So the red/black pill narrative of course maintains that there is growing sexual inequality, first because of the sexual revolution, and now supposedly it's being exacerbated due to online dating.

Let's see if this idea is more than just speculation and holds up to cold hard data.

I've ran some GSS (General Social Survey) data through the Berkeley SDA site, and it doesn't look like 'chad' is performing any better than he was in the 2000s or the 90s.

Among men in their 20s, opposite-sex sex partners since turning 18 have remained remarkably stable over the past three decades among the top 20% and 5% of men. The percentage of men reporting over 50 partners went from 2.5% between 1991-2000 to 3.2% in 2002-2010 to 2.8% 2012-2021. If there was a growing number of partners in the top 5% of men we'd expect more to enter this category. In the top 20%, if anything we actually see a recession, as the total reporting 11-20, 21-50, and 50+ was down to 19.2% between 2012-2021 (the decade which marked a significant rise in online dating) from 23.1% between 2002-2010, and this was not accompanied by a higher concentration in the higher partner counts of 21-50 or 50+. If the top 20% of men were hoarding an increasing share of the women we'd of course expect more men to enter these categories but instead they may be retreating from them, although the error margins (representing a 95% confidence interval btw) make it hard to say for sure.

In terms of men reporting no partners at all (not quite a proxy for virginity as the survey includes gay men and the question relates to female sex partners specifically, and also some may have had sex before but not after turning 18), we do see a noticeable rise for both men and women. The rise from the 2000s to 2010s looks sharper for men, though women started off a bit higher as well. Still, there's a gap of 2.3% between men and women in 2012-2021.

https://preview.redd.it/ffk1zkahhvfa1.png?width=1920&format=png&auto=webp&v=enabled&s=cd85367d962b40a07aa84cfe793d8f9c9cf25e99

Data from the NSFG which has a sample size about seven times greater than the GSS also shows a minor gap of 1.6% among 20-29 men and women who haven't had sex with an opposite-sex partner between the years of 2017-2019, but it doesn't show a proportionally high increase among men as the overall gap is wider between 2008-2010 and 2013-15 than between 2013-15 and 2017-2019.

https://preview.redd.it/763j33bjhvfa1.png?width=1920&format=png&auto=webp&v=enabled&s=a765173c1255b62618d90c71944817b937f2e7f7

So overall we see that while there has probably been an increase in men in their 20s reporting never had heterosexual sex, one it's not anything world shattering, two it's not clear that the rise is being particularly spearheaded by men, and three it doesn't seem to be accompanied by increasing partner counts among the top percentiles of men. This may be surprising to some who like to make extrapolations from dating apps and the imbalance when it comes to swipes and matches on them, but as I've said the gender ratios on them are also highly skewed which is the main (but probably not only) driver of this imbalance and according to the actual outcome data, there is not a disproportionate number of women meeting and hooking up through them, if anything it's the reverse. So it seems like the manosphere has made a mountain out of a molehill when it comes to its unending fixation on tinder and the supposed catastrophe it's unleashed on the sexual/dating market. If anything dating apps and especially tinder which has a hookup stigma just reflect the reality that there's many more men looking for hookups and with greater intensity. It's hardly different than bars/clubs always were. While there are still a minority of men who have most of the sex, it doesn't seem like they're having any more than they already did before the advent of dating apps unless there's some other more reliable data I'm unaware of. There's also a common implication that the remaining 80% of men are either completely out of the game or are desperately fighting over a few leftover scraps which clearly isn't the case either.

One last thing, while it seems likely that there is some overreported/underreporting among men/women respectively, it's hard to see how that would relate to trends over time, and if you were to say otherwise then to have it explain the lack of evidence for the growing chad harem narrative you'd have to say that men are now overreporting LESS than they used to, which doesn't seem likely to me at least.