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Notes -
Somewhat Contra Scott Alexander on Dating
Astral Codex Ten: "In Defense Of Describable Dating Preferences"
I say "somewhat contra" because there is a bit of a disguised Motte and Bailey here. The Motte is that describable preferences like age, race, culture, politics, relationship style, and desire for children have strong predictive and filtering power. This is obviously true. The implied Bailey is that modern dating apps suck, long-form dating profiles like old OKCupid and "Date-me" docs are much better, and the nerdy rationalist coke-bottle glasses waifu you've always dreamed about is just around the corner. This is false.
In the old days, dating sites were based around writing a profile and answering questions about yourself. In current year, online dating programs have converged around the "swipe" model. Why? One common theory I see is that users (customers) finding high-quality long-term relationships is bad for the app, because it causes users to leave and decreases the userbase. This sounds plausible, but if it were true we would expect to see a "two models" system. One mass-commercialized model where people looking for casual fun can swipe to find hookups, and a second non-profit or premium model where people can write long-form profiles to find high-quality partners. What we observe instead is convergence around the "swipe" model. Some would blame Match Group for buying OKCupid and monopolizing the market:
But Match Group isn't a monopoly anymore. In fact, their main competitor, Bumble, is also a swipe app. Sounds more like revealed preferences than evil capitalism to me.
Suppose OKCupid, being an early iteration of online dating, was an inefficient market. Whom would we expect this market inefficiency to benefit? People who are good at writing long-form engaging content for their profile of course. Who are the people currently telling you OKCupid was the greatest thing since sliced bread? Really makes you go "hmmm".
You already know.
Yes, age, race, culture, politics, relationship style, and desire for children are all vital filtering tools. The dirty little secret is that you can tell all of this quite reliably from only a few photographs. A picture is worth a thousand words. Photos are also harder to fake, thus making them a more credible signal of social information. If any doubt remains, it takes literally two seconds to scroll down and see her info.
Far from being the cause of our modern romanceless society, Tinder, Bumble, and Hinge are simply lenses into the inherent nature of the sexual market at the margins. Those who are both in demand and willing to partner up are long since unavailable. There is no law of nature, nor any other reason to believe that every person has a "soulmate". Some people just suck.
What has changed in the modern world is the quality of single life. In the past, before internet porn, before women could reliably hold down careers, people had to pair up. It was socially demanded, it was the only way to obtain sexual gratification if you were a man, and it was the only way to provide for yourself economically if you were a woman. The positive externality of these "sad" marriages was that they generally produced children.
People were also poorer in the old days. The economic benefits of marriage and mutual support meant an awful lot. Nowadays, people are single more often because the BATNA doesn't mean running a huge risk of being destitute.
And, given just how much household labor it took to live a comfortable life in the days before dishwashers, wrinkle free clothing, vacuum cleaners, disposals, microwaves, etc, the benefits of just having a second set of hands meant a lot a lot. A bachelor in 1940 couldn’t maintain his own household, and a woman in 1940 couldn’t work full time over and above the work involved in doing the housework in her own household.
It was no accident that second wave feminism got going in the cities.
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Date-me-docs or any other "long-form" online dating method is a complete meme and I honestly cannot believe that rationalists are so into these things. They're all just cheap talk, smoke, and mirrors. When you're looking for a partner, you need to filter out a ton of people, and you need hard verifiable information to do that. The only hard and verifiable information for people who are otherwise strangers on the internet are:
The rest is just totally made up and fakeable. This is obvious because if you look at the date me docs, all the word-words-words are almost always the same for everybody. You like someone who is thoughtful? You want to have witty and deep conversations? You're into AI and futurism? Wow, truly a rare find.
You need to actually spend time with people in person to figure out the important things. Tinder/bumble/the rest are so popular because they prioritize the information that is verifiable online and get you to actually go and meet up with people. I'm married and I met my wife on hinge, but before that I was extremely active and successful with dating apps, some combination of tinder/bumble/hinge/raya. So take these observations in that context. Also, as a man who dates women these are comments about women but I'm sure something similar applies to men.
(a) A few weeks ago there was an article in the NYT about date-me-docs and it featured a woman in the Bay Area who had one of these. Pretty typical Bay Area woman: Asian, tech worker, pretty cute, had her shit together. And had a super wordsy date-me-doc with a ton of detailed words-words-words. I cold emailed her to set her up with my friend, who is recently single. My email was a pic of my friend (tall and handsome) with two or three bullet points about his background (recruited athlete at very prestigious university; into outdoors stuff), and within a few minutes she responded with her number. For all that hubbub about a date-me-doc, my tinder-lite profile of my friend did the trick.
