As of when I started writing this post, the most recent post on this sub noted that PPD is toxic for both women and men. As someone who has lurked and posted in this sub for seven months, I'm inclined to agree, but I think it's more important to ask why. Why is that a significant portion of this sub has come to believe that for men, relationships, dating, and sex are limited to a small portion of genetically gifted "Chads" and it is in women's inherent nature to abuse and mistreat men when given the slightest form of power? Some women here (and in forums like FDS) have come to the conclusion that "all men are garbage" and there to use them for sex, play a numbers game, etc. At this point, I'm inclined to believe that both stories are historically deeply wrong, with the degree of truth in today's dating world an aberration from our true state as humans, not the norm. The aberration is due to one malicious entity - The Match Group.

In 2010, Christian Rudder, one of the founders of OKCupid, wrote a scathing post indicting Match.com and eHarmony for effectively ruining dating. While I believe the entire article is worth reading in its entirety, I'll paraphrase from it from time to time to help drive home my argument.

  1. In a heterosexual dating site with equilibrium (i.e., one designed to help men and women find each other, or are at the very least not actively trying to pull each apart), a man will typically get a response from a real woman 30% of the time when messaging. Now, anyone using a dating site today will engage in a combination of laughing at the perceived absurdity of this statement, entering a state of pure shock and/or denial based on their own experiences, and scouring the internet in order to find plenty of statistics that supposedly refute this. However, I'm inclined to provide Mr. Rudder the benefit of the doubt here when he states "We've conducted extensive research on this, and you can read more about it our other posts."
  2. Note, however, the use of the word "real". This is not some argument to try and divide women into desirable and undesirable groups based on whatever physical attributes are currently in vogue (as some men are known to do here, much to my distaste). In contrast, the word "real" is meant to separate the women that are actual biological beings that exist with fake bots/profiles. Mr. Rudder lambasts eHarmony and Match for effectively having 99.7% of profiles on their apps being fake because they cannot message without paying, but modern dating apps like Tinder, Bumble, Hinge, etc. have a far more simpler, sinister trick: just create fake female accounts! Anyone who has used Tinder can attest to the large amount of bots there. In the case of Hinge, this comes in the form of profiles talking about "pineapples on pizza", "tequila", "words of affirmation", etc. Ashley Madison has actually been caught in this scandalous behavior, hiring profile writers who would spend "their work hours crafting very sexy, very fictional profiles and messaging users from them." They "made roughly $25,000 a year, with bonuses for hitting certain monthly subscription targets." Ultimately, out of 5.5 million on the site, just 1,492 (0.027%) were real women. To quote Gizmodo, the environment was "like a science fictional future where every woman on Earth is dead, and some Dilbert-like engineer has replaced them with badly-designed robots".
  3. So apart from the grotesque and mlecchic bait-and-switch these dating apps play to deceive men, what other problems do these machinations conjure? It's worth noting that these fake profiles aren't responding to anyone. Chatbots simply aren't performing at the level to engage in long-range, freestyle romantic discussions needed to actually dupe an individual into thinking they're talking to a potential romantic partner for long. As a result, the 30% real rate I mentioned earlier is going to be a lot lower. If 50% of female profiles are fake, your expected reply rate as a male is 15%. Ultimately, a low response rate translates to men getting few, if any matches (or replies to their message). Sound familiar? This is the beginning of the infamous online dating doom loop. Desperate men begin to message/match with more women, which leads to women's standards shooting up (I explain in a previous post how dating preferences are highly elastic, with even small changes in perceived sex ratio leading to dramatic changes in perceptions of attractiveness and sexual dynamics). Because women have more potential suitors and are thus biologically induced in finding fewer men attractive, the typical man's expected reply rate goes down further, leading to more desperation. This includes paying for useless dating app subscriptions, playing a numbers game, swiping right on every woman, etc. Mr. Rudder also notes how sending more messages leads to less time spent on the message, citing a scatter plot displaying a direct negative correlation between the quantity of messages sent and reply rate (likely due to the lower quality of each message). I'm sure any woman who has logged onto a dating app can take examples from their own experiences on just low how these messages can go (I'm not going to discuss any here due to the sheer degree of offensiveness I perceive these to exhibit). This also leads to women dropping out of the app, creating a need for more fake female profiles. This cycle continues on and on until we get the present day, and will continue until some dire nightmare I don't even want to imagine occurs.

In short, the Match Group peruses fake profiles and mercilessly exploits both men's and women's biological wiring to generate billions of profits off of male loneliness and desperation and the appallingly barbaric user experience women are subject to as a result. While this deal obviously hurts men more, with loneliness delivering the same health harms as smoking 15 packs of cigarettes a day, the experience of both parties ultimately is of one of the worst dating cultures imaginable. Perhaps this is why Mr. Rudder states that you were 12.4 times more likely to get married in 2010 if you didn't subscribe to Match.com. I imagine the number is much worse today with Match Group's accumulation of a dating app monopoly and permeation to cover a much larger sphere of the population (perhaps turning this inability to form relations into the norm today, though I have no idea to what extent this is true).

Are there a bunch of terrible individuals who will ruin dating? Of course, there always have been and there always will be. But individuals and genders are not responsible for today's chaos. The Match Group is.