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First, thanks for such a thoughtful response! I do think we’re on exactly the same page through “dating = matching market,” and I need to think more about that lw page you linked. I also want to thank you for being the rare person who acknowledges that emotional pairbonding might be a legitimate goal of dating.
I’d push back on the idea that acknowledging dating as a matching market with preferences, means we can unproblematically import the standard apparatus of commodity market thinking, like supply/demand and pricing/ SMV. Indeed, the article you linked explicitly lists these as concepts that don’t necessarily apply in matching environments!
It’s no accident that people began talking more extensively about SMV with the rise of massive online porn portals and Tinder-style dating apps, because those are both seraglio-style contexts where every click or swipe prompts you to model the individuals on display as interchangeable commodities. If a person spends hours every night freely following their whims across thousands of naked women’s bodies, all freely available to the imagination in ways even the guy fucking them can’t access, I can easily see developing a kind of jaded connoisseur’s eye where small differences in preference coalesce into a defined scale of mostly visual consumption value. But that frame is also importantly different from a plain matching environment. And while I hear your point about the potential “analytical and practical utility” of this framework for lonely dudes struggling to enter the dating world, I’d argue that the shift from “I like big butts and I cannot lie” to “caring a great deal about SMV” is most harmful to exactly these lonely dudes.
Here are two key problems:
“Market value” implies price discovery: that is, the quantified “value” has exterior social (if not material) reality as an emergent pattern across individual buyers’ bids. So SMV inherently pulls sexual desire out of the private space of honesty between a guy and his erection and refers it instead to the social world of mimesis and status, what the Discord guys say and what your favorite influencer would think. This pushes SMVers to over-weight their relationship models around factors that have high social signaling potential (appearance, exercise stats, income) and neglect more important relational factors, like temperament and common values, etc. You said that lonely men get stuck in relationships with women who are unkind to them, but it seems to me that SMV thinking could keep a guy stuck in a match like this, because it suggests that a 4.5 man who marries a sexually faithful 8-hotness woman, however mean or value-misaligned, has scored himself an objectively great bargain that he’d be a fool to pass up.
Market value implies buyer-seller transactions, which means your eventual partner’s socially-determined SMV (NOT necessarily the pleasure you’d actually get from sex with them) implicitly marks the level of the social, and possibly the inherent, value you possess yourself. This places identity and ego between the individual and their authentic enjoyment of a sexual relationship.
Most painfully, it seems to mean that the lonely man who’s struggling to “find a woman who meets [his] boolean floor and whose boolean floor is met by him” will still try to raise himself in exclusively ego-aligned ways even over women’s express preferences, AND will absolutely refuse to consider testing the solidity of his own floor-- even if it’s demonstrably set less by what his dick would authentically feel during intimate congress with this person, and more by abstract SMV calculations to Twitter standards.
I’m recalling a gentleman who posted a while back, who despite being admittedly awkward with some personal problems, absolutely insisted that he could entertain no woman above a 25 BMI. When I saw the post, I though of a shy early-thirties STEM guy I know who is happily married to a funny, outgoing 90s-alt-lite type with roughly Octavia Spencer’s figure. I don’t think you could be sane and say this man got a bad match: I’m pretty straight, and even I can clearly see the contours of desire that should make it exciting to have a lifetime of sex with her (that vivacity, that confidence, those bountiful breasts and the things you could do with them, all that soft flesh). I think the only way you wouldn’t enjoy the idea is if there’s a little Andrew Tate on your shoulder constantly whispering “land whale, 3/10, now you’re a loser.”
But although that poster could have expanded his chance of a happy life of loving and being loved by opting in on matches like that, I realized that there was no way I could ever suggest it. There would have been a massive furious pileon here, as though I had told him to kill himself, presumably because authentically enjoying a mate whom the discourse rates low-SMV would make him also low-SMV, a low-value male, somebody who had lost the game. It would have been a kind of death-dealing to his internet-created sense of self-worth.
That seems pretty screwed up! I certainly don’t think guys should settle for limp-dick relationships with women they genuinely couldn't enjoy sexually, but I also don’t observe that SMV has all that much to do with enjoyable sex, period. Except perhaps in the mimetic-desire sense where the empty guy tries to want what he perceives alphas as wanting on the telly.
This was an excellent comment thread that expanded my perspective. This is exactly what I hope for when I visit the Motte. Thanks to both you and urquan.
But it seems like urquan is talking about all factors that goes into making a partner attractive:
which would make this person way higher than a 3/10 once you took into account her funny and outgoing nature, and all "that vivacity, that confidence, those bountiful breasts and the things you could do with them, all that soft flesh".
But what you're saying is that the very act of adopting this mental model will cause someone to overindex on market sentiment instead of continuing to listen to their own value judgments. Is that correct?
This is well-put, more elegantly expressed than I could have done! I think yes, this. Possibly with a side helping of "consumer thinking makes bad lovers and weak families" and "properly directed, serial oneitis could be good actually."
It's great that both you and @urquan seem to at least think it's plausible that nonvisual features could be relevant in a partner! As we introduce more complex qualitative features and opportunities for idiosyncratic preference (for instance, maybe an extroverted guy would actually prefer a quieter partner who calms things down?), though, doesn't that move things closer to the matching-market framework from that lesswrong post, where classic price discovery and supply/demand dynamics don't necessarily apply?
If current SMV frameworks do try to factor in relevant features like personality, vibe, moral character, cultural values, even niche erotic qualities like individual body features or particular bedroom skills/tastes, I'm kind of curious as to how that works on a single-axis scale that's meant for public discussion. How far do people in practice actually bother with all that complicated math, versus defaulting to the simpler "SMV means how good you look," as has been asserted by others here? It does seem like when I've seen SMV in the wild, it's getting used as a Freakonomics-style cynical hot take generator to justify focusing more on conventional appearance metrics of the Onlyfans variety (maybe "fertility" for women, where fertility seems to mean, well, teen-to-22 appearance, not actually "I want fourteen kids so I need a wife aged =(42-14*1.5)") and less on anything else except maybe wealth. Even in your initial post, you appeared to be also advocating for more focus along these lines- but was that a misread on my part?
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