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This comment seems to echo the fantasy among some dateless conservatives that if only they were born in some bygone era where women didn't have nearly as many options then they'd surely get a girlfriend almost by default. I hate to break it to you, but if you can't get a date now, you weren't getting a date then. And I suspect that these guys never once consider that they're being just as selective as the women they're criticizing. I grew up in the Mon Valley, an area that's not exactly hot at the moment. If anyone here is seriously interested in getting married to a woman who is young enough to have a lot of children and doesn't mind staying home and not working, DM me and I will be glad to take them to the kind of bar where their chances of meeting an overweight, chain-smoking phlebotomy school dropout who's willing to date them are nearly 100%. Hell, you don't even need a good job; a steady, decent job is more than enough, considering most of the guys these women date are the kind of guys who quit because they got into an argument with their boss. Where I'm from these girls are a dime a dozen.
If this is true you have a golden business opportunity starting a matchmaking business for overworked SF nerds with more money than sense. But my experience talking to people who do this kind of thing is that even those kinds of women have become unreasonably picky.
They found a solution
I naively would have thought some significant minority of them would go for all the transwomen we work with. As best I can tell no one does. It must be more than zero, but so low I somehow don't notice. I certainly notice all the asian wives and half-asian kids.
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I don't think SF nerds are thrilled about:
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This seems directly contradicted by the various attempts at measuring the frequency of baseline human relationships. My understanding is number of friendships, number of relationships, number of sexual partners, number of marriages, number of young people who've never had sex, age of first sexual relationship and so on are all trending in the same direction, and the trend is not a subtle one. If significantly more people are actually spending their lives alone than previously, it doesn't seem possible to me that this part of your argument stands.
The odds are good but the goods are odd part, though, seems perfectly accurate.
Why would the existence of undatable people in every era imply that their frequency must remain constant over time? That's true if datability is entirely genetic or if it's strictly relative (e.g. datability = being in the top 70% [or whatever]). But if animal courtship rituals involve complex, learned social behavior, then you could easily have cultural and environmental shifts that would reduce the number of people with the social ability to do courting effectively, regardless of their motivation or desire.
For instance, it strikes me that in every era, when you see intelligent young people who grew up like Extremely Online young men today (that is: indulged but also isolated, mostly sedentary life between school and home, 0-2 siblings under the care of a pampering mom or nanny, pressured to study hard with no economic constraints well through their early 20s, socializing largely virtually or in adult-controlled spaces, allowed to pursue status by developing obsessive, frivolous solitary or same-sex hobbies) - the introverted ones also commonly end up unpartnered or childless and a little eccentric. That's the H.P. Lovecraft story and it seems like practically the median trajectory for Gilded Age scions especially, but you can find instances all through history and across cultures.
So as more people are raised like this, you'd expect the ranks of the undatable to grow over time, assuming that some level of charisma or social confidence are necessary to inciting female desire in the absence of countervailing factors. It's just the "zoo animals can't mate in captivity" or the "my dog doesn't get along with other dogs" problem.
My understanding of the claim was that the proportion of undateable people wasn't changing:
If the proportion of undateable people is increasing, then it's entirely possible that if you can't get a date now, you could have gotten a date before. That's what it means for the proportion of undateable people to increase.
Right, but OP was specifically critiquing
The point of the trad dating vision, at least as I understand, is not "If only it were The Past, I could have become a more socially adept man, then they'd want to date me." Instead, it's "if only it were The Past, I could have access to more desperate women, then they'd have to date me."
And I think that latter claim is wrong: women's standards are variable above a certain threshold, but there's also a hard limit of interpersonal function below which instinct just says it's better to go it alone.
The parallel question is also interesting to investigate for heterosexual male desire. For instance, if every woman (including every woman in porn) suddenly weighed 4x more, what proportion of men would just opt for permanent singledom? Would any?
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