The data from old OK-Cupid studies clearly show that most women are only immediately attracted to a very small subset of men. It is these men who are having all the sex. Seems like a powder keg over time as the excluded men become bitter and forced to postpone getting married and starting a family. I believe many of these men will eventually find someone once enough of the women who are now rejecting them face biological realities and are forced to settle if they want to have children.

Yep. The problems will be generational. On one hand you have the possibility that the men are very aware of this problem, and any relationship they find will be tainted by knowing they weren't good enough to party with but good enough to marry.

But more important than that is the time a couple spends actually getting to know each other is greatly cut down. Which then impacts how the children are raised.

I wouldn't be surprised if we see an increase in divorce and/or single family rates over time.

I am confused by this.... I would feel much better about myself knowing I was the one good enough to marry rather than the one who was only good enough to party with.

Specifically, I believe we've seen a devaluation and financialization of morality (what makes me a valuable person?) in a broader sense. Christopher Lasch caught the beginning of this back in the 70s, arguing that we now judge ourselves in terms of the views of our peer group rather than relative to an authority figure or multigenerational community.

The result is that sleeping around becomes a mark of virtue (at least, among men). This sentiment is at odds with more "traditional" forms of morality and virtue, particularly coming from religious traditions, and the resulting internal conflict can cause a lot of psychic distress, a lot of asking "who am I really?" and "am I really good enough, is she merely 'settling' for me?"

If you can navigate that conflict and feel satisfied that you were good enough to marry, then I applaud you for having a level head and for having your values in order. But I expect many men do not feel this way :(

If there are no kids, then for a woman that has spent the best years of her life dating attractive alpha males, an unattractive male is never going to measure up. Empirical evidence leads me to believe that kids can change that and be a stabilizing influence, bridging the gap between these models since both parties are able to make compromises by coming together and focusing on their kids.

There’s always a transactional aspect to being in a relationship. Are you good looking enough, healthy enough, wealthy enough, well connected enough, emotionally connected, personality etc.

It may not be fruitful to frame a relationship exclusively in those pros and cons terms, but that’s the way nature has always worked.

You can very well imagine a woman in Victorian times, keeping her virginity until her arranged marriage (in less developed Western countries this was still the case up until the 70s and 80s) to an average, physically unattractive male. The fact that he was the only male she knew sexually could very well provide the basis of a stable and healthy, loving longterm relationship, assuming he wasn't completely incompetent in giving her pleasure. This woman has acquired her model of a sexual relationship from the only man she ever knew. She never has a chance to find better, to compare.

This is definitely no longer the case. Women in developed countries are spending the formative and best years of their lives with multiple sex partners thus developing expectations and also reinforcing their baseline models and sexual norms acquired from said interactions. An average physically unattractive male looking for a stable longterm relationship faces very slim odds with this type of woman -very prevalent in the West- today unless he performs massive compromises and lowers his requirements.

I don't want to sound regressive or socially conservative, but this obviously does not bode well for the future of these societies. A permanent, ever-rising underclass bombarded daily with norms of sexual desire and models that it can never meet. One should expect the incel phenomenon -still at its infancy- to drastically intensify. Life-like sex robots may alleviate part of the problem but are probably at least 50 years away. Let us hope that VR comes together in providing alternate meaning-generating realities, sooner.

Do you mean an average physically unattractive male has a better chance of acquiring an average physically unattractive mate?

The mere idea that a society where a woman may have multiple sexual partners to compare against and the idea and that a man may need to exceed the standard "completely incompetent in giving her pleasure" in order to win her affections is inherently unstable reads a lot like someone claiming heavier than air flight is impossible in the 1980s. It's utterly inexplicable. People have been having sex with more than one person for a LOT longer than the 80s. What did happen in the 80s is the beginning of a massive rise in inequality that began with the top 10% earning 26% of all income in 1980 to where we are at the present time where they earn half while the bottom 50% share around 10% between them down from 2O%.

What you are framing as a crisis caused by too much female sexual choice is in fact a crisis of inequality wherein females are choosing "not poor" and the group "poor" expands year after year. Vastly more females escape this trap because men overwhelmingly value youth and attractiveness while women want people with some degree of complimentary earning power.

More recently what has happened is that the internet has allowed more niche groups to connect with their fellows. Incels are a group not of those who aren't getting any but rather those who aren't getting any who have decided to blame society in general and more particularly women. They are fetishizing both self hate and hatred of women. In the context of their in group communication their behavior and statements that would in larger contexts be considered aberrant are normalized by familiarity because people confuse repetition with truth.

If you want to decrease the negative impact of this behavior address inequality, make mental health more broadly available at zero cost, keep shutting down such communities and start putting people in prison who publicly call for acts of violence against others.

Driving evil and maladaptive behavior into hiding means less people will encounter it. Thus fewer will let its poison turn their pain into evil, or begin to view it as normal.

Wishing women boinked fewer men is a complete failure of analysis.

> People have been having sex with more than one person for a LOT longer than the 80s.

This is not accurate for less-developed countries, which is what I mentioned. I've lived in eastern Europe during the 70s and the 80s, the social stigma for a woman having multiple sex partners before marrying was enormous. Doesn't mean it didn't happen but it was definitely not the norm. Today, teenage girls in the west go through sexual partners like they go through cell phones.

> What you are framing as a crisis caused by too much female sexual choice is in fact a crisis of inequality wherein females are choosing "not poor" and the group "poor" expands year after year.

Income inequality is a very weak factor and does not explain female hypergamy today. Spend two weeks living on campus in any US college watching poor but extremely attractive male students and you can validate that for yourself. Money does not buy love or sexual attraction. Spend some time on incel forums reading their posts, assuming you can see past the hate and lingo, and you will realize that most/all of them crave these lost-youth experiences. They don't necessarily just want a partner in their 30s or 40s, but to feel wanted and loved in their 20s. Once they realize that opportunity is gone forever, they have to pick up the pieces.

> Incels are a group not of those who aren't getting any but rather those who aren't getting any who have decided to blame society in general and more particularly women.

This is very superficial since you are not examining the root causes. Look at advertisements today, movies, sports, Facebook, Instagram, reality shows, series on Netflix. We are bombarded by models of sexual attraction every minute of every day, models that are so skewed towards a specific minority that your average physically unattractive male literally stands no chance whatsoever. It's these projected models that strongly reinforce female hypergamy (for both attractive and unattractive women) while at the same time pushing the unwanted males further into the abyss. The worst of all possible worlds. Additionally, not only have all artificial limiters (e.g. social stigmas and pressure towards non-promiscuity) been lifted but accelerators like Tinder have wreaked havoc. Carnage on a societal level.

> If you want to decrease the negative impact of this behavior address inequality, make mental health more broadly available at zero cost, keep shutting down such communities and start putting people in prison who publicly call for acts of violence against others.

If you take the OkCupid studies seriously (you should), then you'll realize how antithetical to any sort of progress your recommendations are. You can't hide this problem or explain it away by shouting mental illness. This is a huge chunk of the population at large and if you miss or deliberately ignore the root causes because they tend to make you uncomfortable then your approximation of reality is completely off and any sort of analysis that you're performing invalid. Look at smoking in its heyday. Imagine being blasted by "smoking is cool" ads, watching most of "successful" society smoke whilst you not being able to afford even a single cigarette. How would that make you feel? Is that a mental illness on your part? Is it not conditioning massively amplified by very specific agents and societal effects? Should you just learn to "deal with it?"

Now consider that smoking is neutral in terms of self-perception of how other people see you compared to sexual rejection by other living, breathing humans. The psychological damage of realizing one is not wanted can be immense. We are talking about a core biological need and for the vast majority of people reason to exist. Surrogate activities (video games, traveling, hobbies of all sorts) are the counterbalance but they're not yet good enough to make this problem disappear.

OkCupid research opened the floodgates but there will be additional studies like the one linked here and societal effects coming home to roost (as it's been clearly happening). At some point, those effects will be too obvious to be ignored or explained away. Let us hope that ways to manage this catastrophic problem manifest, before the ticking time bomb goes off.

After we freed the slaves im sure lower income laborers too poor to have been responsible for owning anyone were put off by having to compete for jobs.

Incels long for an imaginary time when naive women would have accepted their advances and been happy instead of chosen men like jobs or cars by comparing specs.

They rationalize away any actual responsibility for their own lives by pretending it's all down to immutable factors like height, race, facial structure and mock fellow incels for trying to improve health, self, or wealth because this would invite self blame for not doing so.

Inequality is a legitimate concern but this evil self hate isn't on society. We will have to help everyone we can with mental health support and for those who commit acts of violence and terror we have bullets and jail cells.

Do you have a better idea or would you like to indulge yourself in more nostalgia for a world that was worse for everyone except middle class white men?

Of course this self-hate is on society, to imply otherwise because your morals won't allow you to see the facts is to stick your head in the sand. Imagine having a heroin addict on withdrawal surrounded by people using heroin. Blasting him day and night with models that reinforce heroin usage and then blaming him for not being able to cope.

> Do you have a better idea or would you like to indulge yourself in more nostalgia for a world that was worse for everyone except middle class white men?

You didn't address any of my points and suggestions and you're implying that I'm "nostalgic about the past?" Is that really what you got from everything I wrote? Let me put it in plain terms. We have a serious problem here and ignoring it because it's confronting and/or treating it with "bullets and jail cells" is not going to make anything better.

