Dupe culture is the limitless internet-enabled ability to find a cheaper copy of whatever you actually want. It's spread from fashion to food, guitars to vacations — someone even marketed a different Greek island as a 'Santorini dupe.' And the social stigma around buying fakes has essentially vanished.
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Mia Sato, senior reporter at The Verge, joins and immediately stakes a claim: there are more dupes right now than at any point in human history. She defines dupe culture as the internet-enabled ability to find a cheaper, lookalike alternative to anything you want — and illustrates just how far this has spread. There are Lululemon dupe leggings saving shoppers $423 on Amazon. There's the Walmart 'Workin'' — a $50 take on the Hermès Birkin, which typically sells for tens of thousands. There are dupe pots, dupe lip glosses, dupe Doritos, dupe recipes for Outback Steakhouse spinach dip. Someone even marketed a different Greek island as a 'Santorini dupe.' The social shame is gone. What was once seedy or black-market is now a consumer lifestyle, carefully calibrated to stay just inside the line of trademark and copyright.
A consumer creator on social media claimed to have saved $423 by purchasing Amazon Lululemon dupe leggings instead of the originals.
A Walmart dupe of the Hermès Birkin bag — costing tens of thousands of dollars — was sold for around $50 and nicknamed the 'Workin'.'
Dupe discovery has been baked directly into the platforms people already use. Amazon's AI lets you describe a product in text and generates an image to find matches. TikTok highlights products in any paused video. Dupe.com reverse-searches any product URL. Finding a cheaper lookalike is now a two-second task.
Social media feeds men and women the absolute worst caricatures of each other while stripping away the everyday, imperfect relationships that would calibrate their expectations. Combine that with smaller families and fewer cross-sex friendships, and you get a generation that talks about the opposite sex constantly but almost never to them.
The 'would you rather be alone with a man or a bear' debate went viral not because men are objectively more dangerous than ever, but because an entire fear industrial complex of influencers and safety products had already primed women to feel that way. Once the algorithm identifies you as worried about personal safety, the content and the scrunchie drink-covers never stop.
Women feel less safe not because danger has increased, but because trust in institutions — police, churches, schools — that used to enforce safety norms has collapsed. Young women are far less likely than older women to believe those institutions will handle sexual assault responsibly, leaving them with only individual self-protection as a fallback.
Even self-identified feminist women consistently told Daniel Cox in interviews and surveys that they want men to open doors, pay for dates, and show demonstrable care. The internet noise around 'benevolent sexism' drowns out this widespread, quietly held preference.
In focus groups in Philadelphia and Raleigh, every single hand went up when participants were asked if parents discussed financial stability and education. Zero hands went up for marriage or parenthood. Parents are shaping their children's ambitions with total silence on the experiences that matter most.
American families are smaller than ever, with roughly 1 in 5 children now growing up as only children. Without the daily friction of siblings — shared bedrooms, shared bathrooms, resolving disagreements — young people enter adult relationships without the negotiation muscles relationships require.
Online dating optimises for your existing preferences rather than expanding your horizons. People who meet online give bad first dates almost no second chances; people who meet through mutual friends are far more forgiving. The disembodied, checklist-driven nature of apps removes all the social cues that actually reveal character.
A split-sample survey found that men judge male and female cheating identically harshly, and women judge male cheating the same way men do. The outlier: young women are dramatically less likely to call female infidelity morally wrong, suggesting shared-fate thinking and personal experience of being cheated on are reshaping the moral calculus.
The monk mode trend encourages men to withdraw from social life to work on themselves — but this is precisely backwards. The research is clear: close friendships are the single most powerful predictor of whether a man dates, commits, and becomes his best self. Self-improvement without social reintegration is just sophisticated avoidance.
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