(b) I travel a lot for work and would almost always use bumble when I had a free night. Bumble lets you specify that you're looking for a relationship. You can just ignore this. I would swipe on these women, match, I'd clearly explain that I'm only there for a couple days, and they'd nevertheless be eager to meet up and hook up. Often these little meetups would lead to a nice connection and we'd keep talking/meet up again next time we were in one of each other's cities (I tend to match with high-income, fancy job, lots of traveling types), but ultimately both parties would know these were just casual flings with a limited shelf-life. That girl whose date-me-doc or coffee-meets-bagel profile talks about how she is looking for a serious relationship is definitely, DEFINITELY fucking randos on the side. Don't forget it. And inversely, women who say they're looking for "something casual" are very often the ones to crazily show up at your office a few months later wondering why you haven't seen them again.
It's much, much easier to fake a personality (especially through some self-promoting long-form writing) than it is to fake how you look. On my myriad dates the frequency with which someone's personality doesn't match what they seemed like online is way higher than the frequency with which someone's looks don't match their pictures (almost never). If you're getting looks catfished a lot, you really scraping the bottom of the app barrel or you need some practice in recognizing how fat women use angles or how chinese women use filters. The point is, there's only so far someone's curated self-description can get you. You just need to meet up.
This confusion is so bafflingly common that there are entire movies and stock characters about this. When you're at work, or in a coffee shop, or generically in public, are you talking about all the weird sexual shit you're into? No? Does that mean you're not into it? Same for women. Of course women are sexual beings, and of course they are not super open about this at inappropriate times. And there's basically no way for you to connect the public to the private until the very last minute. The distance from that introverted Korean software engineer you just met showing you her favorite books to begging you to fuck her throat or cum inside her without birth control, is like, 5 minutes, tops.
Given this, why put any stock what-so-ever in some pre-planned about me document that has no predictive power?
Almost all women have at least tried the apps. But even if they aren't currently on the apps, their friends are, and this impacts them both directly and indirectly. I have matched with women on the apps who set me up with their not-on-the-apps friends, which always leads to app-like behavior (hooking up). This is not to mention any of the general equilibrium impacts of the apps, which are probably huge.
The ONLY benefit I can see of long-form/date-me-docs style of online dating is that it's just another chance to put your profile in front of someone who might not have already seen it or swiped too quickly on a bumble/tinder-style app. So, like, sure, if you have fun writing about yourself and don't mind an embarrassing document being out there, go ahead and do it. But the likelihood that your manic rationalist dreamgirl is going to find you and date you from this is basically 0.
Indeed. Which is why one should keep in mind that if you're taking it slow with your potential The One on cute, quirky coffee, art exhibit, kayaking dates or whatever, it's likely some other guy(s) has/have banged or is/are banging her through (a) Netflix and Chill-type "date(s)." You're not the only guy she's talking to. And until you've banged her, you're just another random chump in her phonebook texting her, if she even bothered to save your number at all.
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You seem to have an extremely warped view of female promiscuity. I'm in my late twenties and am a PMC, cosmopolitan:
The average 'number' of most of my friends (after 10-14+ years of having sex) is somewhere between 4 and 12 sexual partners. There are absolutely some very promiscuous outliers (and the opposite), but most women aren't 'fucking randos'. A substantial proportion of them have never had sex outside of a 'real' relationship. Most have never fucked someone from an app. Almost none of these people are socially conservative (actually the only right-adjacent, tradcath-meme-posting, red-scare-listening woman I know is one of the most promiscuous people I've met lol), almost all grew up in NYC etc.
I think for some men who get a lot of self-worth from casual sex, admitting that the women they're fucking are all from the most promiscuous decile of the female population dampens their perceived manly achievements. They would much rather believe that the girls they're fucking are outwardly 'good girls' caving into their masculinity while stringing along a sexless beta provider orbiter on the side until they decide to settle down, than accept that they're part of a (comparatively) small group of promiscuous men sleeping with a (comparatively) small group of promiscuous women who are, for lack of a better term, easy.
