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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 26, 2025

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It's not that they're unattractive, it's just that you don't know how to properly judge attractiveness in men and have a seriously distorted view of the distribution. Finn and Niko are at minimum 1 in 100 males. If you don't believe me, make a female profile on Tinder, you'll only see a man that good every hundred or two hundred swipes. In fact, you can even go on the Instagram pages of college frats and you'll find that most men are simply not on that level.

There is a difference between what men think is attractive and what women think is attractive. Women are picking up on personality cues from those photos, and whether they're correct or not, that makes or breaks the deal.

To men "Well he's tall, he's slim, he has fair hair, his face is good" is enough. To women "his hair is styled badly, his clothes are poorly put together, he looks awkward in this photo" send the signals as to whether he's confident and would be fun to spend time with, or if you'd have to listen to an hour-long lecture about maths or trains. (If you're a woman who wants to hear a lecture about maths or trains, go for it!)

Take Nikolas - he's the guy who has it all put together, he knows the image to present and that's why yeah he's successful on that app. Like I said, I would consider him fun but not long-term material, but there's no denying he'll slay. Compare him and Niko to see the difference between "good presentation".

I'm far from convinced of this - if I think about what women of my acquaintance tell me about male attractiveness, and how it syncs up with my own judgements, it certainly doesn't seem as if I'm blind to what they like.

I actually find your argument here a bit odd because it's a well-replicated finding, surely, that women care less about physical attractiveness than men do. Attitude and bearing are worth a lot more than symmetrical facial features. Women do care about appearance, but as far as I'm aware, less intensely than men do.

In this case specifically I wonder more about the algorithm. I don't know how Tinder works specifically, but I've used other dating apps before and most of them have some kind of recommendation function, where the app will suggest particular people to you. In most apps I've seen you can pay money to the app to get yourself bumped higher up the queue. So for all I know, X random man with some ridiculous number of hits is just some guy who got really lucky on the algorithm - who had the Tinder equivalent of going viral on Twitter. But you shouldn't make sweeping generalisations from a weird outlier. It's like seeing someone win the lottery and assuming that it's due to his in-born talent for personal finance. For all you know it's a combination of random chance and buying a lot of tickets.

As I said, I don't know how Tinder works specifically. I understand that Tinder is a casual hook-up app, and I have no interest in that, so I've never used it. (Though that probably also distorts the results and makes them unrepresentative of most people's romantic preferences and experiences.) I'm speculating wildly here, but I suspect no more wildly than you are.

1/100? Maybe on tinder. They look like 7-8s not >9.9s.

You're doing more to convince me of the poor quality of the median man on tinder than of some great social injustice.

I'm 80% convinced you're just a troll.

I don't see what's so outrageous about the post you replied to that you'd assume trolling. Maybe saying Finn and Niko are top percentile is hyperbole, but not crazily so.

Brand new account makes poorly supported histrionic post (and follow-ups) about a subject that inevitably will bait a certain segment of themotte to make embarrassing long-posts, immediately gets linked on rdrama.