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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.
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.
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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