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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"?
I'm not sure why you expect your experience as an older gentleman to have much to do with the experience of twenty somethings which is more central to the original point, family formation. Things change greatly as you age.
The repeated insistence by posters of all stripes and their refusal to engage with the central argument, the crux of the matter is really making me just about fed up with this body of ideas.
Post about young male sexlessness -> Post about TFR
Post about young male sexlessness -> Post about older male sexfullness
Post about young male sexlessness -> Post about women's rights
Post about young male sexlessness -> Post about how to pick up ladies
No one wants to discuss what can be done about the fact that young male sexlessness and datelessness have both gone up by 100% compared to the historical base rate (female remains roughly same with a slight increase recently), and what are the implications of this.
Seriously let's go back to the fucking basics. Refute the central point, not some weakman or weak proxy of it.
I'm about to get real uncharitable here but here's my true unfiltered thoughts on the matter;
My cynical side says that no one but the group getting fucked actually has any incentive to fix it. And by that I don't mean the obvious personal incentive, but all of the other groups greatly benefit in the short term from not fixing it, at least on a superficial level. Old men have a wider pool to choose from, younger women don't want to temper their expectations, older women also don't want to temper their expectations. So all you are left with is token condolences and strawmen just getting beaten often brutalized to absolute shreds. This asymmetry in incentives doesn't allow ones minds to honestly tackle with the arguments (even if their hearts are in the right place) because that would be a stupid way to operate for a human. Why understand something if your livelihood relies on you not understanding it. I also think there is a signalling play here, you make a post about widely discussed {problem} and feign disbelief or obliviousness, it's letting everyone know you are high status enough to not only not have that problem, but to not be able to comprehend its existence.
Here are my uncharitable unfiltered thoughts on the matter: something is seriously wrong with you and other people like you, and you're either unaware of it or willfully ignoring it. Maybe your standards are too high, maybe you lack social skills and weird people out, maybe you're fatter than you think, I don't know. But something isn't right.
I'm not really singling out you specifically, but I just don't understand where these posts come from. I'm a barely above average person. I'm 5'7"/170cm (!!!), face is maybe a 7/10 though under age 25 or so I often got called "cute" (never handsome or hot), body is... I dunno, 6/10? I'm not fat and not ripped, just "normal" I guess. I come from rural nowhere America from a middle-middle class family, went to an average college in a rural state, and prior to marriage made a below average salary. I'm not particularly witty or suave, though I am friendly and genuine and perceived as non-threatening. Never was athletic or played sports, but was also never overweight (until my mid 20s). I'm definitely less intelligent than many people on this board and I only did reasonably well in school, definitely wasn't near the top of my class. I majored in an uncool liberal arts subject and currently work in an unsexy part of tech and make a meh salary for a tech worker.
My point is that my stats are thoroughly mediocre except for some minor strengths here and there (and one big weakness). And yet, after turning 18 I dated continuously for 8 years (4 different women) until getting married at 26. I never had trouble finding a girlfriend, there was always someone in my social circle who I thought was cute and vice versa. I'd rate these women as 7/5/6/8, so I want knocking it out of the park looks-wise, but it was better than being alone and thirsty. I'm only in my early 30s, so this isn't advice in the vein of "just ask to speak to the manager and give him a firm handshake." Perhaps your standards are just too high?
tl;dr as a mediocre person I was able to pull it off, so anyone should be able to pull it off barring serious handicaps.
This is almost certainly it (for me at least). I have sometimes flattered myself with the thought, "oh, I'm just too honest for the dirty, lying, backstabbing tricks required for success in the dating market." I typically dismiss this as egoistic rationalization, but I am again starting to wonder if it is true. I think I am the only regular in the culture war thread who has identified himself as basically an incel. I also notice that the dating/gender war/sexlessness threads do NOT read like they are written by men who are getting healthy amounts of sexual satisfaction, yet every poster takes care to mention that of course they aren't having trouble getting laid and have had multiple deeply fulfilling relationships, they are speaking hypothetically about the 20-30% of young men which they are of course not a part of.
I think some of you are lying.
Honestly as I wrote the post I had the same intuition. Maybe I'm undervaluing how important social skills are, especially whatever you call the highly situational "reading the room" skill. I am pretty good at reading people and intuiting their motivations.
