The post-sex generation

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Gray Area with Sean Illing Episode Title: The post-sex generation
Date: May 29, 2026
Guest: Christine Emba (Senior Fellow, American Enterprise Institute; writer on sex, dating, and social norms)

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Episode Overview

This episode explores why Gen Z is retreating from dating, sex, and real-life relationships, delving into the rise of online subcultures like "looksmaxing" and examining how technology, social media, and broader social conditions have contributed to a so-called "post-sex" generation. Sean Illing and Christine Emba analyze the broader philosophical, sociological, and psychological implications, with an eye toward empathy and nuance.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Introduction to Looksmaxing & Modern Male Subcultures

• Looksmaxing is introduced as an extreme self-optimization subculture that emerged out of the incel (involuntary celibate) community, focused on maximizing physical attractiveness to improve social and romantic prospects.

• Emba describes the online forums and the culture’s origins:

  “Looksmaxing and I'll try and keep it simple because there's always a lot of online lore and background to these things. But Looks Max Inc. Is a subculture that emerged from the incel involuntary celibate subculture.” (Christine Emba, 02:32)

• Various “levels” of looksmaxing include:

  • Soft maxing: traditional grooming, gym, or makeup.
  • Hard maxing: plastic surgery, supplements, or even “bone smashing” (self-inflicted facial injuries).

• A notorious streamer, Clavicular, is discussed as an emblematic figure who began at 14, engaging in risky behaviors like taking testosterone and even crystal meth to change his looks.

  “He talks about how he got into looksmaxing at the age of 14 and how he started taking testosterone supplements at 14, how at some points he's done crystal meth to like hollow out his cheekbones.” (Emba, 06:29)

Notable Quote:

“Apparently it is a thing that people are actually doing. ... [Bone smashing is] basically hitting yourself in the face in order to ostensibly create micro fractures in your jaw or bones that then grow back and you have a stronger jawline or better cheekbones.”
— Christine Emba, 05:23

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2. COVID-19 and the Acceleration of Online Alienation

• The pandemic intensified online-only interactions and social isolation, accelerating the growth of these extreme subcultures.
• Unlike previous generations, many Gen Z’ers never developed social skills for in-person interaction, leading to anxiety and withdrawal from dating.
• Shift from pursuing relationships for intimacy (incels) to treating relationships as status markers (looksmaxers); sex is viewed abstractly rather than as an experience to seek out.
• Illing insightfully ties this to the self-perpetuating “doom loop” of increased anxiety and avoidance:

  "More screen time means more alone time, which means less contact with other people, which creates anxiety about contact with other people, which I think leads to the impulse to avoid actual human contact.” (Sean Illing, 12:32)

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3. Optimization Culture & Commodification of Dating

• The language of “value, ranking, body count, status, leverage” emerges from optimization and economic logics, spreading to dating and gender relations.
• Dating apps are criticized for making the process frictionless but stripping it of genuine connection, framing dating as a marketplace transaction instead of an act of vulnerability and discovery.
• Emba describes a “depressed dating economy”—a society-wide downturn in dating, characterized by anxiety and lack of social confidence, especially among young people.

  “Top line conclusion is that we are in a depressed dating economy, which makes me depressed just to say, frankly.” (Christine Emba, 15:58)

Key Data Point:

• A majority (from a large national survey) want relationships, but lack “dating efficacy” — confidence in approaching, reading cues, accepting rejection. (17:00)

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4. Differential Withdrawal: Men vs. Women in Gen Z

• Men: More often turn to grievance, self-optimization (looksmaxing), and video content that confirms negative perceptions about women.
• Women: Greater focus on decentering men, turning to self-care or fiction (“romanticy,” bedrotting), and increased suspicion of men’s intentions.
• Social media algorithms reinforce gendered echo chambers and negative stereotypes, pushing men and women farther apart and feeding into shadowboxing with caricatures rather than engaging with real people.

  “Men are arguing with other men about women who they are not in contact with. Women are talking about men who they're not in contact with.” (Christine Emba, 29:01)

Notable Quote:

“Young women especially are more prime to think that men are sort of dangerous, bad, gross, too conservative, kind of a risk. And men … tend to see women as like not liking them, man bashing and also like kind of users and untrustworthy themselves.”
— Christine Emba, 25:05

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5. Substitutions: How Digital Solutions Replace Real Connections

• Pornography, dating apps, and (potentially) AI companions offer easy but incomplete substitutes for genuine intimacy, requiring less risk and effort but also less reward.
• This leads to a cycle where risk and effort are further avoided, and the underlying loneliness and desire for intimacy go unaddressed.
• Emba observes increasing concern over AI chatbots as the next frontier in replacing real human connection, as well as trends like “romanticy” fiction and wellness as escapism for women.

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6. The Role of Social Media: Amplifying Old Anxieties or Creating New Ones?

