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A late tangent, but I was warming my hands next to last week's heated exchange between @DaseindustriesLtd and @gemmaem and one thing that popped out at me was @f3zinker's chart representing women's messaging behaviour towards men in different positions of the attractiveness distribution, depending on their own. I've seen variants of this data - introduced here with the unambiguous line "Women just about exercise dictatorial demand." - on the internet for a long time (since the days of the OkCupid blog), and it always struck me as strange, insofar as it did not seem to mesh at all with the reality I perceive around me. The points of disagreement are numerous:
I believe I'm personally around the 60〜70% mark of the male attractiveness distribution, and have always been extremely passive about dating. Nevertheless I've been approached by women in the 50〜90 range of their distribution (as perceived by me), and had those approaches convert into relationships (some of them very long-term) in the 60〜80 band. This would put me smack dab in a pink area in that chart, repeatedly. I do not get the sense that any of those relationships were unequal in terms of effort or resources invested.
People around me, including unattractive ones, of either gender match up all the time, and there is no obvious bias in terms of which side initiates. It's not that unattractive and involuntarily celibate men don't exist (especially from the 70th percentile downwards), but the correlation between involuntary celibacy and attractiveness is actually seemingly quite low.
My entire academic and academia-adjacent blob has very low attachment to existing social conventions around dating. I know several people who are poly, and the most disapproval they meet is being the butt of the occasional jokes. Contrary to the stereotype, the ones I know do not strike me as unusually unattractive. Yet, the most attractive poly guys are not pulling massive harems, and in fact I've observed the most attractive poly girls reject repeated advances from the most attractive poly guys (in favour of less attractive ones).
So what's going on here? After reflecting on it for a bit, it seems to me that there's actually an obvious answer: the very framing of the question being charted ("do you 'like', with the implication of interest in a sexual relationship, this person, based on their picture?") only captures meaningful data when asked of men, because men are the only ones for whom look is a dominant term in the value function that estimates whether they want a sexual relationship with someone. Rewording this question slightly in a way that I don't think actually changes the meaning to "Given that this person looks like that, would you provisionally agree to having sex with them?", what's actually going has an alternative explanation that I think rings more true than "women have unrealistic standards": if looks are only a small term in your value function, you don't know enough about the value of the other terms, and the median answer to "would you provisionally agree to having sex" is no, then the looks have to be exceptionally good to shift the answer to "yes".
Importantly, this model does not require the original preference against sex with an unspecified man to be unusually strong: for any given expected utility -epsilon that women assign to having sex with a completely random man, no matter how close to 0, there exists a delta such that if looks are only at most a delta-fraction of women's value function for sex partners, then a random man would have to be top 10% in terms of looks for the expected utility for women of having sex with him to turn positive.
As an intuition pump, imagine we created the same chart for men, using some quality that men don't value particularly highly (but perhaps women do), and a base distribution of women that you(r people) are just slightly skeptical of as sex partners (your pick, based on preference: Some ethnicity you don't like? BMI >25? Cat owners? Age >40?). Take a dating app where you can't post your picture, but instead publicise your monthly income, and also all women are at least slightly chubby. Would you be surprised to find a chart like the above, but for men towards women, where the top 60% earners among men only are willing to "like" the top 10% earning women? Would this reflect men exercising "dictatorial demand"?
Since I've been called out explicitly and was the one who made the "just about exercise dictatorial demand". I'll defend my thesis a little. Which I think requires a 10,000 word blogpost to express in detail such that I can't be gotchad, but I have to leave out crucial details when arguing for it on forums, because no I am not writing 10,000 words for someone to potentially "tldr didn't read" it or not understand it in detail.
You are correct. That plot is just about the worst-case scenario for men. The reason is, as you said, it zeroes out all the variables but looks. And doing that is somewhat still true to men's attraction functions but not womens. Fair enough!
The second point you make is that the (leading) question also skews the outcomes the way it does because of what fundamentally boils down to "spreading seed across the lands vs choosing the best seed". So a question like "if you met this person, you had a great time, they said some funny jokes, your life values converged, they have a good career, would you consider dating this person" would decompress the plot a little for men, also true. I understand your proposal of using an arbitrary variable producing just as damning results.
Here's the kicker. Why is it getting worse for young men then? Why does reality tends towards as limit of time goes to infinity looks more like the plot than less?
