Two themes (related): women are shooting for more attractive men, meanwhile "Chad" is taking less attractive women.

The end result: women won't pick you on Tinder, the OKCupid 80/20, there are no women left of equal attractiveness for the non-Chads, etc.

First, neither women nor men are regularly having short hook-ups or long term relationships with people who aren't close to their own level of attractiveness. Everything we know about sexual selection indicates that, in terms of physical attractiveness, people select others for both short pairings and LTRs who are remarkably close to their own level of attraction.1 2 3 4 5 6 7 The same is even true when selecting nonsexual friends.

This is what is known as assortative mating - we select people who are genotypically and phenotypically similar, among other similarities. Men and women select people who physically resemble themselves. The preference is even stronger in women. This is why women are more likely to be attracted to men who look like their fathers and men, women who look like their mothers. It's why people with high levels of adipose fat are more likely to pair with others who have high adipose fat. Related to this is the stimulus-value-role theory, an alternate explanation for the same repeatedly observed phenomenon.

What may contribute to the belief that women are selecting men who have higher levels of attractiveness is asymmetry in attractiveness. It's not an accurate assumption to think men and women share the same mean level of attractiveness. If women are more attractive on average than men (a point I have seen many people here concede) then we shouldn't expect a match for every man. We should expect results similar to the OKCupid survey or "I have no matches on Tinder."

So are they? Well, yes. And women may also be more attractive than men by a large margin, especially at the upper ends of attractiveness. Imagine two normal distributions with different means. The middle has more overlap. The ends of the right curve may not overlap at all. This is women vs men in attractiveness.

This also means that 9/10 Chad's actual match is not 9/10 Stacey. (Or, that 9/10 Chad is so infrequent he can't possibly account for the 80/20 figure). We see asymmetry in dating availably because when people select mates who are similar to themselves, this cuts out men of lower relative attractiveness to other men.

A tie in here: research also shows attraction is not linear. The difference between a 9 and a 10 is smaller than the difference between a 5 and a 6, so to speak. Thus when you think of "a 7 going for a 9," it's actually more likely the people are of similar levels of attractiveness. Meanwhile, if you are one of the 80% of men who don't ever get a Tinder match - it's likely you are much less attractive than you rate yourself to be.

A closing note - Chad is not slumming and taking your women. Highly attractive people are even more sensitive to the effects mentioned above. We have even seen this phenomenon in animals.

I have noticed here that men who have struggled with dating underestimate how easy it is for a highly attractive person to hook up with other highly attractive people. "If I were Chad I'd fuck everyone" is the thought process of people who have never had options for their whole lives, but would fuck anyone that they could get. Having options means never having to settle.

This also explains why highly attractive women don't fuck everyone. It's not because they don't want lots of sex. It's because they have options to fuck other attractive men. Very attractive men and women are actually very similar here.

(1)https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12144-999-1020-4 (2)https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-010-9723-z (3)https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/147470490400200123 (4)https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF0106568 (5)https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/014616727900500327 (6)https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1989-01355-001 (7)https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0265407508096700