I repeat myself but what specifically would YOU like to do about the problems you yourself have outlined. I think mental health support and fighting inequality are reasonable suggestions what is your counter offer. If you ran the world how would you fix it.

I think most of my worries stem from an increase in reactionary politics combined with a growing group of young, 'have-not' males. That seems to me like a particularly bad combination.

Has it? The question is not if people change. The question is who they choose and why - now, versus before.

> There’s always a transactional aspect to being in a relationship. Are you good looking enough, healthy enough, wealthy enough, well connected enough, emotionally connected, personality etc.

That doesn't explain the decrease in sex. As a group people are supposedly still about the same.

> It may not be fruitful to frame a relationship exclusively in those pros and cons terms, but that’s the way nature has always worked.

If we talk about humans, the article talks about the changing data. The proposed explanation is that views have changed. You're saying that views always have been like that. So there is a difference in data.

If you go back enough you’ll find that there is waaaay more choice now than before

This is all based on decades of empirical observations. On the plus side for men, it is definitely possible to learn to detect this extremely reliable indicator. On the minus side, one needs a lot of experience with many different women, which isn't the case with average, physically unattractive males.

On the other hand, people who have suffered at length can be quite grateful to find a decent person. Someone like that can make a great wife (or husband).

The guy who is among the top 10% of men is the one who is good enough to party with AND good enough to marry. However, though this guy has a plethora of women at his disposal, he can only select one for marriage.

For the women who weren't chosen, their first choice guy is no longer an option, so they have to settle for a plan B (that is, a less desirable man).

So even if you were "good enough" to marry, you weren't first choice in that either.

A marriage is about finding a person who fits with you, and you can build a life together. That is not the same person for everyone. My best partner is not the same as your best partner.

You say that "a marriage is about finding a person who fits with you, and you can build a life together". So take the viewpoint from a pragmatic woman's perspective; wouldn't these aforementioned traits be desirable because the man who possesses them is a candidate more likely to provide the best life to build together?

Second, there are a lot of other traits that aren't inherently good or bad; things like "do you like going out on the weekends or staying in" and "does your communication style work with mine?" and "are the things you are good at complimentary to the things I am good at?"

My best friend and his wife get along great, but both my wife and I can't imagine living our lives like they do. I am sure they feel the same about us.

This thread has been discussing the implications of the observation quoted in the article: "Sexual activity was largely unchanged among unmarried women, along with no notable decline among gay men, researchers reported."

So it's unclear what point you're trying to make in relation to that.

On the plus side if you’re in your early 30’s and economically stable and well enough off for your area your get to experience life on easy mode.

I got to experience that after my last brake up before I got fed up and went for something more stable and it was really an eye opening experience.

I pretty much spent my whole 20’s in a single LTR that ended so I never had to experience Tinder before but it was a whole other experience.

Also speaking from my own experience while I’ve experienced finding women more attractive as I got to know them better it wasn’t the same type of an attraction, as it wasn’t sexual but rather more complex in terms of seeing long term future possibilities and wanting to share experiences with them in order to enrich my own life, but it never really affected how physically attractive I found them.

Maybe I’m different, maybe men are different in general but at least for me I won’t settle for someone that doesn’t want to jump me or that I wouldn’t want to jump them to me it seems unnatural.

It's the difference between playing a game in easy vs nightmare mode.

This is all based on empirical observations. I am 55 years old, I've had more than 100 sexual partners in my life and a lot of relationships, some of them lacking the initial biological/animalistic sexual attraction factor I described here. I've been married twice, now divorced and in a long-term relationship with my partner. I have two daughters in their 20s.

Almost everyone wants to be desirable.

Yes, it was a tough and emotional week. But things are better out in the open and we have started to rebuild the relationship on love, not lust.

She did ask if I was having affairs. But I honestly said that I'm finished with sex now, I've just no time or interest in playing the chasing games. There are more important things in life.

> As I stated previously the average female “likes” 12% of men on Tinder. This doesn't mean though that most males will get “liked” back by 12% of all the women they “like” on Tinder. This would only be the case if “likes” were equally distributed. In reality, the bottom 80% of men are fighting over the bottom 22% of women and the top 78% of women are fighting over the top 20% of men. We can see this trend in Figure 1. The area in blue represents the situations where women are more likely to “like” the men. The area in pink represents the situations where men are more likely to “like” women. The curve doesn’t go down linearly, but instead drops quickly after the top 20% of men. Comparing the blue area and the pink area we can see that for a random female/male Tinder interaction the male is likely to “like” the female 6.2 times more often than the female “likes” the male. [2]

> The researchers determined that while men’s sexual desirability peaks at age 50, women’s starts high at 18 and falls from there. [3]

> “The age gradient for women definitely surprised us — both in terms of the fact that it steadily declined from the time women were 18 to the time they were 65, and also how steep it was,” said Elizabeth Bruch, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Michigan and an author of the study. [3]

[1] https://www.acog.org/patient-resources/faqs/pregnancy/having...

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

[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/15/style/dating-apps-online-...

These women tend to be wealthier on average, and thus have access to various “artificial” methods for conception. Egg freezing is becoming mainstream.

[1] https://socwomen.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/fact_2-2010-...

[2] https://www.cdc.gov/art/artdata/index.html

We had a friend over to our home, who earlier in life judged my partner for leaving a career to have children, and could not have a child of their own now. The regret during our conversation was palpable while she watched our children play in our backyard, and frankly it hurt my heart.

Reducing women to vaginas on legs that can't be obtained outside of tinder is a big part of why 1/3 not 80% of men aren't getting much play.

For other contributing factors I would look at generational differences in socialization and inequality.

Nowhere on the radar is "hypergammy" a piece of incel lingo not spoken but suggested.

Honesty I'm surprised to read this thread on hacker news instead of reddit.

Evidence shows that online dating is immensely dominant.

https://news.stanford.edu/2019/08/21/online-dating-popular-w...

Whether people use it to find relationships is a different question. I did not use it for that, but some of my friends did... (or tried...)

However, your theory doesn't hold up. The study found that men who had part time employment, no employment, or were students were more likely to be sexually inactive. There isn't any data that suggests that those men are only using Tinder and failing or anything else you described.

If you define inequality in terms of employment or wealth, you may be right, but that does indeed still suggest the culprit is hypergamy actually as women select men with better employment prospects.

Female choice is rational our society is not. We cannot fix anything if we cannot even identify the problem.

What is not true though is that this is entirely an economic problem. If it were entirely economic, then why did sexual activity decrease for men but not women? Is that because men gave up? Are men disproportionately likely to self sabotage? Are men disproportionately likely to suffer from economic inequality than women? Do men not care about economic status in partners but women do?

Furthermore men value youth far more than women do so a only moderately physically gifted 20 year old might be valued over her counterpart a dozen years older and twice as well off herself.

Young poor females are in a much better position to leverage their looks and youth.

Basically men pick boobs and youth and men pick status and ability to support and you have somehow identified the women as the parties making an irrational choice and labeled this hypergamy.

But it doesnt add up. Given that most relations are monogamous, both have as much sex as the other in a relation. So you either need a very high relationship turnover rate or sex outside of the relation to have this sex imbalance between genders.

Or maybe you need a very high age difference.

I also didn't say that men didn't have preferences either.

I don't think there is any disagreement so the word 'hypergamy' shouldn't be a dirty word.

However, I think the people expressing concern about female hypergamy are saying the same thing you are but that for men they might have broader taste and for women more narrow and that may lead to situations where vast swaths of men are un-dateable. I don't have any opinion on that scenario. I don't know much about it.

Definition of hypergamy

: marriage into an equal or higher caste or social group

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hypergamy

Here is how people actually use it online

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=hypergamy

> The tendency for women to deceive men and leech money and resources off them.

> An evolutionary psychology theory that beta males and feminists refuse to look at or even acknowledge exists. They will usually blame the MGTOW and MRA community for making it up, but that just shows their lack of research, even though these same groups will tell their detractors and opponents to "do your own research" or "educate yourself". The theory itself is the study that women seek higher status men and men with more resources to give her seed to the best possible mate. There is nothing inherently wrong with this, but left unchecked can cause societal problems.

> Evolutionary Psychology theory on the instinctual desire of humans of the female sex to discard a current mate when the opportunity arises to latch onto a subsequent mate of higher status due to the hindbrain impetus to find a male with the best ability to provide for her OWN offspring (already spawned or yet-to-be spawned) regardless of investments and commitments made to a current mate.

If good looking poor chicks and middle income+ chicks of all degrees of attractiveness want middle income+ men with acceptable social skills then poor men or people with bad hygiene, and or social skills will be left with the poor and unattractive portion of that Venn diagram.

Whats more the intersection of physically unappealing and poor is a much smaller group than JUST poor which is HUGE so not all of them will likely find mates.

If you want to bring up why don't the poor but reasonably attractive dudes just interact with the more financially well off females this certainly happens but it is a MUCH less successful strategy for a man.

No, Tinder is reality. It's naive to believe that just because it's a platform that facilitates communication and hookup that it's somehow disconnected from reality in it's own little microcosm or niche.

All Tinder does is reflect human behavior. Between Tinder, OkCupid and N other apps you have more than enough data needed to draw some very damning conclusions. Way beyond "more than enough", actually.

