What I don't understand with this argument, is sex is usually a 1:1 activity that takes up a bit of time (like interviewing). Even if you have a population H (for Hottie) of men every woman would wave her panties for (doubtful but let's assume) the men in H can't possibly have sex with every woman every day. Meaning some of the women, even if they can have sex with the men in H, and it probably does affect how they view men in not-H (less well due to inferior H factor), must be spending enough time sexually frustrated to be available for not-H.

Indeed, if you look at sex not as a matching problem between males and females, but as an event distribution, then let's say "desirable men" want sex at a rate of K events per week and all women want sex at a rate of J events per week. Let's say the population has 10 desirable men, 90 undesirable men, and 100 women. In the past where the desirable men were married off, they had sex avg(K,J) times per week, for a total of 10xavg(K,J) events involving a desirable man, leaving 90xavg(K,J) events involving an undesirable man.

Let's say now all those people move in the new, "casual" world. The desirable men can have sex to their heart's content: K times per week. The undesirables must use the remaining times that a woman in the population would like to have sex but the desirables are satiated: 100xJ-10xK. Now, if 100xJ - 10xK > 90xK, so if men and women want sex roughly as many times, or if women want more, undesirable men are not really negatively affected. Indeed they have more variety under the new system.

However if J = 0.5xK, then roughly half the undesirables are unsatisfied, or they're all unsatisfied half the time, which does feel like a step down. Anecdotally I don't think it's the case that 50% of less desirable dudes are just not having sex, but let's say it's 10, or 20%, that's believable. It would mean women want sex slightly less than men -- 10 or 20% less. Note that the 10 or 20% not having sex aren't necessarily less desirable than the other undesirables, just less lucky.

Clearly a solution for the leftover guys is obvious: They must increase all women's libido past the points where the hotties can satiate it.

(Obvious caveats: silly analysis, doesn't model gay people, assume libido is constant or normally distributed across populations, assume partners for every event are independent, etc)

This has actually been studied quite a bit, and it would appear that the increased optimization of dating apps has caused a huge inequality in the dating "market". It can even be quantified with the Gini Coefficient, a measure of economic inequality. [1]

> It was determined that the bottom 80% of men (in terms of attractiveness) are competing for the bottom 22% of women and the top 78% of women are competing for the top 20% of men.

And anecdotally, it is consistent with what I have observed. I am troubled by the effect this might have on our society. I am sure that it is sowing resentment among those who have been left behind. Our society is more sexualized than ever; people are bombarded with messages about how great sex is, and yet it is less available than ever.

[1]: https://medium.com/@worstonlinedater/tinder-experiments-ii-g...

I'm arguing that if sex is more casualized, which it is, then partners are not "competing"; they can have sex with Man A on Monday and let Jody from Accounting have Man A on Tuesday.

The failure modes for this system are twofold: if women want sex much less than men, by a huge factor (which for casual sex may well be true) or if the most desirable men are insatiable nymphomaniacs and quite capable of finding a spot for every groupie. I'm not sure if the second part is amenable to change, but I'm sure it's possible to increase women's libido because surveys tend to indicate women have much less satisfying sexual experiences than men do, so changing that would show room from improvement.

It really isn't a distribution problem, although it is tempting to look at it that way. But I think you are neglecting human behavior.

It would seem that what is happening is that the majority of women are competing for the attention of a small minority of men. The goal of the players is not to make sure that the most people have sex.

> if men and women want sex roughly as many times, or if women want more,

In my experience, this is counterfactual.

Also, I have a hottie buddie who has a lot of sex with a lot of women. Suspect he can easily keep ten women satisfied, on average.

Yeah I haven't mention this, but my theory also suggest undesirable men may be even less well served if, for some reason, more desirable men also want more sex. If so then they could easily satisfy most of the women -- even if the undesirable men don't want sex as much, sex would unlock more social benefits of "interacting with a woman semi-regularly", and now that they aren't getting any, they also lose that.

If that is the case it would be interesting to know why desirable men have such outsized libidos. Is it that they are choosing sex over other activities because it is more rewarding for them?

A hunch is that the genetic traits that make a man physically desirable are the same that govern testosterone levels (increasing libido over mean).

Is there any reason to think desirable men have a differing distribution of libidos (vs the not desirable men)? A simpler explanation would be that they have more sex because they have more opportunity, no?

Lot of equations here. A non mathematical way to understand it is to look at societies where men can marry multiple wives. The rich and high status men have several leaving many men with none. These men with zero chance of reproduction become big social liabilities as they are easier to draw towards high risk activities like terrorism.

Would love to know if Cambridge Analytica saw related patterns here with the edge case types it was able to sway.

Maybe Facebook is the recruiting agency and dating apps are (at least a factor in) the cause!

> assume libido is constant or normally distributed across populations

Ouch.