Given its evident the environment online dating creates is terrible for men for XYZ reasons (women do exercise dictatorial demand in OLD and that is not up for debate), what do we do about that? Perhaps create a maximally friendly environment where young people could attract each other in real life and where the men can leverage their relative status, charisma, sense of humor and pheromones or whatever to win over a lady? Yeah, we are totally doing that.
https://www.businessinsider.com/most-american-couples-meet-online-2016-9
https://www.vice.com/en/article/gy473x/our-deepest-fears-realized-most-couples-meet-online-now
Let me hit you with another plot. [Equally pernicious as 'Met online' goes to the moon 🚀, is that 'met through friends' is cratering, which honestly IMO is the best way to do it.][Article above contains non truncated y-axis]
And then we shut down the world, closed off schools and workplaces, and further exacerbated that trend.
Do you think this does not have an evaporative cooling effect on dating culture? As more and more people (a plurality at the moment, majority soon) internalize that the only places to attempt to swoon women is through a screen on a phone? What about tabooing relationships in workplaces, don't you think they will come for the colleges next (it's already verboten within departments, students in maybe a decade or two)? There has already been years of feminist propaganda that says you should not approach women in public ever (yes only applies to unattractive people, I can read between the lines, but it's not about the men, it's about the broader culture)
So what does a man who looks into the future conclude? Yes in an ideal world the 60-70th percentile man is not screwed, but we are doing everything we could to make the world as unindeal the best we can! And believe me if you are using social media used by zoomers, it's plenty evident marginally above average guys are feeling the squeeze.
And I hate reiterating for the 1000th time, I am not saying I am getting crushed! I am pointing out that a squeeze exists and it's pressing ever so harder by the day, many will get crushed, I don't have to get crushed to point out that a squeeze exists, please refrain from taking the conversation in that direction and offering unsolicited advice, let's stay on the object level and reach/diverge on a consensus on as to whether a squeeze exists or not, because the evidence clearly points to it existing.
And honestly, its tiring all the anecdotal evidence the skeptics put out, maybe bring receipts just one time? I get it the economy isn't bad you and all your friends whose dads work at Deloitte got you guys jobs at KPMG, I know people can still get jobs. I know that. I know you think your anecdotes are low error, I think mine are toobut anecdotes of cultural trends and anecdotes of personal life attributes are not made equal.
And also I hate to bring more heat but, there are no "attractive people" in Academia, just being moderately fit among a bunch of pasty non lifters and hunchbacks codes you as attractive, be honest about the attractiveness level of the women your academic peers are pairing up with, I notice that "nerds" have a tendency to grossly overrate the attractiveness of their partners. Let's be honest with ourselves those Academia poly harems are positively horrific not the stuff wet dreams are made of.
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I also think that there's generally been a rise in female and male interest siloing as a result of the great balkanization of media and interests. A lot of guys I know just don't really have plausible pathways to meeting single females outside of the apps, unless they're going to explicitly start taking up feminine-coded hobbies expressly for the purposes of finding a mate.
Especially now that the risk-reward of workplace fraternization is pretty damned horrible if you're in any sort of a career role.
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What if the whole problem is "equality" catching up with men and catching them unaware? Women have been plagued by having to invest into their looks and "personality" to attract a mate:
improve your face by applying makeup and styling your hair
improve your body by wearing the right clothes and shoes
improve your social standing by having the right friends and the right hobbies
and so on
In a relatively monogamous world where marriage was expected, they had to compete against each other: if you wanted a husband from the top third of the distribution, you had to take make sure you're in the top third yourself. Men, on the other hand, didn't really have to compete among themselves: first of all, they weren't evaluated just by their looks and personality, and second, why bother?
And now, when casual dating is a thing, men suddenly find themselves squished into a narrow band of absolute attractiveness, while women no longer have to run as fast as they can just to stay in the same place, so that when it's time to get married they can settle down with the best possible option.
Those charts where men rate women as 5 on average and women rate men as 2 on average? Truth in television, because it's not a relative scale, it's an absolute scale. Women have been pushing the envelope of what it means to be viscerally attractive for centuries, of course men suck at that. Can you imagine treating your face, your body, your wardrobe, your hobbies and your social circle from the time you're 12 as means to maximize your attractiveness to women? Of course those who manage to learn that or win the genetic lottery get all the girls - it's lonely at the top.
