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I was catching up on the quality contribution threads for last month (yes, I'm very late...) and I ran across this post from @Amadan.
I found this part specifically was interesting in the broader context of the discussion:
One of these things is not like the other.
For men:
For women:
Is it just me or is this scale a bit tilted?
(Apologies for responding so late and in a top-level comment; I didn't want this getting buried in a weeks old thread.)
There seems to be a slippery equivalence being drawn between a market being tilted, and it theoretically being easier to do abc than to do xyz. Strictly speaking, these things are unrelated. We have had this discussion before
To summarize:
@faceh contended that there were about one million American women who met the criteria he considered marriageable: Single and looking (of course). Cishet, and thus not LGBT identified. Not ‘obese.’ Not a mother already. No ‘acute’ mental illness. No STI. Less than $50,000 in student loan debt. 5 or fewer sex partners (‘bodies’). Under age 30. Therefore there aren't enough good women for all the men.
I countered that there were approximately 617,000 American men under 40 meet all these specified criteria: Single, Earning at least $65,000 annually, No felony convictions, Exercise at least once a week, Attend religious services at least once a month, Have not used drugs other than marijuana in the past year, Not classified as alcohol dependent. Therefore, there aren't nearly enough good men for even that small number of women.
I picked 65k because it's about what you could make as a Cop/Teacher, or a forklift operator at a local warehouse that's always putting up billboards for workers if you pick up a little overtime. Quite simply, I have trouble caring about the sexual outcomes of men who fall below the standard where they could reasonably become a cop, teacher, or forklift operator. Those are people who are always, throughout history, going to have to accept substandard outcomes.
Now you can look at it in terms of ease of doing ABC vs XYZ, and say that women don't have to do anything to achieve most of their standards. The female standards Faceh set were mostly of the negative variety. Don't sleep with anyone, don't eat too much, don't get into debt, don't get too old before you find a man. While the male standards I set were mostly active and positive: go to church, workout, get a decent full time job. So it is reasonable to argue that women have it easier in a sense. But frankly, I find it easier to lift weights than I find it not to eat Oreos. And I would find it infinitely easier to get a job at the local PD than I would to be "agreeable and submissive" to some of you chuckleheads.
Regardless of the overall market, it's not actually hard for an individual man to tilt the market in his favor. The vast majority of people might be unfuckable, but you don't have to fuck them. If you get your life together as a young man, you will be fine in the dating market, it will very quickly be tilted in your favor and not hers.
I think that sounds correct on paper but it's wrong in reality. These young man that have their life together have marketing/distribution problem. Once you're out of college, and most men don't go to college at all so that opportunity ends for them even earlier when they finish highschool, they are just not naturally exposed to enough women. Their job is probably male dominated, and even if it isn't they are unlikely to make moves on their coworkers anyway. Their hobbies are male dominated too, so chance of meeting someone there is low. Social drinking, going to bars, clubbing is not in anymore, so they don't do that often enough either. So what's left? Dating apps - select for top 10% men by appearance, even if you're decent looking, your failure rate will be high, you need to put effort into your profile, need to have some social skills and understand what you're doing. What else is there? Cold approach? Purposefully seeking out female dominated hobbies? Church (be for real)?
There's a specific type of content that occasionally goes viral on social media. It's a woman posting pictures of her (usually average-to-slightly-above-average in looks) male friend with captions like "Look at my friend MOST_AVERAGE_MALE_NAME. He's such a good person, he is a DECENT_MIDDLE-TO-UPPER_CLASS_JOB, likes to SOCIALLY_APPROVED_MALE_HOBBY, loves traveling, has an adorable CUTE_NONTHREATENING_DOG_BREED named Archie and he's SINGLE AND LOOKING FOR A GIRLFRIEND" and the post goes viral, women are surprised how such a good guy doesn't have a girlfriend and are asking how to get in contact with him. Men that come across such posts often ask why she (the girl that posted this) doesn't get with him and usually he's either in deep friendzone or she already has a boyfriend, but that's besides the point. I don't know the success rate of this type of attempt at matchmaking, but I'm certain it's better than such dude trying his luck on hinge. My point is this - in the current environment, men like this just disappear off the radar unless they actively put in effort to get seen, but it's pretty much a part time job for most unless they get lucky and pair up with someone quick.