• Illing and Emba consider whether these phenomena are genuinely new or just digital amplifications of old human problems.
• Social media is seen as “supercharging” traditional anxieties around worth, desirability, and fear of rejection, bombarding young people with endless reminders of their inadequacies and the competition they face.

Notable Quote:

“We have all always felt misunderstood and not able to fully understand the world. That's the human condition. But yeah, I think that the Internet and social media and dating apps have supercharged specific aspects of that and made them feel even worse ...”
— Christine Emba, 40:57

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7. Monetizing Insecurity

• Platforms profit from users’ insecurity, with business models built around amplifying anxiety and dissatisfaction.
• Dating apps and social networks play into hyper-comparative, volume-driven feedback loops that strain the human psyche.

“All these platforms, dating apps or social media, what do they all have in common? ... they monetize insecurity. Yeah, basically. And that's all that this comes. If you follow all of these things back to like the source, it's insecurity.”
— Sean Illing, 42:24

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8. Is There Hope? Human Needs, Grassroots Solutions, and Touching Grass

• Both host and guest express deep empathy for Gen Z, emphasizing that their situation is the result of wider economic, cultural, and institutional failures—not individual moral shortcomings.

• Emba encourages small, practical steps:

  “The first thing that we have to start doing is ... just touching grass, just going outside and like trying, perhaps even failing to talk to people by seeking out that in person connection because everybody wants it.” (Christine Emba, 47:03)

• The conversation closes with a note of hope—including recognizing the problem as a precursor to change and the basic truth that people deeply crave connection.

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Notable Quotes & Timestamps

• [05:23] On bone smashing: “Apparently it is a thing that people are actually doing ... hitting yourself in the face in order to ostensibly create micro fractures in your jaw.” — Christine Emba

• [12:32] On the digital doom loop: “More screen time means more alone time ... creates anxiety about contact with other people, which I think leads to the impulse to avoid actual human contact.” — Sean Illing

• [15:58] On the dating economy: “Top line conclusion is that we are in a depressed dating economy ...” — Christine Emba

• [25:05] On gender divergence: “Young women... think that men are sort of dangerous, bad, gross, too conservative, kind of a risk. And men ... tend to see women as ... users and untrustworthy themselves.” — Christine Emba

• [29:01] On shadowboxing: “Men are arguing with other men about women who they are not in contact with. Women are talking about men who they're not in contact with.” — Christine Emba

• [40:57] On anxiety and amplification: "We have all always felt misunderstood ... but ... the Internet and social media ... have supercharged specific aspects of that and made them feel even worse..." — Christine Emba

• [47:03] On practical hope: “...just touching grass, just going outside and like trying, perhaps even failing to talk to people by seeking out that in person connection ...” — Christine Emba

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Important Segments & Timestamps

• Looksmaxing explained & dangers – [02:30–07:30]
• COVID’s impact on youth social habits – [08:27–10:43]
• Anxieties, dating efficacy, and the dating economy – [15:38–19:00]
• Commodification and optimization culture in modern dating – [14:12–19:00]
• Gender divergence & social media's role – [25:05–29:01]
• Substitutions & AI companions – [32:35–36:43]
• Hope, meaning, and advice for connection – [46:35–48:20]

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Final Thoughts

In a conversation both critical and compassionate, Illing and Emba probe the roots of Gen Z’s “post-sex” culture, highlighting its roots in technological change, disrupted socialization, and cultural malaise—not personal failure. The episode balances philosophical insight with practical empathy, and ends on a cautiously hopeful note: only by recognizing the forces arrayed against connection can we begin, individually and collectively, to chart a healthier path forward.

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Where to find Christine Emba

• New York Times Opinion section (monthly)
• Substack: The Editrix – christinemba.substack.com

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For listeners: If the world today feels alienating, you are not alone. As Emba puts it:

“You don't have to be perfect, you don't have to get it right, you can just try and that's the first step.” (47:03)

Transcript

[Sean Illing]

Support for this show comes from the Guardian and their new show Stateside, where journalists Kai Wright and Carter Sherman use the entire independent reporting resources of the Guardian to slow down the news and wrestle with the questions we all have about what's actually happening in the world. Join Kai and Carter three times a week as they utilize all the reporting resources the Guardian has across news, international coverage, climate, culture, wellness and much, much more. Go to theguardian.com stateside to learn more and listen. Wherever you get your podcasts or watch on YouTube, that's theguardian.com stateside.

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[Sean Illing]

This is the gray area. I'm Sean Illing. My guest today is Christine Emba. She's a writer and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Christine writes about stuff sex, dating, loneliness, gender, religion, social norms, basically all of the anxieties of modern life, or at least most of the moral anxieties of modern life. But really, this is a much broader conversation about why Gen Z is retreating from dating and relationships altogether and how the Internet is supercharging all of those trends. Hope you enjoy it. Christine Emba, welcome to the show. Welcome back, actually.