People who reject reality and live in their own little fantasy worlds will find themselves in for a bad surprise when they come to.

I mentioned this in a post further below - this is not new knowledge. Long before online dating apps, in the 90s, there existed alt.seduction.fast newsgroup that outlined all of this for people. Read Neil Strauss' "The Game" for some chilling truths, and then bring yourself back to 2020 and look at what is happening today. It isn't much different.

"a book about scared men who were afraid of women."

He also says he himself at the time of writing suffered from mental illness.

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/oct/10/neil-st...

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Truth-Love-Commitment-Puzzle-Male-ebo...

It seems harsh, but I see a lot of people externalize all their personal issues on perceived societal changes outside of their control, when really the the only change happening to society is the expectation that you treat everyone with equal respect.

The modern world is like being on a different planet.

E.g. if you're among roughly progressive upper-middle white people, your shibboleths are stuff like your comment, your ingroup that you're not allowed to overtly acknowledge exists but that you must still honour is progressive upper-middle class white people, and the outgroup you should show sufficient: A, hatred towards the rich B, disdain towards is lower-class white people.

Showing appropriate opprobum vers the outtribe might not be strictly speaking necessary, just highly recommended. Wouldn't want to be mistaken for them.

Well they are already kind of sitting out.

> the expectation that you treat everyone with equal respect.

Thats an old humbug. IMO it merely means respect for people or group who are ideological flavor of the season.

Most of them are too stubborn to deviate from "they just have to accept me the way I am".

Seriously, getting a nice haircut, dressing nicely, grooming yourself and smelling good has nothing to do with your personality.

In this sense, men have it way easier than women, because men can influence their chances significantly without much effort. And that doesn't mean "fake", it means presenting yourself.

It's pretty simple basically, if you want a woman to pick you, you have to offer her something. And the same will be true for the women, who you will expect to offer you something.

Anyway, colored men (mainly indian guys in my wife's practice) significantly increase their attractiveness by dressing nice and well groomed, so same rules apply.

But what I get from your explanation is that it's all the womens fault of not looking past that. Well maybe it's time for you to face reality.

This assumes people really want to do that. Children are too expensive unless you have a lot of resources already. I think if costs of basic living keep increasing the future is increasingly childless for many people.

Oil & gas has a major presence here in Houston, and is a huge employer of engineers -- not sure about compsci people, but probably them too. The salaries are not as high as California, but the effective housing-adjusted salaries are probably higher. You can buy a nice 3+ bedroom house in a safe neighborhood for $200-400k. When, in California, Google giveth and the landlord taketh away, that isn't really money in your pocket (except you still owe taxes on it).

People want control over their lives, and this is one of the chief reasons why people want to own homes. They want to do with their property as they see fit, have a place to truly call "home", provide a sense of security, and have a place where they can raise their children under ideal conditions where a landlord can't just raise the rent or evict them.

When aspects of self determination such as ownership are removed, people become demoralized. If people don't feel a sense of agency, but can fill the void with artificial fulfillment like TV, games, food and "travel", the likelihood that they're going to want to bring children into the world is going to be diminished.

Of course, for much of history, people didn't own homes. The difference between now and times gone is people would choose starting a family in order to fill that void. But when there's plenty of "soma" for everyone, and people's dreams feel out of reach, what exactly is the incentive for the average person to have children?

I do periodically feel a lack of agency from my kids and their needs basically controlling my life, but I also feel an immense sense of accomplishment for satisfying, or at least attempting to satisfy those needs.

Technically, you can raise children in a war torn country, since it obviously has happened for many millennia. But with the advent of birth control, it’s much easier to choose.

Having to move can mean your kid has to find all new friends, and if buying a home is a complete impossibility for you, you might be further down Mazlowe's hierarchy than starting a family, and might have a life that's more financially brittle than you'd want it to be when you're taking care of kids.

It's harder to compare housing but fertility rates are declining even in countries with free/cheap healthcare, daycare, and university.

I believe sex is an integral part of getting to know someone and determining long term relationship viability. That does not mean the connection with the person was made in pursuit of sex.

This of course doesn't change who is having all the sex, but the intention may be very different.

I feel like 100% of your comments in this thread could be applied to any current social justice protests and they would be just as out of place, but you'd get shot down. There are studies, there's data, but for you it appears being able to imagine other reasons has more weight, and the studies get waved away with as "imaginary social problems".

Why the hate?

Right, right, but nothing like that has happened here, yet you've imagined, shall we say, alternative facts as possible explanations of what has been scientifically studied. Why?

> It is exactly like visiting a white supremacist online community with a different target population.

To be honest, you sound like one, only with a slightly different perspective. They'd replace "incel" with "nigger" and spout pretty much the same stuff. If you showed them studies on police violence, they'd say "Maybe that isn't real and many in fact are just criminals", making up some random thing that may or may not explain something (without offering any statistics, of course, and ignoring statistics that suggest the opposite) and speak of "imaginary social issues".

Eliot Rodger, 2014 - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Isla_Vista_killings

I was a student at UCSB at the time. He killed one of my good friends. He was a hardcore incel before it was a thing. Many incel communities praise this monster.

That's a pretty gross way of looking at the world.

the parent poster

>> “Incel” terrorism is already much more common than class terrorism

My response

> Them being defective is a problem we can only address by making mental health services more available

The subject is people who literally commit acts of terror and murder because they themselves collectively blame women for not having sex with them and instead collectively gifting their virtue to higher status men instead of concluding that they are failing at the mating game. There is NOTHING that society needs to fix about itself in order to avoid mutilation and murder. The perpetrators of such crimes are defective in the literal not pejorative sense in the same fashion that a leaky gas line that is liable to blow up and kill people. Suggesting that resources be devoted to help such people before their actions harm themselves or others is the opposite of gross.

18-25 is a lot of fun, but if you want a relationship you either have to find a trust fund baby or become a sugar daddy which most men don’t want.

Hookups and casual dating with someone that is just getting by is fine proper relationships is much harder.

My current partner is just under 7 years younger than me (I’ve just turned 34) she has good enough of a career that if we can go to Tenerife or Ibiza on a whim for a weekend we don’t have to plan for it and even if I end up spending a bit more money she doesn’t feel like she’s selling herself out and I don’t feel exploited.

Even after 1 year in a relationship there is a big difference between buying a girl a drink or paying for dinner and paying for a flight and a hotel.

The good ones won’t be comfortable with the latter and you probably don’t want to get into a relationship with those who would expect you too.

Who wants to be last choice? Maybe many of these men will wise up and marry a foreign girl(despite the usual shaming) or just hire sexual workers.

Given that there are similar amount of girls and boys, this guarantees that younger men of next generation will have to compete with older men for same pool of women.

Given the ratio of men and women in Asian culture for example, it's a much crowder competition space. That's even more true considering the fact that a large percentage of those Asian women in the US are either highly educated, or from wealthy families that sent them study abroad. They look for partners who are equally educated/successful.

I don't think that assessment is wrong or offensive (although I wouldn't say "foreign").

I think a lot of the problem is culturally related. I've had far better relationships with people I've dated outside of typical white middle class US culture. US parents often inflate egos to absurd levels, set unrealistic relationship expectations, and frequently create terrible personalities, especially for their daughters.

"Easier" isn't inherently a bad thing in this context. I would argue dating someone with reasonable expectations who is actually kind, approachable, and less afflicted by negative culturaly induced behaviors is far more appealing than someone who assumes they're better than say 90% of the population which a lot of US women have adopted in their dating mentalities.

Did someone inflate your ego?

> especially for their daughters

Oh, I have a daughter and the message I tell her is “there are 1,000s of guys out there that would love to go out with you, don’t settle”

we compete for mates in relatively tight geographic circles. that means that one's attractiveness can change purely based on location (arbitrage in the american english sense of the word).

handsome, blue eyed, blonde haired men are a dime a dozen in Berlin, NYC and Seattle. that can be massively arbitraged in Latin America and SE Asia (possibly elsewhere); you suddenly have exotic and attractive features. similarly for wealth: $100K is mediocre in NYC and fairly rich in above locales. etc.

I think he literally means foreign. Like not in the US.

Is being a desperate choice of someone who faces "economic realities" so much better than being a desperate choice of someone who faces "biological realities"?

[0] https://www.marketwatch.com/story/can-american-men-ever-be-h...

I have no idea how class plays into this dynamic, but I assume it's not the poorest that aren't having sex, unlike in the societies where this dynamic works as a powder keg.

That being said, this little excursion into Google turned up some nascent evidence that this historical dynamic is shifting. The modern world is very odd in lots of different ways: wealth, recreational opportunities, the incredibly wide social circles one's exposed to. It's entirely possible that this dynamic has changed, but the research hasn't caught up yet.

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/03/an...

[2] https://d101vc9winf8ln.cloudfront.net/documents/33306/origin...

[3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5983495/

It's a classic case of correlation is not causation. Yes, there have been societies where men couldn't form families that were violent (like the Wild west in the US) but that doesn't mean that that was the cause of it.

Similarly, many on the left have long thought that porn viewing causes sexual violent crime against women. And there is ample evidence showing that men who view porn are more likely to be sexual offenders than non-viewers. But then came the internet and the amount of porn and porn viewers skyrocketed - but the amount of sexual violence against women didn't - therefore busting the theory.

