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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   19859 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 26, 2025

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Studies consistently show that approximately 75-85% of Tinder users identify as male, while women make up only 25-15%.

Accepting these facts as true, what are all the young single women doing?

  • Do they not care about being single for the rest of their life?

  • Are they stupid and can’t comprehend cause and effect? (i.e. “If I make a Bumble profile, I am more likely to get a boyfriend”)

  • Are they slutting out? (I’m including having a Chad fwb who obviously won’t commit in this category)

  • Are they in church and expect to find a worthy man there?

  • Are they mindkilled with wokeness to the point where they fail to understand normal human behavior?

“If I make a Bumble profile, I am more likely to get a boyfriend”

I do wonder about that. How many people who are now on Bumble are looking for proper relationships, versus at the beginning? Dating apps may also be seen as the last refuge of the hopeless, or that men are using them to hook up/cheat while in relationships:

Shares in Bumble crashed 30% this month [August 2024] after a bad earnings report. Match Group, the Dallas-based owner of Tinder, Match.com, OkCupid, Hinge and others, has reported a decline in its total number of paying users, for seven straight quarters. According to Pew research, nearly half of all online daters and more than half of female daters say their experiences have been negative.

The same study found that 52% of online daters said they had come across someone they thought was trying to scam them; 57% of women said online dating is not too or not at all safe; and 85% said someone continued to contact them after they said they weren’t interested.

...Allie Volpe, Vox writer and author of a recent article advocating for finding romance offline, says her single friends in Philadelphia are burned out by online dating.

“People are sensing that it has become so impersonal, and such a numbers game, that people feel there are infinite options out there, we’re not really that nice to people on the apps any more,” Volpe says.

“People are looking for organic ways to meet each other,” she adds. Running clubs and sewing circles, for example. “At least in person you can tell them, ‘hey, I’m not interested’, but online you feel like you have no control on the other side, and they have the means to contact you, that’s kind of scary.

“It can be kind of weird on the apps to go from stranger to being potentially romantically involved immediately,” Volpe adds. “It can be jarring, and that doesn’t happen when you’re meeting somebody face to face.”

But Volpe volunteers that the situation is confusing. “The pandemic normalized the dating app experience because you couldn’t go places or meet them in a bar because they weren’t open. For gen Z, maybe their first dating experience was during the pandemic. So they’ve never dated except online, and don’t know where to go where there are people they don’t know.”

I think that the obvious missing bullet point here is "They date from their pool of IRL friends, coworkers and acquaintances, like normal people". (Church is only a special case of this.)

This may be a thing that happens, but it cannot explain the effect.

To be absolutely clear, what needs to be explained is the anomalous predominance of men on dating apps (and in the dating pool more broadly) when a naive gender-symmetrical model of monogamous pair-bonding would imply equal prevalence of men and women in such spaces when the population sex ratio is 1:1.

Pointing to the existence of even a large number of male-female pairings does not help explain the discrepancy because such pairings (should) remove one woman and one man from the dating pool, leaving the absolute discrepancy unchanged.

I think this is easy. More single men are looking to date than single women. According to a PEW study from 2020 61% of single men were looking to date vs 38% of single women. There was pretty significant age stratification for women (61% of women 18-39, 29% of women 40+) but much less so for men (67% of men 18-39, 55% of men 40+). That does not get you quite to the extreme numbers in the OP but is surely part of the explanation. Add to that young men (under 50) are much more likely to be single than young women (51-32 ages 18-29, 27-19 age 30-49).

The population of single heterosexuals might be roughly equal (PEW reports both 31% of men and women report being single) but desire to get in a relationship in that pool is not symmetrical.

‘Women less motivated because they have less agency’ doesn’t explain it?

Maybe, but all they have to do is take selfies and go, “tee-hee, I love coffee,” which I understand is what they do anyways.

If a woman is downloading an app, she's saying, "No guy in real life wants me." Or, "I don't care about being loved, I just want to fuck."

Women want to have a man fall for them naturally, just by being in her presence. Going on a dating app is admitting defeat.

Is there a big spike in female dating app usage at 35? That’s about when “admitting defeat” becomes the rational thing to do.

I'll look for any relevant stats, but it looks like women are more likely to report dissatisfaction with Dating Apps than men. (51% vs 42%) https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/02/02/key-findings-about-online-dating-in-the-u-s/

I think that's less of a thing than it used to be. Social groups/interests are more gender delineated, workplace flirtation isn't what it used to be due to the potential massive ramifications of going too hard.

I spent about a year in 2022 dating a bunch of educated, upright upper-middle class 25-35 year olds with a view to finding a wife with whom to have children. I now have wife + child, but the experience made me think that the issue is that a lot of the shyer girls just only very sparingly spend time on the market. They'll download an app for a week or two until they have a meh date or get distracted, then either find a mate or delete the proverbial app for 6 months before quarter-heartedly trying again in hopes of their Prince Charming happening to be in the first 2-3 serious conversations they strike up on the app before the next deletion.

Also these women are truly inexperienced, which means those brief forays are more likely to go anywhere since the mindset is more 'formulaic husband interview' than anything romantic. I had about 60 first dates in 2022, 50 or so of which would fit into the broad category of educated women looking for something serious with actual careers and an intent on 'settling down' and I found about half seemed to legitimately be completely inexperienced romantically.

workplace flirtation isn't what it used to be due to the potential massive ramifications of going too hard.

Notably, though, getting MeTooed for coming on too strong is rather less of a concern for women, and explaining why fewer women use dating apps is exactly what @Quantumfreakonomics wanted explained. If the workplace dating scene is hostile to men who are proactively looking for a partner, but less so to women who are doing the same thing, that fits pretty snugly with a lot more men than women turning to dating apps.

Yes but the vast majority of women are not proactive in approaching in person, so if men are unwilling to be the first to initiate interest that's going to have a large impact on the amount of inperson relationships being kindled.

I had about 60 first dates in 2022

Uh, what? Are we even talking about the same concept at this point? How does one both have the opportunity to go on 60 first dates in a year and also none of them go well enough to terminate the process? Is this some poly thing?

How does one both have the opportunity to go on 60 first dates in a year and also none of them go well enough to terminate the process?

My guess would be that women on the apps always have a better option than you. Unless you're obviously her Prince Charming on the first date, why would she bother on a second date if she's matched with five other guys in the last hour?

In my dating days I used the apps and had lots of first dates but far fewer second dates. It's possible that I was just a bad date, but then I didn't have the same issue with girls I met in real life.

Oh I'm married and with child now, having finally struck gold with the 60th but I did a ton of field anthropology along the way.

I live in a majorish metro, managed to work my way up from a 5/10 to like a 7/10 through weight loss + trial & error and essentially didn't turn down a first date with anybody who was open to get a coffee and not obviously a hard no.

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