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I think that for the kind of people who are into writing dating docs, it probably takes them about 10 minutes to write one, because these tend to be highly verbal people. And the downside is probably almost non-existent. It is unlikely that the kind of person who would dislike the fact that you wrote a dating doc would ever find out that you had written one unless you post it on your Twitter or some other social media that is similarly famous and where anyone can see what you write. And there is nothing forcing people to post these things on Twitter as opposed to other social media. So if you really feel like writing a dating doc for some reason, you can easily do it and then just go also try to meet people at the bar or whatever. So I think that the whole debate about dating docs is rather pointless because it doesn't take much time investment to write a dating doc and in practice it is probably unlikely to cause any harm.
That said, yes, one probably should not pin all of one's hopes on a dating doc. Better to try multiple ways of finding sex partners.
I agree, these are all nerds in their weird little Silicon Valley nerd community who love writing and maybe this works for them, who knows.
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the definitely here makes this statement false. Many women have hook ups on the side while claiming to only want a serious relationship but the percent is not 100. Furthermore as guy hooking up with such women it is easy to overestimate the percent as you are quickly filtering out those who don't.
Yes, I'm sure the percentage of potential employers who are lying about having a collegial atmosphere, high impact, great advancement opportunities, excellent work-life balance, and unlimited PTO that everyone totally uses freely is not 100%, but if job-hunting it'd be foolish and naive to act based on any other assumption.
I had always assumed that, “🔍 not sure yet”, was the plausible deniability option, but perhaps it’s not subtle enough if rubes like me can figure it out.
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The 'definitely' here means: If you meet 'that girl whose date-me-doc or coffee-meets-bagel profile talks about how she is looking for a serious relationship' you should assume she is fucking randos on the side. Not: 'I counted and it's exactly 100% guys'.
But the actual statistics show that participation in casual sex is very low, not even a majority of women do it.
It's a case of a promiscuous minority having an outsized impact on the market, because they remain on the market longer.
"Not even a majority" is a wide range, though, and there's a big difference between 10% and 49% when it comes to this sort of thing. I'm also curious how such a fact was even determined, because just because someone believes they're not having "casual sex" doesn't mean the sex isn't casual. Whether or not it was casual is often determined after-the-fact, often due to mismatched (sometimes outright fraudulent) expectations beforehand.
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It's not the sexual market -- or well, it may be, but the crappiness of dating apps doesn't show it. The problem with dating apps as a category is the incentives are all wrong. To keep making money you want to keep people paying, not pair them up.
Wouldn’t this be like saying the incentives for a physical therapist is to keep you injured and thus coming back for treatment? Doesn’t make sense to me, and I think the incentives for online dating is to dominate the dating landscape to the point where it’s the de facto way people meet. Successfully pairing up couples who then speak highly of online dating lines up with that incentive.
This is a perennial accusation against chiropractors.
The difference is chiropractors can't cure you, so they can't produce evidence that they're trying to help.
Whereas real doctors generally do cure people when physically possible.
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It would also be like saying that the incentives for drug dealers is to keep you addicted and thus coming back for more, even if it's damaging you.
It's important to remember societal expectation (and a certain degree of legal heft). I think if definitive proof emerged that dating apps were deliberately trying to promote a kind of shallow hook up culture at the expense of longer lasting relationships, people would be far less bothered than if it turned out there was a conspiracy among a large body of physios to keep their patients injured.
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If they could get away with that, some of them would. But there are incentives the other way, like the insurance company not paying them for long, or the injured person noticing and quitting.
With dating, that doesn't work. People know online dating apps are hellscapes, but the alternative is Netflix and no chill, so they use them anyway.
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I think this is wrong and also cope. On some level, every company has incentive to sell a defective product so that people keep coming back for more. In the real world, people get wise quick and leave.
There is no shortage of “uncool” places that women avoid for fear of being hit on by low-status men, yet Tinder has been around for ten years. It is in fact the place where the hot singles in your area hang out.
An incentive to sell a product which wears out or becomes obsolete. And there are counter-incentives. But the counter-incentives are mostly absent for dating apps, for various reasons. The free-for-customers model basically can't be used for a "durable" dating app, because the normal way you make money off more durable goods is by charging more for them. But to charge more for a "durable" dating app, you need to convince customers you actually are "durable". And you actually have to DO it, unless you're running a short-term scam. But to do all that, you need to get people to sign up (because you can't match people unless you have people to match)... and why would they? Who would sign up for a paid dating app? Mostly those desperate and striking out on the free ones... which means you'll get a lot of desperate men and a few desperate women, all probably with "issues", and you can't run your business with that material.