In the same way, evidence from Japan, China, South Korea and even India means that there can't be a causative link between family formation being unavailable for young men and civil unrest.

Perhaps these counterexamples are evidence of additional factors, in cancer or in unrest, but they do not prove that a causal relationship doesn't exist.

Do you conclude that the overwhelming abundance of data that shows that smoking causes lung cancer is wrong? That there cannot be a causative link between smoking and cancer because there is a counterexample where it didn't appear? I would say that these other factors are also having an effect of comparable scale.

Data suggests that social unrest in China has increased in correlation with incel count. I would count that as supporting evidence for the theory above. But you're saying, correct me if I'm wrong, that, because the initial rate of unrest was so low, and the increase didn't push that rate above that of other countries, incels cannot be a causal factor in unrest?

Help me understand where we disagree here. What part of ´inability to start a family->unhappiness->social unrest' do you think is questionable?

Regardless of the theory.

I have found such X. In principle you agree, but you want to save your theory so you say "Well, if X and not Z then Y!" and that explains my counter example because my group probably had Z.

Here Z being the racist idea that Asian people are less violent than others and that that's why social unrest hasn't erupted in their countries.

You might be right. But then your theory is "inability to start a family and non-asian -> social unrest." Clearly, not the same as "inability to start a family -> social unrest."

Back to cancer, heavy smokers who did not develop cancer are an example of some X for which X->Y is false. Like you said, you would need to take a random sample of cases and see whether Y correlates with X against a control group.

You introduced the concept of Asian countries having lower rates of social unrest, and I have never said this is related to race at all. Perhaps you are reading into the genetic confound in the cancer example, but it was just intended as an example of a confound within the analogy. There are plenty of differences between life in these countries and elsewhere that can act as confounds.

I'm just trying to say that very few things are actually that causal in big complex systems. I'm trying to say that such issues are very likely have many-many factors, and we see an aggregate effect.

And so in case of such aggregates arguing for-against them with very simple first-order reasoning is kind of useless. Because each piece of data (supporting or counter evidence) just explains a part of the big picture. So, without accounting for all data we can't really make general statements about what causes the aggregate effect that we see.

That is exactly what is being done here.

Well, perhaps videogames and internet porn (both inaccessible in the past) could workaround that now ...

Sounds like mental health problems are even more rampant than we guessed. We should probably handle that.

If society's "normal" (which tends to include a "healthy sex life" or at least a supportive social community) becomes impossible for many to achieve, the question for many is no longer "maybe something is wrong with me?" and becomes "maybe society is the problem?"

Other than generalized chemical castration I don't see how you could eliminate the "problem" of most of the male population unfulfilled sex drive. For all its problems and unfairness, patriarchal society provides an answer to that problem, if an ugly one.

Traditional solution of the past was to lure them in the army and let them die in some foreign country.

Whether enough people would see such a thing as acceptable for it to become policy is an entirely different issue.

Mind if I ask what you had in mind to make you think that such a situation would dissuade someone from raising a son?

I'm not really interested in that kind of conversation, thanks though!

1) Civil society is much improved by encouraging as many stable partnerships between pairs of humans as possible.

2) Child rearing within intact families leads to significantly better outcomes on average than single parent households.

3) Societies with lower birth rates suffer financial/economic difficult in properly supporting their elderly populations.

And given strength difference between women and men, it is safer to be alone then with someone who is into outrage at 24 for not having partner yet.

Romantic relationships don't cure anger nor violence. But, women who believe so are the typical domestic abuse victim. They date guys thinking they will change them and blaming themselves for abuse.

I mean, abuse is a real thing (and both genders do abuse). But someone who can get so angry and is physically stronger is double bad news.

I can honestly pinpoint you the day my life changed forever for the better. It's the day I lost my virginity. That one moment where I felt myself being accepted made me realize I was good enough.

Ever since then, I'd become less angry, more confident, more loving of myself, more charitable towards other people's insecurities instead of positioning myself higher in some imaginary pecking order.

I am far from being truly non-judgmental. I am also still very competitive with others, not un-occasionally in some mean, vicious way. But I no longer feel completely rejected by women, which, for some reason, mattered so much before that very moment.

Obviously, I am just one person and my anecdote may mean nothing to the breadth of your experiences. But I can't agree with this one sentence.

That would be a.) unusual and not confirmed by any study b.) honestly still too much risk for an individual to get into relationship.

While I'm sure there may be many studies that illustrate the continued abusive behaviour of men who have romantic relationships, I ask myself whether it's possible to show how many men would've been otherwise angry and aggressive had they not experienced acceptance earlier in their lives.

And perhaps I have not specifically addressed your point that it is risky to date known angry people. And I am sure you are right about that.

The point I was making however is more about being a very young man, the insecurities felt as a teenager, the moments that can change the trajectories of their lives, before they become truly angry men. I only hope that other insecure young men could experience that kind of relief from anxiety as I did.

If you see sex as only proof of being accepted (as opposed to friendships and other social contacts), then I can see how it eases anxiety. It does not sound as if woman in question was important here.

If it is about physical aspect, prostitution sounds like fair way to solve it. If it is about philosophical or social aspect, making self worth less dependent on sex would help there.

The worth given by woman when having sex is however only illusion. Women deciding on having sex with you or not is not actually deciding on your worth. The range of reasons for sex varry quite a lot, from positive to negative, from emotional to practical or to physical or just routine. But actual decision making is not scoring of worth.

Who it was with mattered. Being desired mattered. Buying it would have felt empty for me.

> The worth given by woman when having sex is however only illusion.

This isn't the first time I've encountered this idea. I'm sure everyone is exposed to the idea from a very young age. As a teenager, I would've accepted it rationally but rejected it emotionally. Being told something like that would be as effective as telling a hormonal teenager to stop being so emotional.

And if I were one of these women, I'd probably do the same thing. Even if you can't marry a hottie, if you can have sex with one a few times, that still sounds like fun.

The other guys, who are "normal", and certainly not homely, just don't go out at all, even at what I would consider to be a fairly advanced age. I suspect some are still virgins. Instead, video games and pot.

Since I am homely, this is exactly what I'd be doing if I were young now, given society's recent barrage of disparagement towards men. And especially if I knew someone like adult-me who got absolutely crushed by alimony.

I foresee no particular solution. I think we'll just follow Japan and South Korea. Other societies with different norms will simply displace us. Which I think is fine.

My wife works with men and women who have a hard time finding relationships, so I have a bit of insight here.

You are completely wrong about what women want. You think that women are the same as men, but you are wrong. Women do not want a 'hottie'. I can tell you those women who go out with that 'hottie' have no self esteem, and are not happy. They end up at my wife's practice.

Men want a hot wife, because looks are very important. Women want a successful man, who can take care of the family, and is strong enough to protect the family. Women most of the time describe it as a "real man", but this does not translate well in what men thing a "real man" is.

Most women do not want a player, and only end up with one because of the low self esteem.

The good news is that men can influence their chances with women a LOT (and no this is not becoming a player). The sad part is that most men are too stubborn to accept this reality, and much rather blame their failure on women, other men or something else externally.

This describes several of my ex's, and indeed, they did end up in therapy (or should have). I'm sure self-esteem has a role, and I tried hard to instill that in my step-daughters, to help them do better with this (and, as Chris Rock said, to keep them off the pole).

Men also change over time, of course. But a lot of what you're missing is simply that men like me never had a clue as to what to do when we were young. Not stubborn at all--just clueless. Two hundred years ago, it didn't really matter--sheer want would make things work.

Today, we're all so well off that few women really need to pair off. And those who plan on it tend to think more that they can do it a lot later. Unfortunately, by then, a lot of men have already rotted on the dock.

I think the difference historically and this is true for conservative parts of the developing world today is that parents would spend a lot of effort getting their kids into a marriage, often in a semi-ritualistic manner which involved mutual meetings of the family, extended family background checks etc. (to state my bias, I found my wife in such a process)

The result is that someone who has been through the dating process is guiding the younger generation + there is a lot of checking for compatibility dangers that could take a while to emerge in a normal dating situation. In America today this is often socially unacceptable, more from the kid's side than the parent's side. So young men often navigate the dating world with little guidance from the previous generation. I feel like the dominant message to parents these days is to stay away from their kids dating lives as much as possible, and while there is some merit to that message, it does leave the younger generation with less of a straight road to a marriage.

Out of curiosity, how do you integrate the online dating studies that point to 70%+ of women only wanting the top 20% of men (ie. the "hotties") into your wife's practice, and what she sees from her clients?

Take this for instance: https://medium.com/@worstonlinedater/tinder-experiments-ii-g... , based on 27 women, and he even says himself "Additionally, I am only accounting for the percentage of “likes” and not the actual men they “like”. I have to assume that in general females find the same men attractive. I think this is the biggest flaw in this analysis".

So yeah, basically you can throw away any conclusion there. Other articles are based on this "study". But maybe there are new studies that I haven't seen yet.

I have a problem with the word "hottie" because we men know very well which girls fall into this category. But because women have way more and different dimensions to select on, a male photo model doesn't have as much attraction as you would expect.

Men in that sense are really lucky, because we can boost our attractiveness pretty good. Women on the other hand, if you don't have the looks, there is only so much you can do with makeup.