[Christine Emba]

Yeah, thanks for having me. Good to see you.

[Sean Illing]

I want to start this thing where you started your piece on Gen Z, which is with this incredibly weird male subculture of looks maxing a word I still struggle to say. First of all, I just have to ask for the sake of anyone in the audience fortunate enough to know nothing about this world. What is looksmaxing? How do you describe it for people who are blissfully not online?

[Christine Emba]

Yeah, congratulations to you if you don't know what a looksmaxer is but looksmaxing and I'll try and keep it simple because there's always a lot of online lore and background to these things. But Looks Max Inc. Is a subculture that emerged from the incel involuntary celibate subculture. Incels believe that due to misfortunes of life, genetics, whatever, they were doomed to be involuntarily celibate forever. No one found them attractive enough to ever have sex with or be in a romantic relationship with, and they were sad about that. In many cases that sadness turned into misogyny and went into very dark places. But then there was a subset of incels who believe that it was their looks holding them back from getting into relationships with the opposite sex. And so they turned to this idea of looks maxing. So attempting to maximize their looks, maximize their attractiveness through really intense and sometimes insane means. You mentioned that you have trouble saying the term. So it actually. Of course, the term looks maxing comes from another online subculture or a subculture generally, like role playing games like Dungeons and Dragons, et cetera, where you get a certain number of points and you can assign them to different character traits. The idea of looks maxing is maxing out your appearance as the one thing you optimize for in your quest to become a more successful person. So looks maxers took it really far. They have come to believe or say that they believe that looks and aesthetics are kind of the only thing that matters in life. And on their own sort of forums and discussion groups, they have created kind of a hierarchy of looks that's really, really detailed down to sort of like what the best width of your jawbone is or like distance between your eyes based on this ideal attractive person. And as you get closer to that attractiveness, you can ascend to become a more beautiful person. It's a whole thing. It's deeply problematic.

[Sean Illing]

Yes, it is very weird. So you say they go to insane means to max their looks. I have read that one of those means is smashing their faces with a hammer in order to improve jawline. Is that a thing that people are actually doing or is that just lore?

[Christine Emba]

Apparently it is a thing that people are actually doing. So again, because it's like an Internet subculture, they've come up with their own terminology for kind of everything. So if you're a looks maxer, you can be soft maxing, which is, you know, wearing makeup or going to the gym, or sort of normal kind of non permanent ways of making yourself look better. Or you can be a hard maxer, somebody who like gets plastic surgery or engages in bone smashing, which is the term for what you're talking about, basically hitting yourself in the face in order to ostensibly create micro fractures in your jaw or bones that then grow back and you have a stronger jawline or better cheekbones. And there is video of people doing this online, in particular clavicular, who I talk about in my piece. Who is probably the most famous looks maxer at the moment?

[Sean Illing]

Yeah. How big are drugs and supplements in this world? I assume a pretty big part.

[Christine Emba]

Again, absolutely. One of the things that made clavicular famous is that he, he's a streamer. He livestreams talking about how he has looks maxed, the lengths he has gone to and what he wants to do in the future and like gives advice to other guys who want to become more attractive. So he talks about how he got into looksmaxing at the age of 14 and how he started taking testosterone supplements at 14, how at some points he's done crystal meth to like hollow out his cheekbones. When you talk about people, when you talk about peptides, which have become a big point in conversation at this moment, weirdly, there's much conversation about what peptide stacks you can use to make your hair glossier, make your physique better. So there are lots of pharmaceutical and off label uses that looks maxers go to.

[Sean Illing]

Look, there are probably going to be a few more jokes coming from me in this conversation, but this is actually like devastatingly sad and tragic. Really. 14 year olds taking steroids, I mean, it's just deeply sad. You mentioned the incel thing, right? How these are sort of like next gen in sales who spent years kind of just cooking and Trump era nihilism and the broader manosphere or whatever. And then they were also deeply under socialized during COVID and I think the under socialization part gets under discussed. I mean, do you think we're even talking about looks maxing right now if we didn't have the lockdowns and all the social isolation, particularly with young people that went down because of it?