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Yeah, dating apps clearly capture a small subset of the sexual market. Firstly, user numbers aren’t ‘that’ high compared to truly universal apps like Instagram which a substantial proportion of non-elderly people have. Tinder reports 75m “active” users worldwide. Depending on source maybe 20-30% of those users are women. Many of those women (I say from personal experience with my friends and women I know) never meet anyone from the app, it’s purely an attention button when they’re single through the ‘likes’ / swipes feature. Other occasionally text someone but don’t meet up. Of the women I know who have used Tinder, I’d estimate maybe 20% have actually dated or fucked someone they met on the app.
So again the relevant grouping shrinks. The population of Tinder and Bumble and Hinge who are having sex with people from the apps are largely a small, promiscuous sub-group that is unrepresentative of much of wider society. Even in gay society, which is much more promiscuous and has fewer inhibitions about sex, daily Grindr users are a minority, just three or four million worldwide on by far the top platform for gay hookups, when it’s likely at least a hundred million gay men live in countries where Grindr is the main gay hookup app. And indeed comprehensive surveys of the gay community find substantial numbers of older gay men in largely settled relationships; the specific world of the urban gay scene, white parties, gay clubs, Grindr, drag race fandom etc is a subset of a more more heterogenous community. 70% or more of gay men in some surveys have downloaded Grindr, but the number regularly hooking up on it is a tiny fraction of that.
What is really the case is that hookup apps, as open meat markets, capture the imagination of people interested in sex and dating (which is many people, I’d say), both becuase they’re very public and because they’re interesting - and, of course, because they represent a source of a lot of data. A huge amount of modern research on the sexual marketplace is based on the OkCupid stats released like a decade ago, for example. Collecting data is the single biggest burden by far in psychological research, especially if you’re not just studying college students.
The emphasis on a tiny proportion of highly promiscuous urbanites therefore heavily screws up our understanding of the romantic marketplace; average people are much more boring by comparison and require much more work to study.
Well, why not?
It’s obvious from the statistical and anecdotal data points that there is a substantial fraction of young women who are voluntarily choosing to stay single. I think knowing why they are doing this is the key to understanding the problem and potentially finding a solution (if one exists). Given that they are on apps at all, they must be at least “interested in sex and dating” as you say.
If the answer is that these women are fucking turbochad on the reg, or are minor chad’s side piece, then the incels are right and the solution is to crack down on all forms of heterosexual nonmonogamy.
If the answer is that these women would love to be in a relationship with guys who really exist and who would mutually agree, but matchmaking is the rate-limiting step, then Scott and friends are right and the solution is for Elon Musk to buy Tinder.
If the answer is that these women straight up do not want to be involved romantically or sexually with the men who fell the same about them, and have better quality of life single, then the solution is probably to go all-in on VR AI waifus and rev up the industrial baby-making factories to continue the species.
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The theory that people are exposed to more people than they would have decades ago (because of social media, swipe apps, etc) , and so standards have risen, is interesting.
A similar argument has been made about the surge in 'hustle culture'. In 1970, the average middle class person in the average middle class suburb rarely saw the lifestyle of the genuinely rich, only occasionally in a James Bond movie or a period drama or something. There were people who went their whole lives without ever seeing what a first-class international airline seat even looked like. In the 21st century, again a combination of reality TV and social media means that far more people see just what being rich is like (at least in terms of material goods and experiences), creating envy and making them want to 'hustle' harder. "Everyone" on Instagram is staying at $5000 a night resorts or flying first-class on Emirates or whatever, and they're saying you can too if you only try harder.
There's that, and also the fact that people aren't as willing to accept straight-up no-bullshit tragedy in order to get married. Fifty years ago, a short guy might've been willing to settle for a batshit crazy woman who hits him and tried to strangle their 11-year-old son once...as long as it happens behind closed doors. An awkward guy might've been okay living What's Eating Gilbert Grape with a 450-pound wife and a couple of kids. An autistic woman might simply accept being with a shithead that beats her and the kids. Now that incomes have gone up, religion isn't as strong as it once was, and the Internet has given even isolated people a clearer understanding of what's NOT NORMAL as well as top-tier bullshit to strive for...these people are choosing to cut their losses and remain single.
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That or it's that wages have stagnated, particularly for the lower segments of the workforce, and a lot of jobs have left and/or been replaced by more precarious alternatives. Standing still and just working a random job you got early forever may not seem as viable.
