>I guarantee that only about one in five male clubbers were truly "only there for the music". Maybe fewer than that.

Clubs aren't really raves though. Yes, most single people going to clubs are looking to hook up - all a "club" really is, is a bar with a DJ. A real rave typically doesn't even sell alcohol. But I'd wager that most single people going to actual raves (in warehouses or outdoors) are either too high to even think about hooking up, or really are there for the music and to dance - at least through the 1990's and early 2000s. I'm in the latter group, I'm a guy who went to raves (in warehouses and outdoors) for the music, as did everyone else I knew. Nobody was trying to hook up, it was definitely about getting our dance on.

The risks are called living your life – there is a inherent risk with traveling, hiking, wandering around as a kid, and almost any activity outside of staring at a screen.

I said by today's standards.. women going home with some random guy without anyone even having a phone number for them. No mobiles, no net, no nothing.

And in most cases that worked out fine, but today people would think it insane to even suggest that.

The enormous amount of fear that has been injected into society, seemingly permanently, disguised as "safety" (i.e. framing a negative as a positive) is one of, or perhaps THE, the most detrimental factors to the health of that society, and is actively harming the development of people growing up within it.

That's for a few reasons.

999 good or OK outcomes and 1 bad one can still be overall pretty damn bad, when scaled up to the level of a society. It becomes a Something Must Be Done scenario pretty quick.

And I suspect in this specific case, the ratio of bad experiences.. maybe not terrible, but just bad.. was a lot higher than 1 in 1000.

I mean, the flip side of that is, going home with a stranger in a big city is pretty much a total historical anomaly before the 60s sexual revolution (because of smaller communities as well as more conservative sexual attitudes), maybe some of it is just the pendulum swinging back.

I disagree. A few of those 999 hookups will result in marriages and families. Others in relationships. This is arguably the whole point of society, to engage with other people, to be in relationships, to reproduce. What we see now, largely due to unrelenting fear (again, disguised as "safety"), is unhappiness, isolation, loneliness, depression and mental illness all dramatically increasing. This is not a coincidence.

That's true if the only alternative to hooking up with randoms in a bar is staying home.

Same as, until the Jet Age, the only alternative to risky world travel by land and sea was to stay home.. and then we invented jet airliners, which made travel multiple orders of magnitude safer than the Age of Sail.

I'm a neutral observer on this tbh, never had anything against bar culture at the time, but if you were a 19yr old weighing up your options today, online dating looks like the same potential reward without all sorts of down sides. Not just the personal safety stuff, but as a guy not having to run the gauntlet of approaching women and getting shot down (no big deal really, but cultural shifts now frown upon asking at all, whereas it used to be more a case of.. ask away, the important thing was to respect it if you got told no).

The flip side is that online dating results in a much more publicly conservative culture, where even merely flirting is at risk of being reframed as sexual misconduct, people have thinner skins and lower tolerance generally because they've never had to develop a thick skin, it takes some of the beautiful chaos out of the world.. people didn't go about the place constantly looking to hook up (well, maybe some did) but the very possibility added something to the atmosphere, even if the probability was low.

And on the subject of beautiful chaos. Take a look at video footage from major rock, pop and dance concerts/festivals from 2000 ish and today. Watch the crowds, look at their facial expressions, energy level, state of mind.

Something is up with that, right?

Life is much safer now so mundane relative risks look much worse. When illness or famine lurks a every corner, no one is questioning a kid venturing 3 miles on his bike to buy mom a pack of smokes and buy himself some Cracker Jacks. Now you're considered Satan if you allow that and some prosecutor will ramble about predators and kidnapping at your trial.

That's you not "people" who think that's insane by today's standard.

Poor women, dressing up to get attention and then getting attention.

If this is sarcastic and you mean the opposite, then I think that you don't have empathy for women receiving unwanted attention because you yourself never received unwanted attention and that is sad and I empathize with that feeling of sadness and shame. I think you should reconsider some parts of your belief system if it prompts such a thought that breaks through to be written in a comment for others to consume.

I think most women are aware that if they go to a nightclub and wear their most attractive outfit, they will receive a lot of attention. And yes, if you receive a lot of attention, some of that will be unwanted. Adults realize that and deal with it.

Don't confuse empathy with treating people like idiots or children and putting them into positions of victims.

I have received unwanted attention in the past. I didn't cry about it because shit happens.

There's unwanted "I wasn't interested in that person, next", and there's unwanted "this is a potentially dangerous and scary situation". On the surface, it's unhelpful to lump the two in together.

But the line between 1 and 2 is fuzzier for women than for men, hence the "choose the bear" meme. I've received unwanted attention but never felt remotely threatened or endangered by it, you won't hear that from many women though.

And further. When basically everyone had to play the game, the proportion of actual bad actors was small. Lots of "meh, no thanks, next", not much hassle or danger. However. When a lot of milder actors take themselves out of the pool voluntarily (online being satisfactory, or something like that) you end up with a worse ratio. Basically if fewer guys are approaching women full stop, the ones that do are more likely to be trouble of one kind or another.

Having been to raves, another issue you run into if you go there to meet people is that the kind of people who will hook up at raves probably don't want anything serious. It's a super hedonistic environment. If you want more than a one night stand any other form of dating is better.

Yes - sitting at home and looking for companionship on an app is better than leaving the house, interacting with other people, dancing, laughing, singing, making lifelong memories ::eyeroll::

It's not a choice between going to raves or staying at home and using apps. There are other options.