changes are an improvement over the previous situation. Given the disparate outcomes, every cost is worth the increase in racial equity when all other types of diversity are leveled out along the racial scale. But when you consider these results as a whole, it becomes much harder to justify the app.
Dating apps have a bad track record, but they may be less harmful than other social issues that have been driven by the same kind of ideological arguments.
Perhaps the most important example of this is found in American feminism. Women have been told for decades that they should seek jobs in STEM fields, join the military, or become powerful executives who serve the moral imperative of equal gender representation in all workplaces. Ta. Women’s rights activist groups have invested in efforts to improve women’s chances of getting into these historically male jobs. However, gender-diversity hiring and “lean-in” efforts have had only a small impact on the actual number of men in the field. Only 10% of her CEOs in the S&P 500 are women. Although the gender breakdown of STEM occupations has changed since the U.S. Census Bureau included social sciences in its category, engineering and architecture occupations are still more than 75% male. In the military, women make up 16 percent of all officers, even though physical fitness standards have declined significantly.
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Not only have these ideologically driven efforts done little to change reality, but in the process women’s self-reported happiness has declined both in absolute and relative terms. As this week’s viral TikTok shows, women who are ashamed of motherhood and miserable at desk jobs are almost twice as likely as men to be unhappy. But of course, the solution isn’t that if you try to do something you’re bad at, you’ll be unhappy. That means working women need more paid family leave, a more equal division of housework, and better men to marry to support these fulfilling careers.
These are the unpleasant consequences of trying to impose an abstract ideal of diversity on the reality of society. People matter because conclusions about how society should be should not be questioned. The problem is that you feel uncomfortable swiping at a guy like Trump or you hate math and can’t run a mile in his 4 minutes. There are speed bumps on the road to progress. If the highest good is racial and sexual diversity, then removing these speed bumps and creating the dream world of Boston University professors and their poorly managed research centers is part of that purpose. It is an acceptable method for
At what point can you ask if all this misfortune is worth it?