[Christine Emba]

That's a good question. I think that we might still have looks maxing just because subcultures develop and the incel culture was. The incel subculture was sort of already present before the lockdowns, but I don't think that it would have spread as far as it had. Looks maxing really sort of blew up as a subculture. I think during COVID in part because during COVID like you, you couldn't go out to meet anyone. So you could just sort of stay on a forum or stay online and kind of marinate in your grievances and trade tips. And it felt like you were in community with people and in a sort of post Covid age and a heavily sort of social media ized like atomized moment. You know, we're still not going outside and meeting people in the same way that we did pre Covid, especially Gen Z. I think looks maxing remains like a space that feels like community. It's just community that exists on streams, on YouTubes, on forums. It's not sort of in the real world. I mean, one thing that I wrote about that seems to differentiate, at least in my mind, sort of the classic incel from the looksmaxer is that incels seemed like they wanted to have relationships. Like, they were upset that they couldn't hook up with the opposite sex, and that was the goal at a certain point. Looks maxers, when they talk about. And looks maxing, is a mostly male subculture, to be clear. But, like, when looksmaxers talk about women, they almost seem to view women having sex and relationships as status markers of how. How attractive they are on the looksmaxer scale, how much they have ascended, not as actual goods within themselves, like clavicular, you know. And talking to a New York Times reporter for a profile kind of famously said that he actually sort of prefers the idea of knowing that he could have sex with a woman over actually doing so because, you know, it's kind of a waste of time to have sex. But, like, knowing that he has that status is what's comforting to him.

[Sean Illing]

That's another, like, just bizarrely pathological part of this. Right? Like, I mean, is this just for the most part, again, I'm not doing the gotta hand it to him, move with the incels, right? But they did at least care about human contact. They wanted to have sex and be with people. They just couldn't. And all the resentment came from that. Our looks maxers, for the most part, just straight up post sexual. Like, we've just. We just moved on from actually being in contact with other people. And now it's just all like, you know, narcissistic posturing and online jockeying and scoring. That kind of thing.

[Christine Emba]

Yeah, I mean, I have been accused of handing it to incels several times. And honestly, maybe I have, because I do think that it's very natural to want to be loved, to wish that you had relationships with other people if you don't. And they are open about that, or were open about that and complained about that. Like, I get it, you're sad. It's okay to be sad. It's not okay to commit mass murder because you're sad. But the instinct is human. And so I think when you ask if looks maxers are sort of a post sex subculture, I think what I sort of wondered about throughout my piece was whether they were symbolic of, like, a broader post sex culture, which really means a post being in person with other people culture. And I think Covid helped to push us closer to that, push that forward for everyone, not just this Particularly outstanding group of people.

[Sean Illing]

To me, this is the thing that digital tech is doing to us, right? More screen time means more alone time, which means less contact with other people, which creates anxiety about contact with other people, which I think leads to the impulse to avoid actual human contact. Right. It's just this self fulfilling cycle doom loop. Right. And like that's, that's part of the story for me or not part of kind of the story. And this is just like that on steroids. Is that kind of your read too?

[Christine Emba]

Yeah, no, that seems, that seems totally right to me. That's kind of my theory too. And I would also add, I think there's another factor that plays in which is optimization culture. And you know, America has always had this idea of like becoming the better person, like achieving your next thing, pulling yourself up by your bootstraps, et cetera. But also in this particular moment, I think that a lot of people, especially young people, feel like the world is extremely precarious in any number of ways. And so you like have to always be becoming your best self or improving yourself, optimizing yourself so that you can win in a hard world. And looks maxers specifically I think are optimizing themselves for a new landscape in which dating happens via apps where you lead with appearance. Social media is an image first, you know, medium. So your face and your body feel like they're always on display. So they're like optimizing themselves for this particular technological culture. That also feels especially harsh at this moment.

[Sean Illing]

The optimization thing, I mean the language of this world is so cold and weirdly economic. You know, I mean it's like it's all about value, ranking, body count, status, leverage. I mean it sounds like people talking about commodities on cnbc. Yeah, it's very strange. And, and it's like, it's just, to me it's very anti human. Like it's, you know, and which maybe it's a dramatic term, but that's how it scans for me. Right? Like it's just, it just feels removed from like the flesh and blood world of people and has become something abstract and distant.

[Christine Emba]

I think it's sort of representative in an extreme way of a larger phenomenon in American culture and especially the culture of, you know, younger millennials and Gen Z who were locked down during COVID Like you, you couldn't really experiment with just talking to other people or building relationships in a normal way. You ended up kind of being funneled towards this consumerist image, forward isolated culture and didn't really get practice doing other things. And that is affecting the dating outcomes and relationship formation outcomes of these generations. I think, in a big way, let's

[Sean Illing]

stick with dating for a second because I kind of just gave you my theory of the case as to why people are avoiding people. But you've done some reporting and you've talked to Gen Z men and women. What are the things you hear most from them about why they don't want to date anymore?