I have a cousin who is in his mid 20s, 6'0", thin, reasonably handsome face, has a CS degree and a good job. He could probably do modeling. But he's kind of weird, lacks confidence, and dresses like a dork (he goes for a hipster look that was edgy 10 or 15 years ago, which is about as uncool as you can get now). He's really sensitive to criticism and shuts down if he feels people aren't taking him seriously or are making fun of him (even if it's good natured).
You hear all this talk online about how only looks matter, but I think we all know at least one ugly dude who was so charismatic, confident, and/or cool that he never had problems getting laid, making friends, or getting into leadership roles. He always seemed to have a girlfriend and was often chatting up other girls on the side. To me, the existence of these people (and to a lesser degree people like me) is a fatal blow to all this lookism stuff.
And the good news is that unlike your looks, you really can work on your social skills. Before age 16 or so I was a shy little wimp who was all but ignored by girls. I had a "fuck it" moment around 16, and started being a lot more assertive and aggressive towards other people in what I thought was a self-destructive way... only the destruction never came. Instead, people just listened to me more and took me more seriously. The sky didn't fall, I didn't get my ass kicked. And girls started to think I was worth their consideration.
Obviously my epiphany isn't something you can replicate in a lab. Perhaps it's a point that everyone has to reach on his own. But my point is that it's at least possible, and without the need for shoe inserts or mewing or whatever.
People always seem to say this, but I find it to be the exact opposite. There are aspects of looks that can't be changed, such as height or ethnicity, obviously, but IMHO changing looks is much easier than changing social skills. Changing looks is almost entirely a biological/physical engineering problem, of adjusting diet and exercise to change body composition, changing the chemicals one puts on one's skin and hair, changing the clothes one puts on, and such. And these physical engineering problems are mostly pretty well solved and well publicized, and implementing them is a matter of choice and will.
Changing social skills is a much murkier problem with very few well understood solutions, with the space almost entirely dominated by misinformation. It's also a social engineering problem rather than a physical one, which makes it more costly to perform experiments - which are more required due to the aforementioned lack of information about solutions - along with higher costs when experiments go wrong.
Obviously, both can be changed to various extents, and I've personally experienced changing both of them for the better, but, again, when I compare both the difficulty of enacting changes and the magnitude of the changes involved, the difference is stark. Changing my appearance for the better by a significant amount was almost trivial compared to making even a very minor change in my social skills.
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You are very much undervaluing the importance of social skills.
People tend to ignore or gloss over that there's a horrendous amount of skills and capabilities that contributes toward being dateable. And if you're skilled enough in one area(say, social skills) this can make up for alot of deficiencies.
For example, if you're skilled in the social sciences, you can get a girlfriend while looking like a small mountain(and not in a good way). Or living with your girlfriends family while not having a home of your own, and somehow this is perfectly fine(wtf?). Or, or, or...
Yeah, no. Not everyone has this skill set. Either through lack of chance to naturally develop such a thing, or simply not gifted with the intrinsic capability. Half the time when people bring up 'I'm socially retarded yet I got a girlfriend' and when they describe their circumstance as to how that occurred, it comes across as pure, blind luck.
Still, you're correct. Social skill is very much a skill that can be learned and developed. The trick, however, is finding a safe space that they can learn these skills, with strict rule sets(because if you know the rules ahead of time, it gives you confidence of how to act within the confines of those rules). And, the arena has to atleast allow for a little forgiveness for when you inevitable screw up.
Nowadays, that's a very tall order. Moreso if you live in an area that doesn't have alot of social arenas to break into in a natural, organic fashion.
I know, I'm speaking from experience. Not that there aren't options, mind, but when alot of these options start costing money, that brings up a whole other set of issues...
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Yup, this is the thing. Would it be even worse for your friend if he was overweight, etc. Absolutely. But, I think, unfortunately, too many people actually believe an SNL skit is actually real life. Also, the secret is that a lot of people are coded as 'assholes' because they're good-looking, charismatic, and dress well (for their subculture/etc.).
Yes, there are the typical a-hole guys in a club, or horny drunk guys late night at a bar, but they're nowhere as successful as people think they are. OTOH, yes, they are more successful than somebody who basically spends all their time either in male-dominated spaces or by themselves.
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