At my warehouse job the old-timers both complained and bragged about the situation: they allegedly had much better pension plans that no new employee was getting but also hadn't gotten a good raise in a while and the company was chipping away at their privileges. Meanwhile the newer workers were basically swapped out every so often to stop them becoming permanent and getting similar benefits (iirc this was a thing from the last negotiation)
The older workers arguably "hustled" - just in the one workplace. They looked forward to long overtime at peak demand so they could make money. The younger workers couldn't really count on a permanent job there and, even if they got it, probably couldn't count on a great life as a company man giving living costs so I imagine hustle media selling them creative alternatives is way more attractive.
Which fits my impression that this dream is sold to people trying to avoid bad spots (Tate, for example, sells both hustle culture and PUA tactics to people who feel like they've lost in both markets, I also see it a lot in black media). Better off people have a more traditional "become a doctor or get a high SAT score" track.
Yeah. You also have a big difference between people looking for the best outcome and ones interested in the least bad outcome...these are very different things. Tate hustlers want to get rich, not be middle-income plumbers or something who have a decent chance of getting off the tools and starting a small plumbing business when they're 40. PUAs are more concerned with dating hot, loyal women than avoiding really fucked-up shit that sends people to the hospital and morgue.
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I agree with your opening that Scott has a bit of a Motte & Bailey, but it seems to me like you might be doing a bit of the same. Mind defining your terms a bit?
I read Scott's post as creating a dichotomy between
a) Looks "Only" dating apps. E.g. Tinder
b) Personality/Attribute based dating apps. Among these are two basic groups: the long form (words words words. aka Date-Me Docs) and the filterers (the type where you match based on stuff like 100 dimensions of compatibility).
I personally think group b is should be split into these two for any sort of analysis.
From my perspective you are arguing against b being effective/popular by categorizing parts of "b" into group "a".
In my opinion this is EXACTLY what we do have. Tinder brands itself (and is widely agreed upon) as the hookup app. Hinge brands itself as "The App designed be Deleted." At a glance they look similar because they share some UI elements (swiping), but I think it's a mistake to lump them together. The fact that the UI is similar tells us something about mobile ergonomics, but not as much about the users' goals or the backend. At the risk of sounding like a Hinge shill (which maybe I am?), the matching algo and UX is pretty different and lead to different outcomes. I know several close friends who have great success on Hinge, at one point I may write an effort post about optimal dating strategies.
Even if they were the exact same app, the userbase and their motivations matter. While some (read: many men) use it for hookups that doesn't define it for the same reason that although many people use LinkedIn as a less (differently) competitive dating app, it should not be viewed as such.
tl;dr: "Describable dating" apps exist. They are popular.
As an aside, Dating Docs are a very eccentric approach that will turn off the vast majority of potential partners. I would strongly discourage anyone from having one. To the extent they are at all effective I think it's solely for the ability to signal you are open to advances. This can be done with a less costly signal.
edited to add line breaks.
I agree that the "date me" docs give me the willies, and Hana is someone I'd run a mile from in real life. But the thing is, with modern dating apps, I don't know if it's so much "revealed preferences" as "race to the bottom".
Sure, OKCupid etc. were the first ones. But Tinder was copied as a Grindr clone for straights, and Grindr was all about being a hookup app. The new, younger generation of customers were then looking for something like Tinder, and the long-form old dating app models had to adapt or die. And so now there is the swipe culture and the complaints about that.
That's because of competition. Young men in their 20s are competing with men in all ranges for young women in their 20s, because men from 20-80 have a preference for women in their 20s. So a guy who's 24, maybe still in school, not doing much of anything yet with his life is competing with the 30 and 40 year olds who are established and have money to wine and dine the 22 year old women. Go to the 30-50 year old women and see what rates match up there. And even historically, this was so; May-December marriages because the man was richer and the bride's family thought this was an excellent match, or was a widower looking for a second (or third) wife happened. That put younger men out of the running too.
Are we going to ask men who are 30+ to kindly stick to dating women of their own age? I wonder how well that would go down, with the same people proposing that the answer is to deny women higher education and economically force them into marrying at a young age! I don't think we can blame 22 year old Cindy for preferring 35 year old George over 24 year old Josh, even if down the line George will still be chasing women in their 20s when he (and Cindy) are in their 40s - Josh will be doing the same thing, after all!