Isn't the overall situation more or less similar for women though?
I think it's more or less similar, but not entirely. Women are more socially oriented, so it's more likely for them to have a network that would eventually produce some potential candidates. Women's hobbies are also more social and communal compared to men. They are more likely to get approached in the wild (although I heard this is rare these days, I guess it depends on one's attractiveness). Social media is also a strong source - men slide in DMs with zero shame. So there's a chance for a woman to be completely passive in her pursuit of a relationship and still get opportunities. I'm sure there's plenty of women out there that just bedrot after work, women have higher screen time than men after all, which would put them in a very similar predicament as men. But just posting a reel or two on IG would expand her dating opportunities far more than anything an average man could do.
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Very fair summary and counter. I will not relitigate anything but this:
It has of course recently been discussed (at long last) just how hard the deck was stacked against young men over the last 15 years.
https://www.compactmag.com/article/the-lost-generation/
Motte Discussion Here
So I simply point out that the things guys are supposed to achieve to make THEM seem marriageable are dangled further out of reach of many of them based on nothing but their gender and color of their skin. They are not imposing these restrictions on themselves.
Whereas, as I point out on occasion, literally every change in gender-based policy in the U.S. for the past 50 years has been in favor of women. It has put more of them in education, the workplace, and granted them outsized political power. (this also has NOT made them any happier).
So these men are expected to work harder than ever just to overcome the systemic bias, with the reward of pulling from a pool of women who are less appealing than ever, whilst the entire legal/economic edifice of their country is trying to slow them down.
So I think it is absolutely hard for an individual man to tilt the market in his favor unless he he lucked out in rolling his stats to have high charisma, rich parents, and good genes for height/aesthetics.
"Get your life together" is one hell of a lift for, I'd say, 60% of young men, especially because it'll take like 5+ years of solid work to hit the point where they'd be noticeable as a potential partner, and even then its not a guarantee.
And this shows up in the fact that many men just opt out of dating rather than accept constant psychological damage they're powerless to change.
Noticing that tendency is pretty much why I'm not in any kind of corporate work today. Because I figured there was a quota system in place and I didn't much want to find myself participating in it at the wrong moment. Today, of course, it could just as well be the opposite, but I don't want to be at the mercy of the wheel.
But this very much didn't stop me from achieving the goal of making a decent living.
Most advice that revolves around either women or men just losing the weight or just putting in more work or just settling for what they can get falls into the fundamental problem that everyone has never just and they won't do it tomorrow either.
I just don't like seeing my people blackpill.
The huge irony is that my boss is a woman, and my workplace overall is slanted towards female employees. But since she's an utterly remorseless businesswoman who grinds it out in the trenches alongside her employees, she is EASILY the most meritocratic employer I've ever worked for.
I don't rock the boat politically (thanks to having an outlet here, I suppose), I put in the work and bring in the cash, I keep my personal life separate enough that it rarely bleeds over.
My friends in White Collar corporate jobs seem to be navigating byzantine labyrinths where the goals are ever-shifting, the ability to progress uncertain, and the actual rules for personal conduct are opaque in places. Loyalty doesn't exist, of course. Thankful to have avoided that for most of my life.
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Yeah, when I worked in corporate America, I noticed that women at my level got significantly better treatment and better opportunities than men. It's funny because women are constantly told (and seem to believe) that they must perform much better than men in order to keep up with them, but this claim is about as wrong as wrong can be. (Of course blacks were in a different world completely.)
One of the great things about quitting and starting my own business was that this totally flipped the script. I sold my services directly to customers who could be as racist and sexist as they wanted. Being a white man was suddenly an advantage.
