Attraction inequality and the dating economy

austin101123 · 2021-05-31T13:30:33+00:00

Men caring so much about looks was the fattest lie I ever believed for so long.

Look at Tinder, which is just pictures of yourself, maybe some people read a few lines about you (and there have been other things showing what you say in your profile hardly matters).

Quartz reported on this finding, and also cited another article about an experiment with Tinder that claimed that that “the bottom 80% of men (in terms of attractiveness) are competing for the bottom 22% of women and the top 78% of women are competing for the top 20% of men.” These studies examined “likes” and “swipes” on Hinge and Tinder, respectively, which are required if there is to be any contact (via messages) between prospective matches.

Tinder's Gini coefficient is 0.58, meaning "it has higher inequality than 95% [of] the world's national economies" pic.twitter.com/hPx9ANR0Kz

— Devon (@devonzuegel) January 22, 2019

Another study, reported in Business Insider, found a pattern in messaging on dating apps that is consistent with these findings. Yet another study, run by OkCupid on their huge datasets, found that women rate 80 percent of men as “worse-looking than medium,” and that this 80 percent “below-average” block received replies to messages only about 30 percent of the time or less. By contrast, men rate women as worse-looking than medium only about 50 percent of the time, and this 50 percent below-average block received message replies closer to 40 percent of the time or higher.

It's just not a balanced or fair game at all.

As a leftist, seeing how bad countries economies are about economic inequality, and then I see this is worse than 95% of them? OOF

Bad news is that younger women are much more likely to like women than before, but younger men are not seeing the same level of increased gay and bisexuality, which will exacerbate the problem.

Skirt_Douglas · 2021-05-31T17:34:28+00:00

So the article already established that there is a gender libido gap that is caused simply because men want women more than women want men. So the supply of men is inherently greater than woman’s demand, and men’s demand of women is greater than their supply. Slap on top of that the principal of physical attractiveness and the inequality get’s even bigger. Obviously we can’t blame women for that, they didn’t make us want them more. Getting upset over this, to me, is like women getting upset about men on average having more upper body strength. It doesn’t matter how you feel about it because it’s true, we need to accept it and just move on.

I think internet dating contributes to making this far worse, because locality isn’t an obstacle anymore. Locality gives you less options, you were still limited to having to meet people at work, school, the bar or the club, but you just scan a radius of X miles and boom, there they all are, thousands of potential suitors all seeing your photos. If I’m being completely honest with myself, if I had the options women had, I would capitalize on them as well and also try and optimize my choice. If you have droves of suitors lining up to date you, why the fuck wouldn’t you pick the one you saw as the best? Mating choice is inherently selfish, and it’s pretty reasonable to expect selfish behavior out of people’s mating strategies.

I can’t help but feel like the only real solution is for single men to find a purpose in life greater than just being a dad. To basically accept the first noble truth of Buddhism that life is lots and lot’s of duhkha (suffering), and that duhkha is only going to continue as long as you keep setting your expectations to a disappointing end. Sex isn’t money, and I don’t think it should be thought of as such, I cannot get behind the idea that every single person is supposed to reproduce. Women are not supposed to want to fuck every guy, and I think it is better to just accept that instead of hoping for some sexual socialist utopia to suddenly pop up.

VaultGuy1995 · 2021-05-31T13:42:51+00:00

I found the article interesting, afer I'm pessimistic on the future of dating economy (it's logical because I have strong pesssimistic tendencies): I think the monogamy, to be reeastablished as a rule, must have conditions, like strong communities with important rules. How is it possible in that present world?

I read an article which said, we live in serial monogamy, where one monogamous couple breaks up or divorces, so the ex-partners go to other partners (usually cis and heterosexual men or women). And I tend to agree.