In conclusion, I totally agree that there is no such thing as a soulmate and it's a concept I'd love to kill with fire. It makes the pressure on romantic love and achievement that much greater, it makes people dissatisified and always with one eye out for the better, perfect partner instead of the one they're with, or could be with. There's both too much expectation around marriage (your spouse will be all-in-all to you instead of you having a range of friends and other relationships - not poly, let me hasten to add - outside the marriage) and it's too easy to get out of your current marriage and set out on chasing the soulmate this time round for a second marriage.
I think the part about the lack of friendships for men is very important, too, and part of that problem is the American set up that you make friends in school, then you move off to college, make friends there, then leave home and go somewhere completely different to get a job. And if you don't keep in touch with your college friends or make new work friends, then you're going to end up without friends (unless you marry and your wife does the traditional role of maintaining friendships by keeping the network of contacts going with the Christmas cards, emailing or phoning, invites to life events like marriages and so on). There's not the same "stayed in the local community" expectation anymore, so you leave all your early roots behind and then (seemingly) men find it harder to find and make lasting friends. That's what I was saying about making marriage the be-all and end-all to serve all these social functions, when there used to be things like friendships and membership of societies outside the home.
Another factor is polygyny, on top of the possible age and reporting differentials that have been mentioned in this thread.
Young women are sometimes, perhaps often, dating the same men. Whether wittingly or not, or somewhere in between due to preselection and female mate-choice copying, sometimes with a dose of willful obliviousness. "tee hee, my boyfriend is totally separated from his wife, but he's such a good father that he spends most of his time with them." Some are even more brazen and upfront about dating married men, or men with (a) girlfriend(s).
It's like a set-up for a Norm Macdonald (RIP) joke: "A recent report says that many more young women are in relationships than young men. Some of the men these young women are dating are even in a relationship with only them."
I genuinely don't understand women willing to have affairs with married men. Girl, he's already lying to and deceiving his wife, why do you think he's going to treat you any better or be faithful to you? "Oh he's going to leave her, oh it's her fault she won't divorce him, oh he's only staying for the kids" - no, you're the side piece except in the very rare cases where marriages do break up and the adulterers marry each other.
I do. Attraction is not a choice: For the most part, it's not a plan or anything, especially not initially. Men (including married men) who have credible signals that they have sexual access to other women in their lives induce more tingles than men who do not, just as tall men are more attractive than short men.
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And, as the saying goes, the man who divorces his wife and marries his mistress leaves a job vacancy.
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This is my best guess at the moment as well. I think the revealed preferences indicate that, for most women most of the time, being the 5th in line to a 9 or 10 is better than being the one and only to a 6 or 7. After all, generally the 6 or 7 is still an available option if the 9 or 10 doesn't work out.
Pretty much. Chicks often prefer being the n’th sidepiece of a Chad rather than having a whole Brad to themselves, especially if they can keep teasing enough crumbs to Brads to keep them orbiting as back-up plans.
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We already do, at least a little bit. 2rafa's said below that this doesn't happen THAT much, and census data about marriage bears that out.
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It's not really because of this, the data doesn't suggest any substantial number of 22 year old women are dating or fucking 40 year old men. Of course it happens (and moreso than the gender-inverse situation), but it's not the cause of the discrepancy.
The cause of the discrepancy is almost certainly just the long-observed difference between what men and women consider a 'relationship'. It's the same thing as when your buddy tells you his relationship of three years with a girl "isn't that serious", while she's telling her friends she thinks he's going to propose. In the end, he's posturing to his friends and she's posturing to hers. A woman has an ongoing monogamous relationship with a man, she puts down that she's 'in a relationship'. A man has a monogamous relationship with a woman, but thinks he's a lothario who surely could be fucking another chick if he put his mind to it which he doesn't, and puts down 'single' because he 'technically' doesn't call her his 'girlfriend' and hasn't yet introduced her to his parents.
I have observed this exact situation (a monogamous relationship on both sides that woman considers 'relationship' and man considers 'fwb' or 'a casual thing') countless times. Usually they end up together and get over their own coping strategies about settling down.
Technically, they are both single but in a case like that (if it's going on for more than a year), I think the term for such a guy is "dickwad". If it's monogamous, exclusive, engaging in sexual activity, and long-term it's a relationship, Algernon. If you just meet up for coffee, lunch, and going to the movies, it's simply dating (by older definitions) but not serious and indeed need not be exclusive (women and men could have had several 'dates' like that with different people going on because they were seeing several people casually but nobody exclusively or seriously).