Not saying that these studies are not flawed, but the simple fact that Tinder and most of online dating is basically a looks based popularity contest hints at a problem for the median folks.

There's always a lot of new users, there are always a few young new and attractive users. So the majority just waits for the one. So the hot ones pair off, leave the platform (or come back and pair off with other hot ones, then repeat), but the Average Jane and Joe just waste their time and money while having their self-esteem crushed.

> the simple fact that Tinder and most of online dating is basically a looks based popularity contest hints at a problem for the median folks.

Why would you think real life would be any different?

There are a lot of parameters in the dating game, bug if played right, you can definitely find success on these platforms.

Best example is one of my wife's customers: a 50 year old, average looking woman, who has success on Tinder. No kidding!

For starters IRL you rarely have the density of "encounters" that you have on Tinder, so you have a lot more resources invested in meeting people, this likely increases how much time you spend on one person at a time.

Regarding the 50 year old women. She has success on Tinder? Why is that no kidding? Or you have left out a "no"?

Like you say, it is impossible.

I made that mistake when I started, until I realized that there is only 1 goal: get her on a date. And while other guys were asking "how was your day?" every few days, I asked them out after a good chat, and shortcutted it.

If you are a single guy looking for women the best places to live are NYC, Vancouver and parts of the Midwest with major hospitals. In those places there are more women than men. Yes you can work in SV but there’s way more guys then gals there.

The systematic problem is that all developments in the last decades have made dating/sex a very efficient market that is skewed towards winner-take-all. There is zero commitment required, the pools are very large, and selection is straightforward.

If their free time is about video games and pot, I would say they only have themselves to blame.

Whoa! I never thought of this, and it seems particularly more apt of an observation with the trend towards legalizing marijuana, and even further, decriminalizing other drugs like mushrooms and LSD.

On top of that, games have adopted more and more gambling-like and actual features, and have long been playing on peoples' addictive natures by design.

Because both video gaming and pot smoking is a solo or a very small group activity where the slots get taken by pot smoker's and video gamer's buddies.

```

Mr Lee said: “[China] will make progress but if you look at the per capita they have got, the differences are so wide. We have the advantage of quality control of the people who come in so we have bright Indians, bright Chinese, bright Caucasians so the increase in population means an increase in talent.”

How many bright Indians and bright Chinese are there, Harry? Surely they are not infinite. And what will they do in Singapore? Well, engage in the finance and marketing rat-race and depress their fertility to 0.78, wasting valuable genes just so your property prices don’t go down. Singapore is an IQ shredder.

```

[1] https://www.xenosystems.net/iq-shredders/

The fact of the matter is that, psychologically speaking on the level of a single individual, we do not seek offspring so much as pleasures, and sex and child-rearing are some of life's greatest pleasures. But that does not mean they're the exclusive sources of pleasure available in any culture, and I would warn against putting too much faith in any such notions.

I think the word "worth" could be an anthropomorphization. I read the concept through the lens of survivability. Hypothetically, a societal identity which does not ensure biological reproduction could be evolutionarily outcompeted by one that does. Even, or especially by a fertility cult. I remember this being one of the central, disturbingly dystopic outcomes that Mike Judge's Idiocracy tried to address.

A lot of progressive technocrats look at model citizens with technologically harnessed upward mobility. They observe and want to enable global movement towards this. But if the environment that enables the financial prosperity of these model citizens also disables their ability to reproduce their way of life, how does it successfully compete in "the marketplace of ideology" against opponents who out-produce them by default? Wouldn't that be a local maximum? Without some kind of mechanism in place to address that, the progression has no guarantee of continuing. And this could lead to the dystopic scenario outlined in the film.

Ah, this is pretty close to the same claim that "JayMan" made once when explaining to me how "gay people shouldn't exist, evolutionarily speaking" (because, of course, the gays would be outcompeted genetically by non-gays, and the identity wouldn't persist, right?)

Let me tie it into this:

> if the environment that enables the financial prosperity of these model citizens also disables their ability to reproduce their way of life, how does it successfully compete in "the marketplace of ideology" against opponents who out-produce them by default?

Because ideologies don't exist in a market, they exist within an ecosystem. To put it plainly: it doesn't matter if the finance guys don't have kids, because the finance guys aren't themselves breeding more finance guys. The fact that the role of "finance guy" exists at all is a product of the broader cultural ecosystem, which wont disappear even if all the extant finance guys do.

But all this is beside the point. Land's post lays out a sociological model (viewing the world as a detached observer) and then, through sleight-of-hand and careful selection of metrics, converts it into a measure of value (how one views one's life as an individual).

If your sociological frame makes the world look like a dys/utopia, consider that it might be a flawed frame, at least if your goal is to see clearly.

Obviously "finance guy" would not only breed other "finance guys". However if the society consumes a majority of its productive members without insuring their reproduction, then they'll be selected against.

> Ah, this is pretty close to the same claim that "JayMan" made once when explaining to me how "gay people shouldn't exist, evolutionarily speaking" (because, of course, the gays would be outcompeted genetically by non-gays, and the identity wouldn't persist, right?)

That's such a weird position and obviously made by someone who doesn't understand evolution, so I'm not sure why you're bringing it here. It's the equivalent of saying that diseases/cancer/handicaps couldn't exist because "evolution". That is not what parent is talking about when underlying the risks of hindering reproduction for a whole class of citizens.

This assumes both that productivity is heritable and that the nature of productivity is fixed. The former seems contingently true (assuming the latter), but the latter seems false, as the forms of work considered "productive" tend to shift over time.

The other Problem is the implicit assumption that "[economic] productivity is good", which is an entirely different class of argument than above.

> the gays would be outcompeted genetically by non-gays, and the identity wouldn't persist, right?

I'm not sure that's historically accurate. The connection between pederasty and upper caste aristocracy goes back to Greek civilization, if not earlier, and is its own kind of a cultural reproduction mechanism that seemed to have elements of both mentorship and romance. Without a doubt, it's something that I still see today in elite circles.

> The fact that the role of "finance guy" exists at all is a product of the broader cultural ecosystem

I think I'd beg to disagree -- not with the product of the ecosystem part, but with the idea that it's cultural rather than socioeconomic and caste based. And maybe this comes back to my point earlier, which is a friction point that maybe both the IQ shredder concept and this article fail to account for, which is a certain degree of lifestyle dynamism.

That is to say, is that finance guy stuck as a finance guy forever? Or does he eventually accumulate enough wealth before moving on to a separate phase of his life, one where he can have a family of whatever size he wants with the best partner he can find that will take him? Because if that's the case, then maybe both the IQ shredder and Idiocracy argument perhaps only serve a useful function when referring to the lower and middle class, and fail to account for the upper class. And this, too seems to make intuitive sense to me: even as we see the middle class hollowed out, the upper class in America (and maybe across the world) continue to see increased prosperity at levels never before seen in history.

> If your sociological frame makes the world look like a dys/utopia, consider that it might be a flawed frame, at least if your goal is to see clearly.

I think the warning against dualistic frames is fair to keep in mind. But if you have a non-dualistic frame, that "the future is here, it's just not evenly distributed" then I think that it's equally fair to warn that a frame which conflates an observed scenario to as a dystopic frame rather than evidence of an apoptotic mechanism could itself be the flawed frame.

I mean, my point was that it's a relatively absurd argument based on a misunderstanding of evolution, as the sibling comment states.

> it's cultural rather than socioeconomic and caste based

Are castes and socioeconomics distinct from culture? (I'm working with Lévi-Strauss's definition of culture as the set of symbolic forms present across society)

> both the IQ shredder and Idiocracy argument perhaps only serve a useful function when referring to the lower and middle class, and fail to account for the upper class

If we consider it in this frame, it seems roughly equivalent to the "brain drain" idea that made the rounds a decade or so ago. Only difference being the ethical valence of the arguments.

> evidence of an apoptotic mechanism

Is this a valid metaphor? I'm unsure myself. I don't find myself agreeing with Spengler and co, but I also don't think I could muster a strong argument against it on demand.

>condemning homosexuality

There are worse things than condemnation. In Somalia, homosexuality is punishable by death. Somalia also has a birth rate of 5.93. The future is populated by those who show up. If you want gay rights to continue to exist, then you should want LGBT-friendly nations to have a birth rate higher than replacement.

I find this reprehensible.

I'd argue that there's a whole group of young guys who are just so freaking busy and not really in a place where they can meet a bunch of single women, like I don't even know where I'd put a significant other in my life at the moment.

I guess that compounds because I don't drink really so I'm not going to bars and my personal hobbies are reading, hiking and coding and trying to get a company off the ground so It doesn't really lend itself to meeting people either.

At this rate I've been single for 4-5ish years and if if my life and the world keeps up I can see another 5 years ahead but hey I make more than most people I know, got a senior title pretty young and if I can make it work I'll be running my own business before 30.

Edit: And I'll add I've been told I look like Ethan Hawke and can be pretty funny in the right mood so I'd say I'm doing alright in looks and personality.

The US male populace has maybe 10% of people in similar roles such as yourself. Not many men earn $100k+/yr - period. Most who do are well past 30. If you're in FAANG making $300k+, then you're part of the 1% of /all/ men (not just men at your age). Are you going to say that the top 10% of earners overrepresent the amount of people who aren't having sex? Seems far fetched to me. Having a high income is a marker that many people look for and prioritize.

