Our society's rules about sex and dating have been upended several times in the last few decades, people are broadly more aware of far more social issues and the plights of others than we ever have been because we have all that access to people's innermost thoughts on the internet, whether or not those thoughts are reflective of reality is not important, it's the idea that we are all worried about becoming a subject of that collection of negative thoughts, and we tend to have negative reactions to even the idea of some people finding other people attractive because it's a sharp reminder that most people don't look like this, and most people don't know first thing about how to compensate for not looking like this.

And many guys don't even want to "compensate" by trying to fit some other image they don't know how to achieve.

Also, even though broadly our standards for women, sex and dating have changed so much, our expectations and standards for masculinity haven't really changed at all, so it's created a huge, confusing "wall" of sorts for men everywhere who don't really know how to find a place in a world that simultaneously expects them to live up to these standards that were established in the ice age, but also be some kind of "new male" who has feelings and is sensitive (but only if they're the "sexy" kinds of feelings) and doesn't threaten anyone.

Most young men growing up in the developed world right now have no idea how to date and be loved or even how to have positive emotional states or feel proud of anything while swimming in this social-media-soaked landscape. A lot of young men who haven't developed emotionally choose to either "disappear" from the world of dating and romance, or go the opposite direction and latch onto horrible grifters promising simple answers like the Andrew Tates and Sneakos of the world, and this is all also why the rates of intimacy and relationships between younger people is plummeting right now, to a degree that is seriously going to become a major problem.

Of course we are not.