No wonder surveys are all biased towards the reported experiences of women:
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The article itself attempts to explain the discrepancy as follows:
(1) Women are more gay now (which I take leave to doubt) (2) Older men, younger women (which is my position) (3) Women are choosier (again, that well may be; if there are more men than women, then women have a greater choice. But if there are more men than women, then of course there will be some men who aren't getting dates).
The thing is, there are seemingly as many women saying they can't get a man who wants to commit as there are men complaining they can't get a date. It does seem to be that older women aren't finding men in their age range (and by "older", I mean 30+) and while that may be 'unrealistic expectations' and standards set way too high, I think it's also that those men are chasing - and winning - the younger women.
This study is a bit all over the place, as it is covering decades so it jumps around from 2000s to 2010s, but the key changes seem to be:
(1) Dating has declined, though this may be due to changes in terminology and what people regard as "dating" (2) Cohabitation has increased (3) Marriage rates have decreased (4) While divorce rates are down, so are remarriage rates
So I think cohabitation has largely replaced marriage, and my own view has long been that if you aren't married within a couple of years of 'getting serious' then it's never going to happen, a view that seems to be borne out as below, and women should stop being surprised that "my partner of seven/ten/fifteen years just left me for a younger woman!" because yeah, he was getting free milk all those years and now has traded in the old cow for a younger heifer:
Age of first marriage has also gone up, and I think that's in part down to the acceptability of cohabitation and the view that "you shouldn't just rush into marriage, live together first to find out if you're compatible". In the 70s women got married at 21 because 'living in sin' was frowned upon, nowadays that would be considered too soon and too young and you should live together first. Of course, if you do live together, you're less likely to get married. Another reason would be that women are no longer as economically dependent upon men; historically it was marriage or poverty, but now women can be self-supporting by work.
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In cases such as this, I'd say the crucial difference is that the woman expects the relationship to end in marriage, while the man has no such plans/expectations. Hence the two different sorts of posturing.
Often the man does end up marrying the girl, at least in my experience.
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It's the three years. As I said, if he isn't proposing by then, it's never going to happen, which is why women think "yeah, this is serious and heading that way". If you're only together a year and one or the other of you gives the "it's not you, it's me" speech then sure, it wasn't that serious. But longer than that is - or should be - leading to definite committment.
That's why I think the Sexual Revolution was a bad deal for women, no matter how the feminists of the day thought they could take on male sexual values and enjoy the same kind of benefits. The saying about free milk and the cow has value because it's true: why will a man take on the responsibility of marriage if he's getting all the benefits, including romantic, without entering into the institution? The same goes for women, of course, but I do think women still are being socialised with the view that a relationship should lead to marriage.
IMO it's a birth control issue as much as anything. Back in the days of spontaneous unwanted pregnancies, these things were a bit more self-resolving.
Shotgun weddings didn't get their name from the nature of the problem being self-resolving.
The possibility made you put a bit more thought into where you were putting your genitals, especially with the threat of the half-decade go nowhere relationship.
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I think so. One of the things that’s most important for women to realize is “if he wanted to, he would”. This is true for women, too, but men usually encounter it in dating or friendships (ie the archetypal friendzone ‘should I confess my love to my best friend, who is a girl?’ post) while women usually encounter it in either hookup situations where the man doesn’t want to commit at all, or in long term relationships where he doesn’t want to marry.
I think everyone has seen the same man go from entirely relaxed and putting in minimal effort in one relationship to being the consummate gentleman in another (in everything from chores to holding open doors to presents) and the sole difference is that he meets a girl he likes more and doesn’t want to lose. Almost every quality man I’ve met who got married has said that they knew very quickly after they met the girl.
At the same time, I think men naturally waver more about marriage than women and it’s not an awful thing for a man to be concerned about making the wrong decision, as long as he does come to one. But it’s very sad to have friends where you struggle to tell them that it’s not going to be them, especially if they’re really in love.
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Perhaps the "meta" for individual apps varies from place to place, but I think in certain cities Tinder was a "hookup" app for about five minutes before straight women began using it to look for serious relationships. Off the top of my head, I know at least three straight married couples who met on Tinder.
Data on heterosexual promiscuity suggests that any straight app used primarily for hookups would be an extreme niche thing, sure.
