For nearly 50 years, Americans lived in a stand-off with Soviet Russia called “Mutually Assured Destruction” or MAD: When the bombs started flying, we all knew that neither we nor the Soviets would come out alive. While we’re no longer forced into that state of hateful paranoia, it seems we’ve found new ways to inflict it on ourselves. Modern online dating has effectively become an arms race between the sexes, and the stakes are just as existential.

Modern online dating makes authentic connection harder than ever to find. Enter the Tea app, which gives women a platform to anonymously share personal information about men they’ve dated. Ostensibly, it is designed to root out cheating, “catfishing,” and other red flags, in order to keep women safe in the digital dating world. But far from the nonproliferation pact sorely needed in modern dating, the app has made things much worse.

Tea gained new notoriety after becoming the top app on Apple’s App Store last week. It quickly found itself in the crosshairs of anonymous hackers, who released the images and identities of tens of thousands of users, to the mockery of (mostly men) online. It’s certainly a privacy violation, immoral if not illegal—but it’s also the inevitable ratcheting effect in the MAD of modern dating.

The app is modeled on the many “Are We Dating the Same Guy?” Facebook groups, which popped up locally over the last several years. With lawsuits piling up across the country, the these groups are frequently used for nefarious aims, not just for keeping women safe. In some cases, they help uncover genuine foul play; in many others, they host cruel and highly subjective gossip about the men that the female users dated. In extreme cases, the gossip of these disgruntled women daters has spilled into the real world, prompting defamation suits from men who have seen their careers and reputations derailed by what they maintain are false accusations.

The hack of the Tea app has, ironically, evened the playing field, giving men access to the details of women who have been anonymously casting aspersions on them behind their backs.

The Tea app has enabled the worst of modern feminism: the idea that men are de facto abusers and exploiters until proven otherwise, and that millennial girl bosses—raised on a steady diet Disney princesses and careerism—deserve to “have it all,” regardless of what they personally bring to the table. The result, as the hack shows, is giving the most obnoxious voices of both sexes a soapbox to set the terms of online dating, at the expense of every normal, well-meaning person.

Tea empowers a certain kind of woman, the true believer in this feminist credo who can find both sympathy and retribution for her perceived slights as she lives out a revenge fantasy online. She’s the loudest voice (and the scariest when it comes to potential abuse), so she sets the tone of the discourse. The casual Tea user—say, a wife who suspects her husband might be cheating—unwittingly gets sucked in, falsely believing that heightened abuse and deception are the new norms of modern dating.

In turn, this empowers the most disillusioned men to set new terms on their end. The hack, undoubtedly born of self-righteous resentment as well, reflects a sort of anti-feminist misogyny—one that holds that all women are too hateful to deserve a loving partner, that dating itself is too risky considering the possibility of a life-ruining accusation when in the end, and believes all sincere women are probably just wasting your time anyway.

Dozens of X posts have gone viral since the hack, sharing unflattering hacked photos of Tea users with some snarky iteration of “These are the women calling you an incel loser” as the caption. There’s even a website devoted to allowing men to rate the hacked Tea users’ profiles. As the loudest, most slighted male voices mock everything from these ladies’ expectations to their appearance, they reinforce an equally dismal view from the female side of the dating pool. And with major lawsuits against Tea already looming over “data breaches caused by inadequate security measures,” there’s sure to be even more scrutiny in the public eye.

What we’re left with is a stalemate, the good lumped in with the bad, and guys and gals both thinking the worst of each other—making the necessary trust of an earnest connection even harder to come by.

For all the liberal handwringing over the last 80 years, MAD has been a generally good thing when it comes to foreign relations. Arms parity prevented the two opposing sides of the Cold War, mortal enemies locked in an irreconcilable ideological battle, from engaging in exchanges that were obviously stupid, dangerous, or escalatory. It prevented nuclear holocaust, and to this day, keeps the world relatively peaceful. Enemies can only go so far when destruction is mutually assured.

But does this apply to the dating wars? Isn’t a dating stalemate a welcome development? No—because men and women are not supposed to be mortal enemies. In fact, the two sexes are the most reconcilable foundation of the natural world.

MAD might constrain enemies, but it’s no basis for building a personal connection or a fulfilling life with another person. Thinking otherwise only creates an intractable roadblock to family formation.

Whatever the dominant narrative, the truth is that serial abusers are not a majority, a plurality, or even sizable cohort of the male population, just as most women are not turbo-lib radicals champing at the bit to lodge a false rape accusation. And though we live in a transactional age of digital dating and hook-ups, most men and women ultimately want the same thing long-term: a happy, healthy, and fulfilling relationship. If we continue down the path of MAD, the only alternative is more of the same: marriage rates, family formation, and social cohesion plummeting even more than they already have. In other words, civilizational destruction.

The only answer is for the sexes to mutually lay down their arms. How we get there is another question entirely. Let’s just hope we can find better negotiators than the last five decades of nonproliferation agreements have given us.