You should be familiar with this infograph.

A link to [The Rational Male] article which uses it.

The author is guilty of what many of us neurotic types tend to do. Think too quickly without articulating our thoughts. Jumping from A-->C and missing the steps A-->B and B-->C.

While differences in nuanced views exist, the thoughts the author tried to convey in that article and crude graph, putting aside pedantry ("Where do those numbers come from for SMV?!"), are on point.

Some naive rpers have interpreted the infograph to mean that it's a regular occurrence for 36-year-old men to be hooking up with 23-year-old women. It's not impossible. It does happen, but it's not the norm. Bpers [rightfully] ridicule this idea. Anyone who has gone to college will tell you that it's far more common for 20-year-old women to be fucking around with early 20's men than it is for them to be hooking up with late 30s and 40s.

The problem is two-fold.

-- First, rpers and bpers alike share this misconception. They confuse "SMV" with physical attractiveness and also assume obvious fungibility.

  1. SMV is objective. Attractiveness is subjective. What comes to mind for objective measures of physical attractiveness are the Marquardt Mask, BWH ratios (female), shoulder to waits/hip ratios (men), symmetry, etc, but even those are subject to change over time as humans evolve biologically and socioeconomically/culturally. So long as two people genuinely disagree on what is physically attractive, it is by definition subjective. Until "God" or some absolute standard comes around, the closest we have to an objective scale is the Fiat-Drok scale. In contrast, SMV is based on the concept of "market value" which is objective.
  2. SMV does not imply that there is a simple fungible asset/value being traded. It just focused on supply and demand. A man who is 35 might have comparable SMV to a woman who is 25, but that doesn't mean 35-year-olds men and 25-year-old women are paying attention to each other the most. Even if we assume equivalent SMV, all that would imply is that the supply of available/eligible 35-year-old men relative to the demand is as bad as the supply of 25-year-old women relative to the demand for them. That could be just as true if most of the demand for 35-year-old men is coming from desperate 30+ year-old women, and most of the demand for 25-year-old women is coming from mostly men under 30 (though I highly suspect that they are still more universally desired among men, as it tends to be more common for women to prefer men their own ages).

-- Second, the graphs imply more precision than we can reasonably provide. There's even numbers at the side (it even uses the absolute 1-10 scale numbers) and gives exact ages. It could have been more vague to focus on concepts/ideas instead of giving pedants free ammo.

My interpretation of "The Wall":

Women's SMV start dropping (due to age) earlier than than men's.

Rather than a biological imperative/urge to settle down at 25, 30, or some other proposed median for "The Wall", many if not most women face significantly more pressure (cultural, economic, and biological) to find a long-term mate. (Men have their own bio wall, but men can remain fertile for much longer than women. Even though male fertility also declines with age, it tends to happen gradually for men.) While the biological pressures are there (harder line in the sand wrt to fertility, health risks associated to late first time pregnancy - even cancers, slower recovery time, etc), whether these biological pressures are actively felt by women, independent of social pressures, is still questionable to me. Plenty of women are blissfully unaware and unconcerned about bio-clocks.

In addition to the matter of fertility, male sexual demand is at its peak in their teens and early 20s. Horny as hell. While it stays high, it is mostly downhill from there. In contrast, women's libido is steadily increasing into their 30s. This isn't to say that women's libido will significantly surpass men's. Men almost always have higher sex drive. HOWEVER, we are looking at relative values. The sexual demand from men for women drops over time while the demand from women for men rises. They don't stay equal, but clearly this will affect SMV, and many women are not prepared for that.

As a result of those bio pressures, cultural pressures are a bit higher for women than they are for men to settle at an earlier age. I'm sure many of you have heard of Japanese "Christmas Cake" (a derogatory term for women; "unwanted after the 25th"). The pressure for beta males to settle usually comes later.

Even economic pressures are also weaker for men. For example, it tends to be the case that men climb the socioeconomic ladder via occupational mobility more than women, whereas women conversely experience it through marital social mobility more than men.

What I'd like to do for this discussion is go through many of the possible reasons for this wall. So let us dispel once and for all this fiction that women don't know what they are doing. They know exactly what they are doing. Rather than some biological impulse that overrides their autonomy, they undergo a systematic change in priorities due to numerous factors not limited to biology. A lot of the reasons are well-thought. Let's talk about where some of these pressures may be coming from in addition to what I briefly summarized above.