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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.
I would be interested in hearing what your proposals to "fix it" are. I think the reason few to no people offer solutions to the issue is that there are not any solutions people operating in a broadly liberal framework would find permissible.
From my own liberal perspective, nobody is owed a girlfriend, or relationship. If you (or a lot of young men) are unable to get someone you want to be in a relationship with to also want to be in a relationship with you, that's a you problem. Relationship formation is that good old double coincidence of wants. It's not enough that you want to be in a relationship with someone, you need to find someone who also wants to have a relationship with you.
We've banned leaded gasoline, even though it was certainly economically advantageous for every individual driver, and our liberalism calls for less market regulations. We've outlawed OTC cocaine, and made sexualization of minors taboo, with a rather expansive definition too. It's not inconceivable that we could prohibit OnlyFans, Tinder and TikTok. Maybe some more elegant approach is preferable. New problems are born of new clever exploits and profit-making schemes, and after the cost of that profit becomes clear, they call for still newer solutions (which are often enough illiberal on their face). The first step, inescapably, is to allow that a problem be recognized as such, as a problem worth discussing; which is why the space of allowed concerns is so bitterly contested.
Suppose applying this reasoning to literally any other consensual relationship with high stakes, like employment. Do you think it isn't a «poors problem» when working class people feel they've got a raw deal in the contemporary economic arrangement? Do you think it's a «youths problem» when higher-status Muslims build harems and watch contently as the red-hot madness sizzles underneath their feet?
Ultimately it doesn't matter what you think. Either the dissatisfied party can intimidate you into concessions – or wreck your neighborhood, or tank your economy, or straight up burn your McMansion together with your family – or it can't, and the point is moot.
Rights are merely an issue of negotiation via credible threats. There's a fake oath attributed by Russian bloggers to 15th century Catalan nobility: Nós, que valem tant com vós per separat, i junts més que vós, us investim sobirà i us jurem lleialtat per tal que ens protegiu, defenseu i treballeu pel nostre progrés, i si no, no. Allegedly it means something like this: «We, who are worth as much as you separately, and together more than you, invest you as sovereign and swear loyalty to you so that you protect us, defend us and work for our progress, and if not, then no». This probably wasn't the case in Catalonia. This is definitely the premise of representative democracy (rationalizing the democratic way is the intent of this fiction), and of your liberalism today. People who are not represented by the operating system of the society, who are not protected, defended and aided in their progress, can just say: i si no, no, withdrawing their pledge. It is valuable to minimize the frequency and magnitude of this second «no». There are various means to that end. It is possible to delude them into thinking their problems are negligible or shameful (just as it is possible to provoke a group with no legitimate complaints into a righteous fury), drive them to suicide, prevent their self-organization. Up to a point.
I think the reason for this performative callousness is precisely the intuition that men who don't cut it in the sexual market are pathetic non-threatening worms (at worst, some outliers will become school shooters or rapists) and can be safely utilized as fuel for minor self-affirmation in glib offhand remarks. This has worked well enough in Western polities, historically. I posit that when the cutoff is at 30% and climbing up, and in the context of there being essentially no other self-actualization tracks in a postmodern society, this tactic isn't quite as sound. Sexually frustrated young men are a moral problem, but even if you don't agree, they are a well-known political problem. Your problem too. You are playing with fire.
For the record, I guess I'm roughly in the same place as @4bpp, in that this isn't a pain point for me. I don't much care about how I look or score on some bullshit «you must be this tall to ride» plot: to eventually receive sexual attention even from fairly attractive women in the vicinity (of course, not exclusively attractive… and not only women), I've only ever had to start speaking. (I speak roughly in the same manner I write, although lacking the edit option for typos and l'esprit d'escalier is a bummer; then again, my voice has its own perks). Naturally this works best in dense mixed-sex environments where long-winded conversations are not frowned upon. So that's education and less male-biased sections of the academia, and adjacent gatherings. (In fact I believe that's what many women seek in higher ed in the first place, even if they've been gaslit into thinking otherwise). Not fucking Tinder, which is the go-to platform for matchups now.
Of course, inflating the educational pipeline even more would be insane for a whole host of other reasons. Also, «I got mine» is a not an argument even if true.
@f3zinker is correct that the effect of online dating is already disastrous and we've only began to feel it, and that you all are intent on dodging, downplaying and misrepresenting the core issue. Last but not least, it's frankly disheartening that I feel the need to write this disclaimer to preclude another tedious discussion about personal frustrations, inadequacies and attractiveness scores.
I've been wanting to write an effortpost about how TheMotte (or at least, a significant subset of it) falls into many of the same traps that the mainstream does when talking about sex relations, but haven't really gotten around to it and also realise that post is inevitably going to draw an utterly exhausting flood of dismissive rhetoric and criticism.
Even in heterodox communities like this one there's still quite a bit of dodging and downplaying when it comes to many topics surrounding sex relations, specifically those topics that relate to men's issues and especially those with an element to them that doesn't make women look fantastic. It's a thing that's very emotionally charged and controversial even for a community whose purpose is to discuss topics outside of the Overton window, and bringing up these topics seems to elicit from people quite a bit of pearl-clutching and emotional appeal and fervent attempts to justify their knee-jerk reactions to things they'd rather not confront. Hell, I've seen more pushback here on this than HBD. (Meanwhile in the broader public sphere female claims of victimisation are constantly treated as a pressing social issue even when the core claim is incredibly questionable.)
Really, the discomfort ultimately just seems to come down to something deeper and much more instinctual: "Men who complain about their situation as men (and especially those who do so at the expense of those who possess a greater social claim to protection, like women) are inherently low status". In the case of the dating market, that disgust is further amplified by the stigma that already attaches to sexually unsuccessful males. And my posting and engagement with people on the topic has slowed partially because it's really started to hit home that the asymmetry in discourse surrounding sex relations might be unfixable.
EDIT: clarity
Which is why I dropped the bomb before leaving my house for the day out lol.
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