Being a high income earner doesn't mean you're busier than other people either. I see many people making $250k+/yr and have regular 40 hour work weeks where I see people below $100k/yr pushing 60+ hours frequently.

Edit: And earning a lot doesn't entirely correlate with how hard you work, I agree. I learned selling yourself the right way makes it a lot easier. Which is why for people outside of my bubble as you put it I imagine they are grinding even more.

I think we're talking about non-commital encounters, not "relationships" like you're referring to. (Not that there's not a time element involved to nurture that part of one's life!)

I'm not sure this is new? I also wonder how large is the group is, and whether this category is as applicable outside of tech (which is a small fraction of the population in my mind). I suspect it's not that large, and groupings by other categories discussed elsewhere in these comments are more relevant.

I offered a counter-view to that thought. Though I guess you could argue the point above isn't that new either. Wealthy attractive men have always been thought to have more sex or have more opportunity to have sex.

Because it's very likely that there is a few percent of the population who are good looking, wealthy and prioritize having lots of sex, and they virtually occupy a much larger share of their target group than their group's size.

So there's a disparity. And lot of men want to emulate that lifestyle, which leads to them constantly not finding appropriate partners.

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...

Look at the chart for number of sexual partners reported by men and women by year. Honestly just read the study. It has data on many of the issues people are speculating about, including porn and what not.

If you were to believe that a small number of men are getting all of the sex at the expense of women, you would expect it to take a more bimodal shape with much fewer men getting 1 partner, some more getting 3+ and more getting 0. Instead we see the number of men getting 3+ declining over time and a big shift from 1 to 0.

Another important insight is that the rates of getting no sex drop significantly once you're a little older. Compare the 18-24 year olds to the 25-34 year olds to older. Looks like 25% drops down to 15% drops down to 5% in the most recent year.

Thinking of the male people I know who didn't get sex during college, it was mostly because they were busy doing other things or insecure.

It's entirely possible for women to favor only the top few men on dating sites but for this not to control the narrative of who gets sex and who doesn't. I'd go as far as to say it's likely it does not.

Everyone I know in real life (from different genders and ethnicities) acknowledges this. But for some reason these issues spark a fierce debate online. I am not sure what I am missing here.

This statement just does not mesh with the study suggesting the proportion of people getting 0 sex has risen by about 5 percentage point (eyeballing the chart) from 2000 to 2018. Doing some bad-and-wrong-but-making-a-point statistics, if you're getting 0 sex in 2018, the majority of your likelihood of being there was already present in 2000. I'm sure it's harder being a man of color, but I'm also sure it was harder being a man of color in 2000 as well.

It's totally possible for dating markets to favor a few individuals and for that not to explain this trend. The reason it sparks debates online is because some individual recount their struggles getting dates as evidence for huge impacts on what dating is like for the majority of males. It doesn't resonate with those who have "normal" sex lives.

So people see that there are very favorable targets on the platform, and their perception is skewed, they start to reject the average matches, they want the best.

So less sex, more hoping for the best.

Am I missing something?

The data in the study you linked to its entirely consistent with what the OP suggested. We need to know what is happening at the tails to determine whether what you're claiming or what the OP is claiming is true. However, OP has a lot of anecdotal evidence in their favor. The study only provides data for the left tail of the distribution, but we need to see the right tail to know the full story. You could be right, but the OP's hypothesis is also supported by the data.

These alpha male type men may exist, but they're a drop in the bucket compared to well documented factors like worsening economic conditions.

If true, I wonder how much of that is due to self-selection by men who aren't having sex. Having once upon a time been lonely and bitter, I know that men often end up in positive feedback loops that strengthen their not having sexual partners - due to the attitudes they develop towards women.

Furthermore, I think that these apps mostly reflect reality. In the offline world fat people would have a hard time finding dates too. Don't you think?

The apps simply reflect peoples' superficial preferences. It's way easier to swipe left on a photo of a fat guy than it is to reject a fat guy who you find attractive because he is kind and makes you laugh. Personality really is most of it, but personality doesn't come through in apps.

Most of the problems with online social networks and dating apps are not brand new, just a lot more severe.

Isn't it easier to hide these things on a Tinder profile than in a nightclub?

Therapy helps; if you can boost your own self-esteem enough to have real vulnerability without soliciting sympathy it goes a long way to building better relationships. It also helps you see things from another perspective.

I mentioned the same thing to my wife, only half-joking. Many of her friends are single, professional women who don't want to date down. The problem is that all of the men they're interested in (millionaires in their 30s and 40s) get married quickly after they signal they're on the market. It seems to me there's presently an "inefficiency" in the market where they could take on a second (or more), willing wife if only it were legal.

It might be dangerous to society to have so many permanently single men, but the status quo appears to negatively impact educated women.

This sudden fall of a cliff, which only takes a few years, has to be extremely disorienting for those women that don't enter committed relationships by that point in their life (or those who exit them). It's also very predictable, but it's hard to blame twenty-somethings for living in the moment and frittering away their most attractive years having lots of sex. Assuming that marrying down is a better fate than remaining a spinster, it's not clear to me how these dynamics balance out.

I know this all sounds rather harsh, but it's an inevitability of looking at the "market dynamics" of a matching problem.

[1] I don't say this to be insulting, it's just a fact of male attraction in the same way that the massive skew towards the tiny top decile is for female attraction.

On top of that, the subpopulation of 30 y/o women I mentioned are the ones who are still single at 30. There are a good amount who didn't fully go the casual-sex route and skewed more towards finding a relationship: those are the type of people that my friends are dating. (Though even within an individual, it's not like people make an all-or-nothing decision between flings and deeper relationships: it's just a preference, and an ongoing decision about where to put one's energy).

As you allude to, I slightly switched the topic of conversation from "average men" to "my rich social circle". What I was getting at is that these same people, despite being pretty rich in their early 20s too, now have almost the same situation that women in their early/mid-20s have: lots of power in the dating market. The implication, to me, is that men who are more average in desirability will have correspondingly less luck but still experience that shift in power, as women their age who have fallen off the desirability cliff "settle" for them. I've noticed the same myself: I'm rich and I'm told I'm funny and reasonably good-looking, but I'm also not very tall; I did a little dating in my early 20s, and was in a long-term relationship for much of my 20s, but the last few years (late 20s), is the first time I've had a pretty decent clip of getting openly hit on by women without putting any effort into it.

I don't want to make this sound like I have it all figured out; it's just something I've noticed in my own experiences and the experiences of all my friends, and I have a model that explains it reasonably well (and comports with the broader science on sexuality that I'm aware of).

[1] It doesn't escape me how this sounds, and if I'm being honest, I find class-signaling to be pretty gross. But it's just a reality I've observed in the corner of the dating market that I have visibility into through my own and my friends' experiences.

They wrote a song about it.

   City girls just seem to find out early
   How to open doors with just a smile
   A rich old man

   And she won't have to worry
   She'll dress up all in lace and go in style
   Late at night a big old house gets lonely
   I guess every form of refuge has its price
   And it breaks her heart to think her love is
   Only given to a man with hands as cold as ice
   So she tells him she must go out for the evening
   To comfort an old friend who's feeling down
   But he knows where she's going as she's leaving
   She is headed for the cheating side of town

   You can't hide your lying eyes
   And your smile is a thin disguise
   I thought by now you'd realize
   There ain't no way to hide your lying eyes

   On the other side of town a boy is waiting
   With fiery eyes and dreams no one could steal
   She drives on through the night anticipating
   Because he makes her feel the way she used to feel
   She rushes to his arms
   They fall together
   She whispers that it's only for awhile
   She swears that soon she'll be coming back forever
   She pulls away and leaves him with a smile

   You can't hide your lying eyes
   And your smile is a thin disguise
   I thought by now you'd realize
   There ain't no way to hide your lying eyes

   She gets up and pours herself a strong one
   And stares out at the stars up in the sky
   Another night, it's gonna be a long one
   She draws the shade and hangs her head to cry
   She wonders how it ever got this crazy
   She thinks about a boy she knew in school
   Did she get tired or did she just get lazy?
   She's so far gone she feels just like a fool
   My, oh my, you sure know how to arrange things
   You set it up so well, so carefully
   Ain't it funny how your new life didn't change things
   You're still the same old girl you used to be

   You can't hide your lying eyes
   And your smile is a thin disguise
   I thought by now you'd realize
   There ain't no way to hide your lying eyes
   There ain't no way to hide your lying eyes
   Honey, you can't hide your lying eyes

I have friends who had the same attitude but them they realized there's like, a few dozen men in their city who a) make more than them b) are single c) are sexually interested in women d) are attracted to them e) they are attracted to.

They now OK with "dating down". This is just a result of women being able to get good jobs too.

As an example I see the Middle East where polygamy is not unheard of and the rise of the Islamic State or the Taliban.

Would be interesting if anybody has data on this.

The pressure from polygamy might have contributed to the individual motivations for some people to join those groups, but it was probably far from a significant factor in the geopolitics.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/10/13/islamic-state-re...

What worked best for most places was monogamy. With a partner men are more likely to use their energy for their family instead of antisocial tendencies.

This isn’t my theory; I think the technical term is “enforced monogamy” if you want to find data.

You can’t even date. Many marry young for that reason.

Japan and South Korea, two of the most stable and conformist countries politically are notorious for their low rates of sex, particular among young men.

