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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 23, 2025

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I agree with your solution, but I’m going to push back a little- sex creates the expectation of romantic exclusivity, so these ladies are entitled to Chad’s undivided attention. And statistically, most average women are in a relationship with average men.

Now, it does seem true that the floor beneath which most pick ‘pass’ is lower for women(or should I say higher, considering how much of it is driven by BMI). But 80% of women competing for 60% of men isn’t what you’re describing.

I agree with your solution, but I’m going to push back a little- sex creates the expectation of romantic exclusivity, so these ladies are entitled to Chad’s undivided attention.

I think that both Chad and the women would agree on that, they just differ on the time frame. In most cases, the women are not starry-eyed virgins who believe that sleeping with a man they just met will create a relationship which will last until death doth part them. They likely had some previous sexual relationships which did not last, so they have enough data to establish a baseline. They might also have been wooed by a PUA before, in which case they would have excellent real world data on the long term prospects of a relationship beginning with sex on the first date. Chad's idea of the time horizon might be more like refraining from swiping on tinder until the post-coital cuddling.

And statistically, most average women are in a relationship with average men.

The problem here is selection bias. You might be correct that the average case is an average man and an average woman happily forever (or until the man replaces his wife with a younger model 15 years down the road, or the woman dumps her husband after he gets burnout). But this majority is unlikely to star in the drama described above very often.

or should I say higher, considering how much of it is driven by BMI

My ad-hoc model of partner selection would have two scales. One is a rather absolute scale, e.g. "Would your evolutionary programming tell you to forgo sex for years if this one was the only possible partner?"

The other is relative. "How does sleeping with that person affect your status in your group?"

Unsurprisingly, I think that men are mostly filtering on the absolute scale and women are mostly filtering on a relative scale.

As a thought experiment, consider a group of people of one gender partying. One of them is hitting it off with a person of the opposite gender who has a much lower SMV than the group, say overweight, and they leave the party together. The next day, they meet with their group, and are teased about the night. The group member says "oh yeah, we ended up banging, turns they are really great at oral sex".

If the group is male, my expectation of the response would be something like "congrats on getting laid, bro", with some more mild teasing.

If the group was female, my expectation of the response would be "that bottom-feeder will literally fuck any man with a pulse".

As a corollary, I think that giving all the overweight incels GLP-1 antagonists and bringing them to normal weight will not help them much getting into relationships. Their SMV is a result of their relative status, and while some fraction of women prefer (as in "revealed preference") to share a smaller group of hotter men, there will be an imbalance.

Sex used to create the expectation of romantic exclusivity, but we kind of bulldozed those expectations. If you want that, make it a condition of having sex with the guy (and if he doesn’t want that, move on).