Sooner or later the dating market will fix itself. Men will learn to preen themselves, will know that "foundation" is not just a construction term or a sci-fi novel, will be able to answer what the best and the worst parts of their body are and will act on that knowledge. Women will gradually adjust their expectations, relearning the value of male companionship. But the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent, as Keynes said. Or virile, in this case.
I think 'the Squeeze' is a great term for that. Women are gaining power in all aspects and are now putting the 'squeeze' on men. But I also see some problems with that.
The environment I grew up in always held up a very critical lens towards society. Being an active and earnest participant in the rat race of social status and wealth was looked down upon. 'What matters is what's on the inside, not the outside' and other similar tropes. You shouldn't chase personal aspirations that are guided by shallow and vain markers of status and wealth. Instead, aim towards the greater good of how to make the world a better place. That, ultimately, was the true 'high status'.
I feel that the core of that sentiment is inherently humanistic and altruistic. Maybe it's because I grew up with it but I automatically assumed that a lot of the aspirations of any well meaning do-gooder person, especially here, came from a similar place.
So coming from that kind of thinking I can't for the life of me understand how anyone can in any way shape or form look at 'the squeeze' and go 'this is fine'.
From a sort of ingroup/outgroup pathology perspective I understand why there exists a lot of 'you deserve it' rhetoric, like you espouse here. But then what? Because it was bad for women we can now do it to men because... what, we hate them? Two wrongs will make a right? I had sort of assumed, particularly because of my environments rhetoric, that pushing people, men and women, to focus on looks was... bad? I certainly got the feeling that it was the case after being inundated with news stories about the dangers of women being too thin because that's what fashion show runway models looked like. Though those stories are now a distant memory.
Aside from that I find your assumptions about equality harmful to your argument as a whole. Men won't turn to makeup to charm women. We already know what men turn to. Steroids, MMA and drugs. I've already seen drastic societal changes where I live because of this very distinct change in social dynamics. A drastic escalation of violence at all ages, drug use at all ages and status symbols like cars and clothes.
I mean, from an EA perspective, is it useful for everyone to have to spend more time on status, wealth and looks in an eternal 'arms race'? Maybe it's my anti-equality priors shining through, but I don't think 'equality' is doing anyone any good here.
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What are you even talking about? Are you referencing some kind of immortal man who was dating people in their 20s 50 years ago and is still dating people in their 20s? twenty year olds today have no concept of what dating was like in the past. Even defining "a husband in the third of the distribution" implies men were competing with each other.
You must not be seeing the same people I'm seeing. Women lead men in obesity albeit only by a bit. In every way men have become less attractive women have also become less attractive.
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In the United States, 84% of men and 80% of women are overweight or obese. Or if you look at obesity alone 50.8% of men and 53.4% of women are obese. This is lower for younger people, so the dating market is a bit better, but not so much as to obviate the point. This is not a population where women are "pushing the envelope" of attractiveness or where they are heavily optimizing their attractiveness from a young age. It is a population where both men and women are unhealthy in a visible way that makes them less attractive, in roughly equal proportions. And weight seems to have an even bigger impact of female attractiveness than male attractiveness. (Now, this makes the rise in overweight/obese people itself a prime candidate for the rise in sexlessness, it seems to make sense that if people were less attractive they would be less interested in having sex with each other. But people seem to think there isn't enough of a correlation for this to make sense, though I haven't looked into the statistics to check. I also don't know what the statistics look like if you look into something a bit more subtle, like if a sedentary lifestyle reduces sex-drive or motivation or something.)
The idea of women relentlessly optimizing for attractiveness is prominent in our culture, not only because the people doing that are more visible but because of its role in feminist rhetoric and pop culture discourse. Similarly, overweight and obese people are stratified by education/class/intelligence/race/social-circle, such that for many people their prevalence might seem like societal dark-matter which shows up in statistics but not real life. (Similar to that large chunk of the population which can't do simple intellectual tasks like reading a bar graph.) But we shouldn't mistake their prominence in discourse for something with much relevance to population-level statistics.
Now, one upshot of this is that if you're a normal weight it's unclear how much statistics about dating apply to you. But normal weight people probably tend to want to date someone else who is also normal weight, not just for an attractive and healthy partner but because of all the other things like class/intelligence/social-circle it correlates with, so this doesn't really correspond to being favored in pursuing that goal either.
Is this true? Maybe it was back in the 90s. I'm sure some of these "overweight or obese" women look like fertility goddesses (though not all of them obviously).