This sounds purely like folk psychology to be honest, people just love somehow attributing sexual motivations to just about everything. To me, this feels like plotting skyscraper construction against sex rates in Asia and then concluding that male architects are channelling their phallic energy into architecture, you can really apply this to everything

What is already happening in rich parts of Asia. Tons of pissed off women with no kids who want to raise your taxes.

https://www.scmp.com/lifestyle/health-wellness/article/30412...

Why do they want to raise taxes?

Takes 2 incomes (or a rich income) to buy the luxuries most women demand. Most women are still not as wealthy as men.

I wonder if this is actually true. I also wonder what your idea of being less 'traditional' means. Having multiple partners, but going from it being done in secret (i.e. cheating) to it being consensual (i.e. swinging)? Going from a president getting a blow job in office to a president who is on his third wife, embroiled in stripper lawsuits while in office? Gay relationships being legal?

Might I offer an observation? As women have become the greater number of degree achievers and have entered the work force in greater numbers, combined with the availability of birth control, they simply have greater agency than in the past and thus can be ever more selective. So this statement on wealth cuts both ways for men and women.

Secondly, ask any single female friend about their dating experiences. It's very clear there are many men who really have no idea how to interact with women in the context of a health, adult relationship.

1. Throughout my 20s and early thirties I was very, very unsuccessful with dating. I was shy, and lacked self-confidence. At age 32 I had had one partner, and a period from 27-32 with no relationships of any kind. I did go on a decent number of bad first dates during that period.

2. In my early thirties, I continued to be shy, not conventionally attractive, etc. But I became comfortable enough with myself to keep at dating consistently and to realize that rejections often were not about me (or didn't say anything bad about me). I continued to be well intentioned, sincere, conscientious, and generally decent. I came to understand who I was and what I was looking for better.

3. After many bad first dates, and a few unsuccessful medium term relationships, I met my wife. She is conventionally attractive. It happened that we were perfect for each other in other ways. We had similar financial values, we had compatible senses of humor, we both liked camping and backpacking, and we could just talk and laugh together endlessly (we still can to this day).

4. We dated for a year and half, got married, had kids, and have a spectacularly fortunate alliance 10 years in.

So, if my 32 year old self had read this thread, I would have been agreeing about 'apex predators' and legalized polygamy and the general hopelessness of everything.

But, I think there are many, many women who would love to meet and marry exactly the kind of decent, sincere, intelligent, thoughtful men who frequent HN. You just have to stick with it. You have to go on a lot of bad first dates. You have to be patient and not overly critical as you get to know people. You have to be looking for someone who is a really good match for you overall, and to whom you provide a lot of value.

My sincere advice is this: My 20s and early 30s were pretty awful in terms of dating. But if you meet someone wonderful for you at 33, none of that will matter in the long run. All that frustration will fade away, and you will be happy. So keep at it, even if dating really sucks most of the time.

Do we have to get assigned scores now?

If history is any guide this will likely lead to widespread social problems if it takes off.

I don't see many people here talking about how they engaged in intentional self improvement.

You aren't owed a significant other, or sex. Nobody is. If you're not getting it, it's not because someone else was born hotter than you.

Stupid, ugly people fuck all the time.

"Stupid, ugly people fuck al the time" and imply this is a non issue

I'm not seeing anyone proposing to explain the impact, or what they have done to offset any impact they perceive it is having on themselves.

The other person who replied to me pointed out that it's not fair for me to assume folks haven't already tried a lot - so that's fair. I'll go back to:

I'm not seeing the discussion here being about the results or the impact, except to lament their own personal woes, and to hypothesize things like a coming age of polygamy.

I'll come with some depth when others do, but I guess it's fair that I should probably have not bothered commenting in the first place.

It's so interesting how whenever any man talks about romantic problems he is met with this feminist mantra "you aren't owed sex". Do you honestly think that's what we're talking about? If someone talked about how much it sucks that they don't have car and need to walk to work would you tell them "you aren't owed a car"?

I think people regurgitate this phrase because we can't ever acknowledge that sexual empowerment results in peoples needs not being met. It must be their fault, they must be sabotaging somehow. They must be sexists.

I'm hearing mostly outward complaints about what other people are doing to them, and that's mostly why I left my comment - a counter point.

I do get that it's not so simple as "it's their fault" and I do appreciate you making that comment, it's worth thinking about this next time, but it's hard to always do when you don't feel like everyone is coming to the table with open minds and good intentions.

In an age where access to premarital sex is plentiful, I wonder what motivations, if any, there would be for these first-class men to marry more than one. Multiple marriages, it seems to me, would be more of a legal and financial liability.

Hint: they continue having a lot of sex with a lot of different partners outside the marriage.

As you said its winner takes all.

Why? Who do you think would benefit from this?

Don't believe me? Checkout Sean Stephenson (RIP). If you think he dated the women of his dreams because he's wealthy, my experience suggests it's his charisma. I've learned that a huge part of it can be trained. The funny thing is, no one would call me charismatic, yet, I found my voice and a way to expose my personality in an attractive enough way to the women I want.

I simply know the pain and if I can help other people not experience it, yea that would be an amazing use of my time.

The average woman judges me to be a 6 by looks at best. My target group of women almost never praise me for my physical features but my personality instead.

Judge for youerself: I'm tall, super skinny (most often the skinniest), have a very atypical face, so yea not in the top 1%. It took me 5 years to learn what I wanted to learn. And now I'm now I'm happy in that area of my life. For the past 8 years, I've had no issues related to lack of intimacy.

If you need any dating advice, I'm by far not the best dating coach, and I am by far not the best seducer. But I'm a HN'er so, and I struggled a shit ton with this and learned a lot of it consciously. Also, my peak moments have been borderline insanely awesome. So there's that.

Shoot me an email (see my profile) and I hope I can help a bit, any gender is welcome to email (I've seen some overlap in issues and approaches). In most cases, I've noticed, I can't help [2]. I wish I could share online resources, but it's a bit of a mine field since it really depends on how you learn and how you perceive the world.

Or just do what I did and simply Google "how to get a girlfriend/<word_for_intimate_partner>" and go on a wild adventure that will lead to your future love life. When learning this on your own, remember to be: respectful, full of empathy (both cognitive and affective empathy [3]), playful, confident and kind (preferably, in that order). I know, it's a lot, I never said this would be easy ;-)

[1] Intimacy being defined here as a mix of sex and companionship. Also, I say "most cases", since I know how terrible I was, but I also know that there are people even worse than me. In most cases, these people wouldn't be capable of applying any sort of logical thinking, so I suspect this isn't you.

Also abundance: the feeling of "yep, I'm good :)"

[2] I'm not a coach, just someone who wants to help. What I am struggling with when helping my friends is that: in general my friends didn't dare to experiment enough on their own. In some cases, this was even the case when I was able to give them exact counter evidence, tailored to every whim. So yea, if you at least aspire to want to be able to self-experiment, I might be able to help somewhat. I've done it :D

[3] Cognitive empathy: you're able to understand why someone goes through a certain situation by understanding it logically. Example: someone falls, therefore they must be hurt, therefore they will appreciate help.

Affective empathy: you're able to understand why someone goes through a certain situation by understanding it by feeling their pain. Example: someone falls (you feel it as well), by feeling their pain, you can feel that the person landed hard on his knee and by looking at their face and "feeling" their facial expressions, you feel their are in a huge distress. You now know that you need to calm them down and make sure their knee is cared for.

^ These two examples are quite simplictic.

Women do this in general because mentioning physical attractiveness among women is taboo. This is why a personality-focused, zero pictures version of Tinder would utterly fail. Do you think women would leap to such an app, finally being able to judge people by their wit and conversation skills and empathy? Of course not. They want photos.

> Judge for youerself: I'm tall, super skinny (most often the skinniest), have a very atypical face, so yea not in the top 1%.

Height gives an enormous advantage. The rest I can't comment on, but I suspect you're underselling yourself. If you're white and have a conventional appearance (even if not chiseled or model like), you're much more acceptable to a woman (and her friends, and her family) than a 5'6" Indian guy.

What I've noticed is that any guy can fall to rock bottom, but not every guy can float to the top. There's a lot of privilege to go around. When people try to take credit for everything in their life, whether it's business/dating/athleticism or whatever, it's just trying to deny privilege and ascribe some fairness to a world that we all know is not. I know I'm privileged in some ways that hot guys are not. I mean Tucker Max is in therapy today.

That's why I mentioned Sean Stephenson.

> than a 5'6" Indian guy.

I know a pretty small Indian/Surinamese guy (used to be a Dutch colony). Surinam is a bit of a melting pot, FYI but his family line has remained relatively purely Indian. In all fairness, he's good looking. What he also has: the best accent and voice tonality I've ever heard. He says it's his biggest strength and most of that is totally teachable. He taught the best Dutch accent I've ever heard entirely himself and he lowered his voice.

So yea, I do have those advantages, but they are overcomeable. It's simply a lot harder. Also, you don't need to rise to the top. One needs to rise to a level that they feel content with, and in most cases that isn't the top.

With that said, I had the advantage of being tall and white. That's true. Not that it mattered, compared to the amount of disadvantages I had, but I do agree that it would be harder as a starting point if those 2 points also would've been against me.