[Christine Emba]

I hear a couple of things. First, I think is a general sense of anxiety around interacting with other people. So one of the things that I cited in my New York Times piece was this major survey that came out. It was done by the Institute for Family Studies and the Wheatley Institute at byu and they did a nationally representative study of Americans ages 22 to 35. And then they narrowed that down to people who explicitly said that they were interested in relationships or getting married one day and who are currently not married. And they asked about dating. And the first line of the report is so dark to me. They're like, top line conclusion is that we are in a depressed dating economy, which makes me depressed just to say, frankly, yeah. And then the reasons that people cited for not dating were really just like, anxiety based. First there was the idea of like, money, which speaks to the precariousness. Like, dating is expensive. I'm not sure if I have enough money, et cetera, to take people out on dates. But then also, like, 50% of people talked about having issues with what the survey described as dating efficacy, which really, when they broke it down, meant that they didn't think that they knew how to or were confident enough to approach someone of the opposite sex. They weren't confident that they could like, read social cues. They weren't confident that they could accept rejection and like, bounce back if, you know, they dated someone and it didn't work out. So because of their anxiety, it's exactly the cycle that you've that you stated they were just like, opting out of doing it. And I hear a lot of this anxiety when I've gone to college campuses and talked to young people myself too. There's just this worry about getting it wrong.

[Sean Illing]

You mentioned the dating apps. I mean, you would think on the surface that should make dating easier. Um, but again, it's that easiness, right? It's the frictionlessness of the whole thing which wipes away the courtship.

[Christine Emba]

Right.

[Sean Illing]

Process. Right. Where you actually, you. Where you have to encounter the other and learn about the other and allow them to learn about you, which is bumpy. And yes, has a Lot of friction, but that's life in the world with other people. And again, as that becomes more intolerable, the idea of doing that becomes scarier for understandable reasons. And I have a lot of sympathy for people who have like, grown up, like become young people in this environment. I mean, it just feels really stacked against social flourishing and emotional well being, for lack of a better word.

[Christine Emba]

Like many of the technological developments over the past 10 to 15 years, I think that dating apps were something we were all very excited about when they first happened. Like, yeah, this should make things easier. And then they've kind of turned out to be a social cancer. You know, one thing that I also hear from younger people about dating apps, and I mean also from older people, honestly, is that first, especially men seem to feel like they experience just so much rejection on dating apps because, you know, you're swiping through people like a deck of cards, you see that there are so many people out there and then you try and match with them and they don't match with you or you start a conversation, it doesn't go anywhere or they unmatch. And it's like a volume of rejection that is kind of abnormal for a human person to experience. And I think that kind of sours people on the use of the apps. And sometimes on the opposite sex, women experience this rejection too, but also experience a lot of harassment and sometimes like really scary things on the apps and the way that people approach them and talk to them. And so I think that can dim their view of the opposite sex. And then there is also just like the way that the apps are set up. Right. I mean, like, you really are swiping through hundreds of people like, you don't know what they're looking for. They don't know who you are. It's very easy to treat people poorly or casually or waste people's time. And so it makes you feel like a slog. Yeah, you're shopping for commodities, which is not how you want to be related to as a human person. And also kind of crowds out other, I think, more healthy options for dating that we used to have in the past. You know, like, if you go to a bar these days, you realize that people aren't sort of mixing up and, you know, talking to each other, buying people drinks. There's almost a stated assumption in many public places that like, okay, we know that the apps are where romance happens. So I'm not going to bother anyone in real life. I'll just wait to see if they're on the app, right? But then if you're not matching with people like you don't get that practice. There's not that human interaction and so yeah, things begin to feel very cold.

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[Sean Illing]

I've heard you say that, that men and women at least seem to be withdrawing in different ways. Certainly on the surface, right, like men more into grievance and, and the self optimization we've been talking about. Women in a lot of cases seem to be just decentering men altogether. Do you see those as parallel responses to the same world, or is there something importantly different about the way Gen Z men and women are adapting or reacting to the conditions?

[Christine Emba]

I think, and this is not totally separate from dating, but also a larger sort of question and phenomenon in and of itself. We're seeing a real gender divergence in younger generations. And this became really notable during the 2024 elections, right, where young men tended to remain in the center or move in a slightly more conservative direction and. And young women voted far to the left. And that seems kind of representative of how the sexes are separating in real life too. When I talked about sort of dating apps and other situations sort of turning men and women off of each other, I think younger women especially are more prime to think that men are sort of dangerous, bad, gross, too conservative, kind of a risk. And men are again, I guess I'm gonna like hashtag notallmen, hashtag not all women tend to see women as like not liking them, man bashing and also like kind of users and untrustworthy themselves. And I would say that a lot of this is fueled by social media too. And again, the amount of time that people spend on social media in this moment, like if, if you're on YouTube and you're watching sort of, I don't know what might be considered male centered videos, right? Like you're watching sports clips or whatever. It doesn't take you very long for the algorithms to suddenly take you to like Andrew Tate or some like dating advice guru who tells you that, you know, like women only want one thing or women only want men who are 666. And also all women are constantly sleeping around and are untrustworthy. And you know, you can call women foids and whatever, all of this stuff.