I was just going off anecdotes regarding what people on the internet say influences attractiveness for them and others. I tried looking for a study to provide something a bit more substantial but didn't find anything useful after a couple searches on Google Scholar. So I tried asking ChatGPT ("Is the impact of obesity on attractiveness different for men and women? Cite your sources.") and it actually gave me real studies, one of which was what I was looking for, though its description of what the study said was not accurate. And looking up the study found there was also an equivalent one done for women. This is the first time ChatGPT has provided me with useful information, out of the 4 times I have tried using it as an information source.
Anyway, it's a pretty small study so maybe there's a better one out there, but it shows what I would expect. It's from 2005 if you think it has dramatically changed for some reason, but I doubt that, particularly since the results were broadly similar for the different cultures of Britain and Malaysia.
Male physical attractiveness in Britain and Malaysia: A cross-cultural study
Female physical attractiveness in Britain and Malaysia: A cross-cultural study
Per Table 2 in both studies, BMI accounted for 84.1% of the variance in female attractiveness rated by British men, but only 53.7% of the variance in male attractiveness rated by British women.
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I believe in the squeeze.
I think I'd basically internalized it as a thing that exists, and that this post had more of an effect on making me realize other people don't think it exists. I'd probably end up in arguments with those people and we'd just talk past each other, not realizing that we have a fundamentally different view of reality.
It always felt like there was something in the water ... or in the culture that just didn't want men to have sex. I kind of remember in college the first time I realized that women actually enjoy sex. I was dating my college girlfriend, and a new video game had come out. She was texting me to get me to come over to her place. Normally she only needed a light suggestion and I'd run over to her dorm, we'd pretend like we were hanging out to do something else, and then inevitably fuck like rabbits. But this time I was being reluctant cuz I wanted to play this new video game. For the first time she got more explicit in the text messages saying that she wanted to have sex. My mind was blown that she actually wanted to have sex. This "revelation" continued to repeat itself for just about every girlfriend and one night stand I had after that.
At some point I had a talk with my mother about this. She is a biologist by training and never had the normal awkwardness talking about sex things with her kids. She was flabbergasted that I had this idea about women not enjoying sex, she was adamant that she hadn't taught me that. I still don't really understand where I got the idea from. Culture is what I choose to blame, because no one ever said it explicitly: "Men shouldn't have sex. Its selfish, gross, and just plain wrong."
I was very horny as a young man, so despite being aware of the societal conditioning I just went right through it and kept trying to have sex. Its safe to say that my mid to late teens and early twenties were basically consumed with the pursuit of women and sexual gratification. It probably would have been better and more healthy for me if I spent less time so obsessed with sexual gratification. Society had a set of brakes meant to slow me down, but they failed on me, and they probably failed on every other male that they were meant to be applied to.
Instead those brakes seemed to work really well on the guys that needed a push. Scott Alexander and Scott Aaronson both describe it better than I could, and from an internal viewpoint. I also had plenty of friends that I saw fall into that pattern. Many of them seem to have made it out, but it took a while.
I can't help but feel there are a set of guys out there that really should slow the hell down. They aren't doing themselves any favors, the women they sleep with any favors, or society in general any favors. But there is no easy way of targeting those specific men, so society just kind of targets all men. I knew some of these guys, they'd have sex with a different woman almost every night of the week. I was hanging out with one of these guys and he complained to me that the night before he'd messed up his scheduling and thus ended up having sex with two different women the same night. I was like is that normal? And he responded "no, I'm normally better about that, it only happens once a month or so". That guy needed brakes.
In the end, I don't know if I really see things improving in the future. Society and individuals keep getting pissed off at the men that are the equivalent of 18 wheelers barrelling through the roadblocks they setup. The roadblocks work just fine on all the guys that are the equivalent of ford pintos or mopeds. Its a society wide Chinese finger trap, where the correct solution is to relax and push into the trap, rather than use force and try to pull away. If society made it really easy for guys to have sex and meet women, then they'd all start pairing off together. And their would be fewer targets for the guys just trying to sleep with everything that moves.
This is the first time im coming across the brake analogy, I like it and will think about it on as to whether it fits into my current model, because it certainly explains some things, but i need to think on whether its just a side effect or not.
