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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 27, 2023

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What does success mean? It is getting what you want. Women have high standards in a number of different, often vague and socially informed attributes like status. Dating Apps are absolutely terrible at helping you to find this out. Even worse, they are by their nature most conducive to casual hookups, which most women aren't particularly interested in. I think it is not surprising that they broadly speaking steer clear of them as a result. Yes they can leverage this mismatch then to make the men on apps jump through ridiculous hoops if they so wish, but it doesn't really mean that women have more "success" in a meaningful sense or that the experience really is more pleasant for them unless they have a specific kind of personality.

Your definition just rationalizes away success, where if someone gets objectively better outcomes, but their expectations are higher, they somehow aren't doing better because the gap between expectations and outcomes is similar.

Inappropriately high standards from women is a thing I like complaining about myself, but that was not my point here. The point is that the look-based nature of online dating cuts both ways: Women can advertise themselves better, yes, but they can't themselves effectively select for the things they care more about, while it is trivial and obvious for men. So in practice women are naturally disadvantaged in online dating - being able to better advertise yourself while not getting what you want is a net negative - and this disadvantage translates into them not going on the platform in the first place.