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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   12223 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 26, 2025

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So much clueless discourse and blathering on here really makes me think that a lot of people here have rather interestingly false conceptions of the gap between them and an attractive man in terms of dating success. That's not to speak of the absolutely massive gap between the average man and the average woman that I think could do with some amount of rectification though the use of a couple particularly pertinent examples. In short-- the average man i.e a guy who would probably get rated a 6 or 7 by most people is virtually invisible to women online to a degree that's frankly quite horrific when you compare it to the experience of an attractive man. The average guy could probably expect to reasonably manage about 5 to 10 likes a day, probably dropping off to less than that after the first week, with maybe a couple matches a week and perhaps 1 out of 50 matches actually converting to a date and an even smaller proportion converting to anything more significant than that. That doesn't sound too bad, right?

The thing is, an attractive man isn't just getting say 10% more matches, or even just doubling their matches. The amount of attention they get from women usually dwarfs the average male by several orders of magnitude. The top profiles on Tinder, Hinge, Bumble, are maxing out the like counter in give or take under an hour, the rungs below that with ease in under a day and so on and so forth. There are plenty of men who are not rich, not famous, not exceptional in any way really other than the face God gave them and perhaps the muscles Trenbolone gave them (though if you're thinking steroids alone will make you one of these men, you're living in a world of delusion-- women want the complete package) breaking 20,000 matches in relatively modest sized metro areas like Copenhagen, Stockholm or Denver. I should probably note that these profiles are typically white men though, as funnily enough even here racial gaps manifest, though this is frankly a matter of degrees, as even these disadvantaged attractive men of color are usually not lacking for women-- but it's going to be generally significantly less attractive and desirable women and they'll have to be a point or two better than their white counterpart to compete. These men have such an abundance of choice and easy access to women that they effectively dwell in a completely separate reality when compared to the average man-- they are the pickers and choosers and have no desperate need to compromise or settle down with one woman. Think of the gap between a man with 70 IQ and a man with 160 IQ in terms of capacity for intellectual output and perhaps multiply that gap a few times and you'll have a somewhat decent grasp of the dynamic in play here.

No amount of game or self improvement will ever get you close to that if you lack the genetic basis for it. It's like thinking a 70 IQ man can become a world class physicist and win the Nobel prize if he just tried hard enough-- the world doesn't work that way.

It's well known that attractive women have their pick of the litter, but I'll just add in that a woman need not be particularly attractive to be bombarded with options. The average girl you see on the street could open any dating app and find literal thousands of men throwing themselves at her within a day, maybe two or three if she's a bit ungifted in the face. Though as with attractive men, there's a pretty big gap between the kinds and amount of attention that white women get, and every other race of woman, including Asian women (of the northeastern and southern varieties) and having blue or green eyes supercharges this a surprising amount.

Here's an album of proof

  • -12

Okay, but who is using ‘dating’ apps?

Studies consistently show that approximately 75-85% of Tinder users identify as male, while women make up only 25-15%. In some regions, the disparity is even more pronounced, with ratios as high as 91:9 in Italy.

Even these numbers overestimate the actual percentage of female tinder users who would be willing to hook up with a man from the app, since a substantial percentage of tinder’s women users just do it to get some easy attention and never meet up with anyone from the app at all (whereas almost every man who uses it would probably be willing to hook up with an attractive woman he met on it).

So in reality, what do dating app statistics tell us?

They tell us that a substantial percentage of the male population is competing on the apps to have casual sex with the ~15% most promiscuous women, who as a result have their pick of the men. Given that this 15% run the gamut of hotness, that means maybe 4% or fewer of women are both attractive and open to casual sex with random men from dating apps.

This results in the genre of ‘sad tinder despair’ male posts. It also explains how most men who rack up high body counts (and aren’t celebrities, famous athletes or male models) are usually hooking up with less attractive women.

This does not tell us much about the dating habits of the vast majority of women. The kindergarten teacher whose hobbies are crochet and collecting Disney memorabilia who is far too shy to meet a man off the apps (and far too insecure to create a profile at all) is not fucking a new guy off Hinge every week. The average man never even encounters this kind of woman except maybe in passing.

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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