Plus, with the rise of polyamory (I have the impression there more men with two women than women with two men), the monogamy declines. Plus, there are more and more single people, especially among young men.

rydenroll · 2021-05-31T23:39:04+00:00

Uh, saying this as a very lonely, insecure kind-of-virgin (I did on a handful of occasions perform some sexual acts just not full-out sex as most people think of it) who used to consider myself an incel (though by most people’s standards I wasn’t as I never thought I was owed anything) but ‘dating inequality’ really isn’t a legitimate problem worth bringing up in anywhere near remotely the same conversation as economic inequality, if anything it’s very disrespectful to the countless men and women and people of all other genders for whom their economic inequality is a constant, life-threatening struggle, to compare your sadness over not getting laid to them not/barely being able to afford the bare essentials to survive (which, believe it or not, romantic intimacy isn’t one of) comes across as narcissistic/entitled.

Mr-X1 · 2021-05-31T19:11:08+00:00

First: the left is always advocating as much equality as possible.

If we go by what is called "left" in most English speaking countries then this is clearly not true. They instead focus on boosting certain minority groups only + women to gain power, an aim which is partially helped via the resulting reduction of solidarity within the total population. The left in most European countries is probably not much better.

Lots of men are not satisfied with the current situation, but many women aren't either.

They are happy enough with it as a group despite the occasional bs whining for attention and victimhood points, and "changing back" to some stricter form of "monogamy" goes against their "evolutionary imperative".

BloomingBrains · 2021-05-31T20:04:09+00:00

A monogamous society at least forced people not to look for the partner highest in the dating hierarchy, but for someone who is the most fitting partner for them. Hopefully we can find a way to make that idea popular again without returning to old-fashioned puritanism. As I said, it would benefit everybody.

I think the best way to do that would be to think about it like this: puritanism says, you must have one sexual partner for your entire life, essentially getting married very young and then only staying with that person.

Monogamy, to me, in a modern context, means something like "Dating only one person at a time". I don't think there necessarily needs to be a rush to get married, but it should be obvious by now that this extremely "enlightened" notion of hookup culture, where people date many other individuals all at once and sleep together on the first date, is not working well. Everyone seems to be dissatisfied with it, men and women.

Puritanism also had limits on sexuality itself, being against homosexuality, fetishes, sodomy, etc. None of that is necessarily part of monogamy. Gay people or people in alternative lifestyles can still be monogamous with each other.

LastRounder · 2021-06-04T13:55:57+00:00

Honestly, I do not understand left wing obsession with equality.

Differences are inequality, right? Differences in DNA, behavior, looks, tastes, are the main engines of evolution. Basically the very reason why diversity of life exists is, that DNA copying process is imperfect, it makes errors, that are selected for fitness to current environment. Why there is need for selection? Because variants are not equal. Environment changes, criteria of fitness change, diverce population survives, species survive and evolve. That's simple.

But when you extend it to human society, there are alvays people who want to make everybody equal. Wich means mediocre. That's just counter-survival strategy.

I think we should not aim for chimera of total equality,we should aim for equality of base possibilities. And that is it. Nothing more.

People get bare minimum of possibilities, anything above should be result of their own work. That's how living things survive, humans no exception.

DanteLivra · 2021-05-31T13:33:24+00:00

Normalize polyamory.

Hear me out, nobody HAVE to be in a relationship with multiple people at the same time. But what works with the economy works in dating too.

If one compagny forces you to buy only from it, then that compagny would be free to abuse you however they wish.

If you date multiple people, it's easier to compare and identify shitty people, forcing everyone to be competetive and decent humans.

People could settle down after x amount of time and there's nothing wrong with that.

There's people who will say "people already sleep around before having relationships" but I'm not talking about sleeping around, I'm talking about having a relationship with multiple people.

Women will be privileged at first. But quickly, people will realise that they better be alone than be with a shitty woman who manipulate a harem of men.

Those women will end up alone if they don't change and the same goes for men.

When people start dating for love rather than for sex/fun the dating scene will be much more equal. Bringing biology into this is pointless, yes most animals will have the male doing the chasing, but a lot of animals lives by doing the contrary and many do something completely unrelated to gender.

We have the privilege of cognition, we have the capacity to analyze and choose what we want to do. Let's make the best of it instead of saying "well, that's how it is".

Roads are not how nature is but we still built them because it was convenient. Money isn't natural but we still use it because it guarantee cooperation. Reducing humans to their biology is always a poor argument against change. (Paradoxally, there are convincing evidences that humans are a polyamory species, in nature there are very few examples of monogamous animals, actually.)