[Sean Illing]

Wait, what is 666? I'm sorry, I know my brain is

[Christine Emba]

rotted from researching this, you know, this idea that Women only date men who are six feet tall, make or over, make six figures, and have a six pack or something else. But like, all these stereotypes about women that are false, first of all, but make them seem like the enemy who you're sort of always fighting with and have to control and demeaning. And then women on the other side are often getting a lot of advice about or a lot of conversation, we could say, about how bad the patriarchy is and how, you know, unsafe relationships can be and how many, you know, narcissists there are out there. And so they're like, I don't want to deal with that either. So both of the sexes are sort of in opposition to each other and end up because they're not spending time in person, you know, taking in these stereotypes and avoiding each other even further.

[Sean Illing]

It's not just that they're not spending time together in the real world, it seems. The problem is also that online they're just shadow boxing with caricatures of the other sex, right? It's mostly men talking to other men in their online corner and women talking to other women and in their corner. And they're both sort of grappling with, like, cartoon versions in a lot of cases of each other, which, again, just feeds into the, the cycle of, of distrust and anxiety. I mean, I just, again, I guess this is a recurring theme. Lots of doom loops here.

[Christine Emba]

Lots of doom loops.

[Sean Illing]

This is another one, I think.

[Christine Emba]

Yeah, no, I think shadowboxing is like the exact correct term, actually. Like, men are arguing with other men about women who they are not in contact with. Women are talking about men who they're not in contact with. And the, you know, the way that you would correct this. Right, is by spending time with an actual woman if you're a man and being like, oh, is this correct or incorrect? Like, this real woman in the world could tell me something about how women are. But if you're spending all of your time online, and also if, you know, algorithmically, you're pushed into the specific, like, male content or female content funnel, you're. You're not really doing any of that. And like, I've. It's funny, I've had this experience and I see this online not infrequently, where, you know, some guy posts something about how all women want is X, Y and Z, and a bunch of women are like, posting under his X thread, like, no, actually, as a woman, I can tell you that's not true. And he's like, I don't believe you. Women lie. We Know this and it's like the women are here, but you'd rather listen to like Fresh and Fit tell you about women or something like some podcast.

[Sean Illing]

Do you think most Gen Z people actually still deep down want intimacy, but just feel like they lack or actually lack the social skills or the emotional resilience, which you only get by going out into the world and kind of falling down and learning from it? But do you think that deep down most, the overwhelmingly, like, overwhelmingly most people even at that age still want intimacy, they just don't know how to get it?

[Christine Emba]

Yeah, I mean, I think, I think this goes back to my sort of sympathy for the incel. Right. Like people. I do believe that most people, all people really want to be loved. You know, they want to be seen. It is nice to be known by someone else and, you know, have intimate relationships. Like in the dating survey that I cited, a majority of the people, you know, who are spoken to said that they wanted to be in relationships. You know, they wanted to be with somebody. It was more that they didn't know how to get there. They didn't feel confident almost in their skills and understanding to make it happen for themselves?

[Sean Illing]

I don't know. How long have you been really reporting on this, thinking about this? I mean, I. Do you feel like things are getting worse increasingly quicker or is it just sort of kind of holding steady? Right. I mean, does it feel like. Like things are really deteriorating pretty quickly and just sort of. And again, a kind of self fulfilling dynamic driven by all these factors?

[Christine Emba]

Yeah, I mean, as you can. As you can probably tell, I've maybe been reporting on this too long, but I think I started writing sort of on gender and relationship and sex topics accidentally. I was at the Washington Post, I was an opinion columnist and there was the Elliot Rogers sort of incel shooting spree. And I wrote a piece about like the incel phenomenon and kind of felt inklings of like, oh, there's something weird going on here.

[Sean Illing]

Just to jump in real quick. Was this the guy at UC Santa Barbara?

[Christine Emba]

Yes, the guy at UC Santa Barbara who was upset that like cheerleaders and sorority girls wouldn't date him and so went driving around shooting at them. And then, you know, metoo happened and I was writing about that and I ended up writing my first book, Rethinking Sex, A provocation about how women especially felt like they were experiencing a dating scene that felt bad to them. Like dating apps were sort of confusing, weren't leading to the relationships that they wanted. Even though again, we had at first hailed dating apps as wonderful, that there were like all these expectations around sex that were influenced by social media, by porn. And, you know, I went on from that to write about masculinity and how that seemed increasingly influenced by sort of both a lack of real world experience and kind of mentors and the online world. And I think one thing that I've noticed as, like, I keep reporting on this is that substitutions keep popping up in increasingly, I think, worrisome ways. And I think that that may make the cycle worse.

[Sean Illing]

What do you mean by that? Substitutions.