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I do want to point out that their are premium dating services and match makers out there. So it is a bi-modal market. Those match making services are not cheap though.
And I think the expensiveness serves a purpose: It keeps out the unserious.
The problem with the okcupid model of serious matchmaking is that people who just want casual flings can easily infiltrate a free service. They can string partners along for sex, and then leave for other opportunities.
So people who just want sex can use the swipe model or the okcupid model. But people that want serious relationships can't easily use both models.
There is also a coordination problem going on. Why is your match on this dating website? Are they interested in the same thing as you? It's not good for either party to waste time and energy on someone looking for something different.
I was using okcupid back when Tinder was just starting to be a thing. I remember realizing at some point that my usage of the website had painted me into a corner of only finding people for hookups. The few times I found relationship material they had created their profiles on a lark or at their friends request.
Okcupid was dying and would have been tenderized either way. They needed a more significant barrier to entry to prevent people from just looking for sex and hookups.
I was on one of these match maker services for free as a guy who got set up with women who were paying $50k+ per year for the privilege. The women might have been serious, but I certainly was not. Any of them could've found me and tried to fuck me for free on bumble.
On these services there are also women on there for free that the paypig men are getting set up with. I think they can't match the paypig women with the paypig men because the paypig women (30+, career successful, not necessarily hot or mother-of-your-kids material) aren't what the men are looking for.
Congratulations on being born on second or third base and running home! Let me guess: you put yourself through Harvard by working as a male model?
I understand that there are a decent number of obese, even morbidly obese, individuals in high powered careers, if doctors at a teaching hospital in the Northeast US are anything to go by. That being said...what exactly do you mean by "not being mother-of-your-kids material"? The only thing I can think of that would be disqualifying is functioning alcoholism, maybe stimulant use. Most of the other things I can think of - like serious mental illness or drug addiction - seem like they'd rapidly get people booted out of those high-powered careers. I suppose some might also be raging assholes, too...I don't know.
Some women just seem like, although capable in other ways, they would be extremely bad mothers.
Given the choice between marrying a randomly selected kindergarten teacher or hedge fund quant, both the same age and race and height/weight and the like, I’m picking the kindergarten teacher. And I suspect most men would be the same. Yes, I know the hedge fund quant is probably smarter and more generally capable. But she also seems like she would be mean to her kids on the occasions she pays attention to them at all. Maybe that’s just a stereotype. But I suspect lots of men have the premise that hasn’t worried about having kids before her biological alarm clock went off translates as ‘will be a shitty mother who resents having to do the work and makes up for it through neuroticism and misplaced high expectations’.
I don't know. I'm going to be a medical doctor. Once I'm an attending? Can I work just enough to keep my medical license and be a stay at home dad? I'd prefer the quant. She seems pretty intense and like she'd pass that on to the kids. Also like she would be blunt as fuck.
My bar for "extremely bad" is set a bit lower than "kind of a workaholic asshole"... that's bad, yes, but not on the order of "beats the kids", "denies them dental care when their teeth are rotting", "is an alcoholic and can't hold down a job", and other delightful things. This is bad, but not quite that terrible. Haven't met many quants. If they are anything like the female MIT students and radiologists and neurologists I met... sounds good. Maybe I'd think differently if they were surgeons just bc surgeons are often assholes.
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The huge discrepancy in Democratic/Republican voting between unmarried and married women really cries out for an explanation.
I wonder what the discrepancy is like if you control for age and opinion about abortion.
Women change radically with marriage and children. Far more so than men do.
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The phenomenon is real, but young men have substantially lower voter turnout than young women. Even in 2020, young male voter turnout was probably 44%. In 2016, it was maybe 37%.
And the gulf between parties is also partially explained by race - for example single black women have much higher voter turnout than single black men, and since black voters choose Democrats 90%+ of the time, that skews the gender-based stats. Look at this data (scroll down). Black women 18-29 have voter turnout of almost 50%, black men 18-29 have voter turnout of 30%.
The actual gap is between young white men and young white women. Even there though, the swing is nowhere near that describe in the link. Young white men go for Trump 51-45, young white women 42-55 for Biden. So there’s a 9-point difference, not a 30-point one.
Those stats are for young people in general, not young single people. If we make the assumption that people are mostly partnered up intra-party, then the small overall difference in political ideology by gender becomes much larger among those who are still single.
In 2011, just 20% of 18-29 year olds in the US were married. We can assume the current number is even less. So almost all these people are single.
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