Don't get me wrong, I believe that you overcame challenges. We all have. I bet 90% of your dating experience is determined by how you were born, not how you have chosen to behave. Your main advice is "be tall, be white." Your post follow the classic formula:

BRO. Bro. Physical attractiveness doesn't matter. I may be a [6'1" white guy / mid-20s female in a large city] but I can confidently tell you that it's entirely possible to be wildly successful on dating sites if you're ugly. It's all about your personality and how funny you are and how kind of a human being you are. You know what's really unattractive? Your INSECURITIES. If you could just be confident then people would be swarming your profile with unsolicted visits and date offers.

I knew this one guy in high school who looked like a shorter and Indian-looking Danny DeVito with tertiary syphillis but he had an amazing demeanor so he bedded one different girl a month every month. Oh what about the other 50 ugly Indian guys? I dunno I only remember this one. I'm sure they must have been successful too.

All the non-white friends that I have are way better seducers than me and are just as happy in their relationships. The vicinity of Amsterdam is pretty multicultural, so any open-minded person ends up with a good chunk of multicultural friends. Currently, I'd say that my friendships are 30% Dutch, 20% international (white) and 50% non-white. They're almost all male though.

My closest friend is non-white and when I met his extended family (all non-white as well), I could tell you that all family members were better seducers than me. That also includes for all the non-white people I have in my own extended family.

This means I'm the worst seducer of all the non-white people I know within my vicinity which basically includes 1.5 families and a few friends. Most of them are better looking than me (it's not that hard), shorter and more socially capable. They all get better results.

And yet, the rhetoric that the winner gets all and therefore you get nothing is simply not true. If you want to work for it, then the winner gets all and you get what you want despite not being the winner.

I've approached over 10000 women. My success rate in attracting them is about 0.1%. I'm more than content with that. People that don't have success and haven't at least done 1000 approaches, they haven't put in the work. It's brutal, for me it was. So a shit ton of motivation is needed.

I've seen a few cases (white only) who did put in the work. All of them had really low intelligence, frankly speaking and I have the suspicion that they required some professional help with that.

I now see it as mining. You're mining for an amazing intimate connection.

This idea doesn't have to pertain to only the intimate realm of human connection, I think it's a good idea to multiple forms of human connections.

It also depends on your background and beliefs. I was 100% convinced I'd die alone as a virgin around the age of 80. So I was willing to do whatever it takes.

I also didn't do The Game or The Mystery Method. I basically took another dating book's question "how can you find the women of your dreams with just your personality?" and took that as far as I could.

Long story short (for me personally): use assortative mating theory to its fullest and most extreme.

With that said, I have met other people who found it easy. It's definitely not an uncommon experience.

Thanks for the book recommendation! That looks like such an old book (1969!), I'll take a peek.

Although misogynistic incels are obviously abhorrent, I believe that they're probably right in their assessment of their own social status. It just seems like rather than trying to better themselves, they turn it into outward hatred.

I've also seen calls by right-wing thought leaders for "enforced monogamy," which obviously seems authoritarian, rapey and wrong. However I do think monogamy and commitment a good moral values to cultivate. Even though there's a lot of "slut-positivity" now, the people I know who live that way seem much less happy, fulfilled and stable.

Example: putting commerce online created the Amazon monopoly. It's easier than ever to buy from any store you want online, but paradoxically everyone goes to Amazon. This is mostly because everyone goes to Amazon, therefore virtually any product is available there. Only niche products require you to shop elsewhere.

So we've put sex online too: Tinder, dating sites, etc. It has never been easier to "shop" for potential sex partners. Is this paradoxically resulting in a narrowing of sexual pairings?

I wonder if the paradox can be understood if we look at biology. Imagine the Earth were a uniform environment with a uniform climate, no mountain ranges, no rivers, etc. I imagine that a single species would come to dominate each niche. There might be one large predator, one large ruminant, one bird of prey, one burrowing rodent, and so on... or maybe two or three, but not more than that. You'd probably have a biodiversity collapse.

No boundaries = no diversity?

Returning to the sexuality issue, I do think there's more than one thing at work here. I think the narrowing of male sexual options has multiple causes: economic strain, easier "shopping" when dating, easy access to porn that distorts peoples' ideas of what sex is actually like, and men growing up under-socialized.

I see the latter a lot in the incel phenomenon. I literally saw a comment once to the effect that "real women are nothing like they are in Anime." So these guys are disappointed that women are not like cartoons. That's insane.

Also didn't mean to suggest that narrowing of dating is "womens' fault" any more than the triumph of Amazon in the shopping space is the "fault" of consumers. What we're seeing here are emergent behaviors in a complex system. Nobody planned this and nobody is really even choosing it. I don't shop at Amazon because I want them to be the CHOAM company from Dune. I shop at Amazon because its convenient.

Just because your monogamous friends are happy and fulfilled doesn't mean your slutty friends would be happy if they lived the same way.

Humans are varied.

Talking to my Tindersex-addicted friend about his behavior - which has been very destructive to his own life - he believes that it comes from a place of trauma as a coping mechanism, not simply a lifestyle preference. In a similar vein, many women I know who only had uncommitted relationships in their twenties are now in their mid 30s and interested in settling down but are having extreme difficulties in finding a partner.

Note that these same friends also have stable, fulfilling (non-monongamous) relationships in their lives.

I think that's why I bristle when I see people equating slutty behaviour with lack of fulfillment or trauma. I think that sex absolutely can be an unhealthy coping mechanism; but so can alcohol, yet many people manage to use alcohol in a fun and safe way.

I think that presenting commitment and sluttiness as the only two options is harmful, and it keeps people in destructive sexual patterns because they don't think they can have broad sexual exploration at the same time as serious relationships, so they avoid relationships altogether. It takes a lot of work, but you can have both! And I think that the more we become comfortable with that as a society, the healthier we will be.

This isn't backed up by research which seems to suggest that the more sexual partners you have, the worse your relationships are in practically every dimension.

This is an area where it's very difficult to show cause and effect (since you can't exactly do a randomized controlled trial) so I would be skeptical about drawing conclusions that lowered relationship quality is caused by having more partners.

Non-causal and uses marital happiness as a proxy for actual happiness though.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/02/opinion/incels-sex-robots...

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2018/04/two-types-of-envy.html

https://www.cosmopolitan.com/politics/a20138446/redistributi...

It has become a genuine struggle to separate reality and parody.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solon#Solon_and_Athenian_sexua...

> Solon established publicly funded brothels at Athens in order to "democratize" the availability of sexual pleasure.

Whether fact or ficion, this discussion has been going on a long time.

I don't think this entire discussion belongs on this site.

Yea, it's a bizarre dynamic: women who are looking for lots of casual sex are fine, but the women I know who are looking for deeper relationships are continually frustrated. It seems pretty stupid on its face, but female attraction is really complicated, and if the women in my friend group are any indication, they don't quite understand how it works either[1]. Especially once they reach their thirties and get hit with the double whammy of declining attractiveness and a higher desire for deeper relationships.

That is to say, I think the "unmarried" qualifier in the headline is hiding the fact that the status quo is pretty dysfunctional for both sexes, and this seems to be driven primarily by the environment's incompatibility with female mate choice (combination of frictionless matching and monogamy norms).

[1] It's not quite an insult to say that female attraction is more well-rounded in many ways than male attraction is)

You mean their biological clock is ticking to get kids?

> female attraction is really complicated

They indeed look for more aspects than men. But I think it can best be summed up as:

1. successful man 2. man sweet enough to take care of the family 3. man hard enough to protect the family from the outside world

I think there is still confusion about these points: successful does not equal rich. A born-rich loser will have a harder time than a hard working entrepreneur that might hit jackpot some day.

And they are not looking for jerks. They are looking for jerks to the outside world, and sweet to them. Basically a man who can and will protect them and their family.

But of course, I think we can all agree that women are more complex than this ;).

Partially, but the fact that the men I know are more likely to want deeper relationships too suggests that it's not entirely due to that. Aging changes preferences: most people also have fewer, closer friends as they age too.

> And they are not looking for jerks. They are looking for jerks to the outside world, and sweet to them. Basically a man who can and will protect them and their family.

I didn't mention anything about jerks.

A third of men aren't monogamous -- they're oudengamous.

One can't simply say "women prefer men with higher socioeconomic status" because it sounds right, and I'm not saying that this isn't studied somewhere, just that when making conclusions about a study, if that factor wasn't included in the study, we shouldn't assume it then is one of the conclusions of the study and start connecting dots with other studies just because it feels right.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_distribution

Isn't this normal? Males in the animal world fight to death for the right to pass down their genes.

Women don't care about all men getting sex...everyone wants the "best" possible mate for themselves to have sex and/or kids.

They actually don't. Such a thing would be on the rare side in animal world.

The only exception would be spiders where he risks being eaten. Other then that, they either have basically hookups or woo lady while ignoring other guys.

Only if "other guys" didn't have their own plans. A quick search:

Bees fight to death over females

http://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth_news/newsid_8354000/835...

Male Bison Fight for Harem Rights https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L4eOhuLDfeU

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harem_(zoology)

Animals are way more likely to fight over food and such. Sex, not all that much and they have not that much reason to fight over that.

>>Animals are way more likely to fight over food and such. Sex, not all that much and they have not that much reason to fight over that.

Everything boils down to sex, pass down those genes and insure that your offspring make it.