[Christine Emba]

So. So when I say substitutions, I guess I mean substitution effects are something that I worry about more than I used to in the past. I think that people really do desire love and companionship and like to be in community with other people, to be with someone else. But doing that is kind of hard, especially if you didn't necessarily learn the skills or have spent a lot of your time isolated. You know, like, going out, putting on the right clothes, like, figuring out how to talk to girls, say, is kind of a slog. And you might get rejected a bunch of times and it feels bad, but in the past you kind of had to do it if you, like, wanted to have sex or like, experience some kind of sexual relief. But you know, for men, I think especially first, you could kind of not do it and find a bunch of guys to whine about your problems with in a forum and give you, like, an excuse not to do it because, like, women won't want you anyway, etc. Etc. Or you could just sort of watch porn, which is like, not as good as being in a relationship, but, you know, for the moment maybe suffices. It's frictionless. It's easier than doing the real thing. You know, dating gaps have made sort of the asking someone out on a date feel frictionless and can feel like kind of a substitute. Like, well, you know, I tried dating, but I didn't match with anyone. So I guess I'll give up now. Like, I'm not gonna pursue this further. I'm worried now about sort of AI and how that's going to play into it in the future as people, you know, enter into sort of emotional entanglements with these chatbots who will never, you know, tell them that they're wrong. Like, you don't really have to practice relationship skills because, like these, the bots affirm you and agree with you. Like, you don't learn how to, how to argue, how to have friction. And then women. I think I'm very interested in the rise of romanticy, what is really kind of like written softcore as a way to sort of engage romantically without putting yourself out there or this idealization of a sort of like soft detached life or bedrotting or whatever, you know, self optimization and wellness as almost in lieu of forcing yourself out there and the discomfort of other people.

[Sean Illing]

Foreign.

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[Sean Illing]

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[Christine Emba]

Software manufacturers have been allowed to develop and deliver flawed, defective, insecure software because they've prioritized speed to market and convenience all over security.

[Sean Illing]

I'm John Finer. And I'm Jake Sullivan, and we're the hosts of the Long Game, a weekly national security podcast. This week, Jen Easterly, former director of the Cyber Security and Infrastructure Security Agency, joins us on the podcast. The episode's out now. Search for and follow the Long Game wherever you get your podcasts. I really do think, Christine, if you ask the aliens on whose supercomputer, I presume our current simulation is running, if you ask them to build a social environment most likely to destroy the conditions of human connection, I feel like this is the program they would write. Now that I've just said those words out loud, do you think I sound hysterical?

[Christine Emba]

I do not think that you sound hysterical. In fact, I agree with you. And I have felt increasingly about the

[Sean Illing]

aliens or the social conditions.

[Christine Emba]

Okay, the aliens did sound a little bit crazy, I'm not gonna lie to you there. But the social conditions, like I, I have become increasingly radicalized. Not really just the Internet, but actually social media, specifically in the interaction styles that it preferences and increasingly like doesn't even preference, it just forces upon people. You know, as far as the Internet goes, I don't know that we were ever meant to have this much information at our fingertips or be in contact with this many people. And then social media and the way that it prioritizes and reifies sort of fear, anger, you know, takes you out of the real world, gives you facsimiles of the real world that you can live in. I think it's been bad. I think we, I think we made some mistakes, some big mistakes.

[Sean Illing]

Well, I mean, look, I, you know this humans have never been super great with uncertainty, but the Internet has just turned ordinary uncertainty into an endless feedback loop of analysis and insecurity. You know, it's like we've all become Dostoevsky characters or something. But all these pathologies we're talking about, I mean, do they seem genuinely new to you or maybe just a case of the Internet amplifying old anxieties?

[Christine Emba]

I think a bit of both is the right way to put it. I mean the problem of humanity, right, like the problem of being mortal has been sort of trying, trying to be seen and understood by people, trying to find connection and failing feel, feeling alone and trying to make meaning of it, et cetera, like that. We have all always felt misunderstood and not able to fully understand the world. That's the human condition. But yeah, I think that the Internet and social media and dating apps have supercharged specific aspects of that and made them feel even worse and also given them sort of outsized prominence in our day to day lives. You know, like again, I think it's the human condition to think about the future and perhaps be a little bit worried about what's coming down the pike. That's always the case, right? But today you have that and then it's like, oh, every second of the day you're going to get a news alert about how some major crisis is happening in some other country. You can't do anything about it. It might be coming for you, you don't know, but you're just going to know about it, you know, or a crisis happening in your country or some bad statistic about how bad dating is. And before, like, you know, you might have anxiety about the future and all those things might be true. But you weren't constantly being bombarded with that fact every second.

[Sean Illing]

Well, it makes you feel anxious and impotent at the same time. Not good.

[Christine Emba]

Right.

[Sean Illing]

You can't do anything about all of those terrible things, and so having it bombard your brain cannot be good. And again, all these platforms, dating apps or social media, what do they all have in common? Well, probably several things, but certainly one of them is that they monetize insecurity. Yeah, basically. And that's all that this comes. If you follow all of these things back to like the source, it's insecurity.

