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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 26, 2025

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That's about how it works when men rate women.

Not the case when women rate men.

I think women do judge men more harshly when it's based on photos, because women are accustomed to "this is how you must look to be attractive in a photo" while men seem to go "I combed my hair, that's good, right?"

First impressions are unkind, but if you're trawling through hundreds of images, things that are small flaws in themselves build up to make choices harder.

I think women do judge men more harshly when it's based on photos, because women are accustomed to "this is how you must look to be attractive in a photo" while men seem to go "I combed my hair, that's good, right?"

I agree. There's a joke that every other man has a profile picture with a fish because that's the only time when a guy asks his friends to take a picture of him. Women are generally more aware of their appearance and asking a friend to take a picture of you just because you look cute or hot right now is perfectly normal.

If a guy tells his friend, "hey, it's overcast and windy today, go get your camera, let's put sport coats on, style our hair and hit the pier, we can take moody pictures of each other and attract girls who are into dark academia by posting them on our Tinder profiles," they will both agree that this activity is both fake and gay, even though it totally works.

Yep.

The whole problem with apps is they've all converged on the "Swipe through cards endlessly" model rather than letting you target in on people you actually think would be a good match (how OKCupid used to work). Plus gamification algorithms.

My last foray into the apps, I FELT myself dehumanizing the people in the photos more as I went. You see 150 different profiles in like an hour, and you get very critical of even small flaws.

There's also the argument that men look better in motion since women like seeing men do things. So a dating app that let men post 5-10 second videos of themselves, e.g. playing guitar, rock climbing, playing tennis to showcase a skill would probably even things out a bit in the attractiveness field.

Have to assume the app companies don't want to deal with policing the content of millions of videos, though.

Have to assume the app companies don't want to deal with policing the content of millions of videos, though.

Social media companies already do this, YT does this, it's not an unsolved/unsolvable problem.

Making a dating app that works isn't an unsolvable problem, OKCupid was pretty effective back in the day.

They abandoned the hell out of that though.

If it would cost them more money and make it less likely people stay on the apps indefinitely, I can't see why they'd implement the feature.

Sure, but the number of videos on YouTube with nudity is less than every other video.

policing the content of millions of videos

so yeah heres me playing my guitar AND THEN I PULL MY GIANT DICK OUT WOOOO