Evidently, I might not have the healthiest ideas about sex or relationships. I too absolutely could not fathom that women enjoy sex at all. The first time a woman moaned when having sex with me, it was a surreal experience. I literally could not believe my lying ears. I dont know who to blame for this either, I definitely did not seek this out either and no one told me as much in explicit terms, maybe the brakes worked on me, I dont know but somethings in the water and I will point that out.
The old joke among incels is that "of course women want to have sex; they just don't want to have sex with you".
Women certainly can enjoy sex... with the right guy, in the right place at the right time, if he does the right things to please her, and so on and so forth. Saying flatly that "women don't enjoy sex" is of course very incorrect, but there are still authentic, irreconcilable differences in how men and women relate to sex and how they experience sexual desire. Women, on average, will never be as radically DTF as men are. They can't afford to be that profligate with their scarce reproductive resources.
A female friend once told me, "putting a dick in your pussy feels like putting your finger in your nose; it doesn't really feel like anything". Her experience isn't universal, but it's common enough. Female sexual desire is more complicated than just "I am having sex and sex is awesome".
While the orgasm gap definitely goes a long way to explaining why women are less radically DTF than men, I think that male sexual desire is also more complicated than "I am having sex and sex is awesome." Yassine put it well in the latest Bailey podcast when he said that the straight male desire for sex is mostly about status. Men want to have sex with the most physically attractive woman they can find willing to have sex with them, because of the status/ego boost. "She's so hot, she could bang literally any guy she wants, and she chose to bang ME!" This explains the disconnect in some of the other discussions in this thread around "incels should stop complaining about how hard it is to get laid, it's really not that hard, all you have to do is X" where X is a list of things like going to bars all the time, learning how to chat up women, learn how to dress better, etc. And at that point it starts to sound like a lot of work. And if you have to put a lot of work into getting laid, suddenly it's not such a status boost, is it? Now she's not banging me because she chose me out of all these other guys, she's banging me because I was the only guy who was willing to flatter her for long enough.
There's certainly an equivalent for straight women but it's the commitment after the sex that is important, not the sex itself. "He's so smart and successful, he could choose to commit to any chick he wants, and he's committing to me!" And I think "can't afford to be that profligate with their scarce reproductive resources" translates to "can't afford to hoe around too much or it will be impossible to get any high-status male to commit to me" in modern times.
This is a ridiculous assertion. If sexual desire were mostly about status then substitutes for sex would also be about that. But the obvious substitutes (masturbation and pornography) do not confer status. Instead, they mimic the physical qualities of sex. I won't argue that status plays no role at all, but it plays much less of a role than the actual sensations do.
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With large cities and many niches, people can find communities to belong to that have selected for people just like them. My gym is 95% men, other gyms are 95% women. My job is all male, my hobbies are all male and not just that but select for people with specific personalities. Meeting through friends is hard when the friendship circle is too similar. Most likely people vote the same as their friends, have the same level of education, similar age group, gender and so forth.
The only really open public arena are bars, but they generally aren't much better than tinder, just more time-consuming.
Personally, I hired a photographer who does viral marketing for fashion in order to go from the 60-70th percentile to the top 10%. I strongly believe a lot of guys could greatly improve their looks by having better pics. I took thousands in order to get good ones. It is hard to take good photos, and having 20 pics to choose from in your phone's gallery is guaranteed failure. Women have often taken thousands of selfies and learned the art. Most men have no idea how to take good photos. Good cameras help a ton, lighting is key, and practice helps. Men are underselling themselves by using awful pics.
I believe a future trend is going to be better arenas for people to meet such as single's nights, speed dating and other ways for people to meet irl.
I feel like even the crowd of 'people who are not bar people who are actively going to bars to mingle' is kind of dying out, similar with clubs and stuff. 50 years ago just hanging out at the local pub was far more of a mingling opportunity due to lack of options, but now for most people the clubs are a very infrequent thing or only a rite of passage for a year or two.
I do also agree on the male/female interest thing. I believe the genders are far more self-segregating than they were in recent history, meaning that organic meetings are just harder to come by. I similarly managed to grind online apps to the point of doing okay on them, but if the apps were to shut down tomorrow I'd have no idea how I'd happen across a girlfriend with any consistency. Workplace fraternization has a horrible risk/reward and I'm senior enough it's very unlikely I'd run into a female coworker who I wouldn't be doubly-barred from by relative rank/power dynamic. Vast majority of my hobbies are sausage fests, and whilst 'alright go pick up a girl-dominated hobby as a tribute' is a thing, it feels disingenuous.
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