[Christine Emba]

Yeah.

[Sean Illing]

And to me, that's, that's. That's the beginning and the end of the thing.

[Christine Emba]

They monetize insecurity. And also they are volume plays in a. In different ways. And I think that is. I'm not sure that the human psyche has caught up to that. And so that adds to our anxiety. Like, if it's news apps, it's sort of receiving all this information that you don't know how to handle. If it's dating apps, it's seeing like the volume of people who are out there in the world not dating you or who you should be trying to talk to, but you can't. Yeah, I think that's sort of hard for people to handle, but we don't really know how to express that.

[Sean Illing]

Maybe like you said, you sort of made this whole world your beat and you think deeply about it, even spiritually. I think about it. Do you still think of yourself as just a journalist or a writer covering a beat, or is this more like a moral or religious project for you? And I mean that like in the. In the best, most good faith sense possible.

[Christine Emba]

I started out as a person, as an ideas writer, you know, because I just was sort of have a lot of questions about what is going on in the world and what people are talking about and wanted to sort of explain them to myself and in the process to other people. And I think I started writing about gender, dating, sex, because I had a lot of questions about it personally. Like, I like, was a. Am hopefully a young person, like out there in the world, living in a major urban center, like, trying to meet people of the opposite sex and feeling that things were weird in a number of different directions. And so I was writing about it kind of. I was reporting almost to like understand it myself and then in the process help other people understand it. And one of the most rewarding things about writing some of these pieces is getting feedback in the comment section from letters when I speak in Public, where people are like, oh, I thought I was the only person who felt this way or, or like I noticed this too, but I didn't know how to explain it or where it was coming from. And honestly, this beat can be kind of a bummer these days, as you can probably tell by our prior conversation. But in a certain way it does feel kind of vocational in the sense that like, maybe this is something that I'm supposed to be doing and supposed to be talking about to like, help other people make sense of their lives and like help us all try and figure out a way to sort of overcome some of these things and find that, you know, love and community and human flourishing that I believe that we're actually made for. I think, I mean religiously and also, you know, personally, I think I do think that humans were made for love and you know, connection is part of human flourishing. So I guess by reporting about this, helping people understand it, ideally maybe helping us make better decisions in the future, I think that that's like a, a service, a good that I can provide and so I should do it even, even if it kind of depresses me sometimes.

[Sean Illing]

I find this to be tragic, really. And I have enormous sympathy for Gen Z and younger generations who have been thrown into a world that is so weirdly disconnected and so shaped by shitty institutions with perverse incentive structures, it is no wonder they are the way they are. But they did not come out like this. The world they inherited made them like this. And that's not their fault. And so I just feel like that's a note on which to end, at least for me.

[Christine Emba]

I would echo that too. I think that's actually really important to say. I feel like a lot of people feel like there is something wrong with them and yeah, it's not their fault. Like the, this culture is, is bad and has become bad for human connection in ways that we didn't choose. You know, I am hopeful though that in recognizing that the culture is off, that something is off, that can give people some motivation or impetus to try and change it. And I think that the first thing that we have to start doing is, and this is very internety suggestion, just, just touching grass, just going outside and like trying, perhaps even failing to talk to people by seeking out that in person connection because everybody wants it. Like you think that people don't want it, but if you want it, someone else wants it too. And like, you don't have to be perfect, you don't have to get it right, you can just try and that's the first step.

[Sean Illing]

Amen. Do you have any projects you want to plug? Where can people find your writing?

[Christine Emba]

Yeah, so I am writing about once a month New York Times in the Opinion section. But I also have a substack that I update. It's called the Editrix and it's just christinemba.substack.com all right, right on.

[Sean Illing]

Well, it's good to to speak again. It's been a while. I enjoyed it as I knew I would. So thanks for coming in.

[Christine Emba]

Thanks for having me.

[Sean Illing]

All right, that is all. As always, we want to know what you think, so drop us a line at the gray [e-mail] or you can leave us a message on our new voicemail line at 1-800-214-5749. Once you're finished with that, please also rate Review subscribe to the Podcast It Helps Us Grow this show. This episode was produced by Thor Neuer and Beth Morrissey, who also runs the show, engineered by Shannon Mahoney and Christian Ayala. Fact Checked by Melissa Hirsch and Emma Munger wrote our theme music. Our executive producer is Miranda Kennedy. The Gray Area comes out on Mondays and Fridays. Find it wherever you listen to podcasts. If you watch podcasts while you listen, you can do that too. Go to YouTube.com Vox for video versions of the Gray Area. The show is part of Vox. Support Vox's journalism by joining our membership program today. Go to Vox.commembers to sign up. And if you decide to sign up because of this show, let us now.