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Your daily reminder that countries other than America exist.
The collapse in coupling is a global phenomenon, it's happening everywhere. America went crazy with race and sex discrimination during the Great Awokening, but basically nowhere else did. Even in the UK, there was nothing like what was detailed in the Compact piece. Wokeness was always mostly an Anglo phenomenon.
The second article you link highlights the real issue. It's the phones (where phones are a stand-in for atomised, digital, addiction-driven daily life).
My personal thesis is that its the algorithms, not explicitly the phones (obviously the phones are a prerequisite).
Early Facebook was fine. It was a chronological feed consisting solely of what your friends posted.
Early online dating was also fine. You could navigate and search out people you thought were compatible, message them directly.
The rise of curation via opaque algos is when we saw things shift towards optimizing attention, ad dollars, and ragebait and brainrot. And in dating they removed the ability to filter directly and just gameified it and blew up the 'organic' nature of the environment entirely.
This is reaching an apotheosis now with gambling integrated in everything we do.
Twitter/X just open-sourced their algorithm, and I've been seeing people pointing out some of the direct factors in there that would lead to 'toxic' feedback loops and demolition of organic communities.
Have to assume its the same on every other site, too.
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A lot of that article was for a relatively thin slice of upper middle class men looking to make it in creative professions. So yes, if you were a straight while male who wanted to be a literature professor or TV writer over the last decade it was very unfair toward you. I don’t know that the average American, especially blue collar, saw the same pressure.
Still talking about white collar work, but pretty much any corporate or government job faced some of the same pressures.
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I think there's a (relatively thin) slice of Blue Collar skilled professional who has made out extremely well due to a relative dearth of competition for a smorgasbord of work in the trades. Lot of dudes getting rich off working in oil fields or, more recently, Data Center construction.
But... we can't ignore the immigration surge exerting pressure on e.g. construction work, trucking, unskilled trades.
So different pressures... but still impact that would fall primarily on males. And still arguably coming from the same source (political favortism for groups other than white males).
Anyhow, they're still struggling on the partnership front.
https://wng.org/roundups/study-shows-working-class-men-arent-getting-married-1749503094
Arent getting married or arent acquiring partners? These are, especially since the rise of cohabitation, different things.
If they're younger guys, its not acquiring partners at all.
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I feel like a lot of these population-level filtering attempts fail to capture the correlation between factors and therefore exacerbate the scarcity of certain attributes.
Fermi estimates are the best we can do for now.
But when you START with the fact that 40% of women are obese, you've already shrunk the pool considerably, and every criteria you add shrinks it further, you start to see the shape of the problem.
(Yes, about the same % of men are also obese. There's research that obese men are fine settling for obese women but the reverse is not true. This is borne out by my personal observations.)
Then you get the spike in mental illnesses, the increasing amounts of debt held by women, the spike in LGBT identification, the increase in sexual partners (I'd wager this is anti-correlated with obesity but who knows), and the decreased prioritization of marriage and you can visualize how each of these is narrowing the non-obese pool significantly.
Even if the error bars are pretty huge, I have little problem believing <10% of single women out there are really 'appealing' as partners.
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I don't really think the math works out the way either my good buddy @faceh has it or the way I do, chatgpt and grok estimates are garbage, my purpose in the example was using the same tools to show contrary results.
In reality men and women don't filter by these nice lists of attributes. "Don't ask fish how to catch them" and all that jazz. Men for the most part aren't really looking for chaste, demure, young, uneducated virgins to marry in two months; the few that are often have little trouble finding them at church or in high school.
I'd argue online dating actually makes it more practical to hard filter by attributes like this, which is why people aren't forming relationships as much. They're not placing themselves in the position to have chemistry override quibbles at the rate that prior eras did. People are inherently fungible and easily replaced on apps, you can even literally filter for a lot of these attributes on major apps and just not see people who don't meet your criteria.
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