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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 28, 2026

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There is definitely a trad wife out there for you. I believe that sincerely.

You are asserting that there exists an injective function from the set of heterosexual monogamous men to the set of heterosexual monogamous women such that every woman prefers being paired to her corresponding man over remaining single or holding out (there are additional conditions, but this seems like the easiest one to break).

People underestimate how difficult the gender wars/dating problem is because they don’t think about it in the proper mathematical terms. The thing that we are looking for is a binary relation between two distinct sets that satisfies certain properties. It’s easy to make a bunch of observations such as, “men are like this, but women are like that.” Okay, what does this tell us about the function space?

You are asserting that there exists an injective function from the set of heterosexual monogamous men to the set of heterosexual monogamous women such that every woman prefers being paired to her corresponding man over remaining single or holding out (there are additional conditions, but this seems like the easiest one to break).

It's called Gale–Shapley algorithm. Oh, wait, I see what you mean: at some iteration women will start valuing staying single over the next batch of men asking them out.

This won't behave how we'd naively expect.

Let's take two hypothetical countres:

Country A : 1.5 men per woman

Country B : 0.75 men per woman

Mathematically, we'd expect the women in country A to want to pair since they will have higher quality matches available.

In country B, we'd expect women to resist pairing since high-quality men are scarcer.

Yet, the opposite behavior appears to be true. Given an abundance of thirsty dudes, women will often reject even high quality mates. See: San Francisco.

high quality mates. See: San Francisco.

Sorry to burst your bubble but if wealth + intelligence is your only metric for high-quality mates you have a weird skew. As the saying goes: "The odds are good but the GOODS ARE ODD". Autistic nerdy men who happen to make 7 figures do not high quality mates alone make.

It's almost a tautology at this point, but the Bay has been known for this sort of male population for a long time. So if men in the Bay are still struggling then it would behoove you to update your model on what is actually considered high quality (different than high status) instead of what autistic nerds would like to be considered high quality

It's a nice story, and I agree with your assessment on status, but it doesn't hold water.

  1. SF has a bad ratio. This is the core of the problem.

  2. The same man who strikes out in SF/Seattle goes to NYC and drowns in female affection. It's a well-known phenomenon. There is no magic soil in NYC that makes men less autistic.

We don't have to make broad sociological observations. It's 90% just the ratio.

One would wonder why no women from NYC go to SF/Seattle. Why do we never reach equilibrium between two unequal states unless transfers are one sided or the transfers that are happening aren't the problem population.

It's a well-known phenomenon.

Theoretically, but among my remaining friends in SF/Seattle, including some who took 6 month hiatuses to NYC for this reason, I have not seen drowning. It's hard to prove or disprove this as phenomenon with relying on anecdotal data because while its theoretically possible its too multivariate to quantically determine it.

In SF, age 25-39, it's 52.8% male. In NYC, it's 48.8%.

While that doesn't SOUND like a huge difference, let's say 80% of each group are open to a heterosexual relationship (with the remaining 20% being gay/not looking). Then let's pair off 70% of the remaining women with men.

In SF, there are 1.4 single men for every women. In NYC, its 0.84. The difference is stark.

But in the modern world, men will always be at a disadvantage. 51.2% of people are born male absent any sex selection. It's supposed to get down to 50% by the time men breed, but we don't kill each other with sticks as much anymore.

Are those the overall sex ratio numbers, not age specific ones? The ones for NYC get skewed heavily by the older cohort of women if you use overall numbers, and it doesn't do the average 25yo male much good that there are loads of single 50+ women in NYC (jokes about cougars aside). You said 25-39, but those sound more like the overall ones I remember.

edit: this one I was thinking of is old data. I wish I could see an update with moveable sliders like this one has. Set to 20-39 and the oversupply of women seems to vanish.

My data is for all people age 25-39. The discrepancy between the raw data and your "singles" numbers can be explained pretty easily.

  1. Older men like to date women in the 25-39 bracket but not vice versa

  2. Women in "situationships" tend to report being in a relationship while the man she is dating does not. One Chad might have multiple women who perceive themselves to be his girlfriend while he thinks of himself as single

Nevertheless, the difference between SF and NYC is stark. Men of Silicon Valley, get thee to New York (or better yet Asia) lest your bloodline be extinguished.