https://theblog.okcupid.com/your-looks-and-your-inbox-8715c0f1561e

On r/PurplePillDebate and The Manosphere in general there is a lot of talk about this OkCupid "article" or "study", there a few posts on r/TheRedPill about it, a lot fo users use this 'data" to justify claims about a Pareto distribution and there is even a user that devoted their username to this. The study confirms a shocking revelation, which the shocking revelation that attractive individuals get more messages on an online dating site than the more unattractive individuals was discovered.

Here is the first chart

Our chart shows how men have rated women, on a scale from 0 to 5. The curve is symmetric and surprisingly charitable: a woman is as likely to be considered extremely ugly as extremely beautiful, and the majority of women have been rated about “medium.” The chart looks normalized, even though it’s just the unfiltered opinions of our male users.

When the author says the "chart looks normalized" what the author means is that it follows a Normal Distribution curve, women are more to be rated as really attractive or really unattractive, and most women follow in the middle on "average".

Here is the actual distribution of the messages the male users sent

When it comes down to actually choosing targets, men choose the modelesque. Someone like roomtodance above gets nearly 5 times as many messages as a typical woman and 28 times as many messages as a woman at the low end of our curve. Site-wide, two-thirds of male messages go to the best-looking third of women. So basically, guys are fighting each other 2-for-1 for the absolute best-rated females, while plenty of potentially charming, even cute, girls go unwritten.

Despite the first graph following a Normal Distribution, the graph showing how males choose to message the female participants is skews to the left of the graph, "2/3 of male messages go to the top 1/3 of women.".

As you can see from the gray line, women rate an incredible 80% of guys as worse-looking than medium. Very harsh. On the other hand, when it comes to actual messaging, women shift their expectations only just slightly ahead of the curve, which is a healthier pattern than guys’ pursuing the all-but-unattainable. But with the basic ratings so out-of-whack, the two curves together suggest some strange possibilities for the female thought process, the most salient of which is that the average-looking woman has convinced herself that the vast majority of males aren’t good enough for her, but she then goes right out and messages them anyway.

This is the controversial claim(here is the graph), 80% of males are rated below average by the female population of OkCupid. This data is used to "confirm the 80/20 rule" which is referring to the Pareto principal. The Pareto principal, is a statistical observation stating 20% of X accounts for 80% of Y, for example: you can take my post, put it under a word frequency counter, you would quickly find out that a small amount of the words that are used in my post account for the majority of words used. In the data regarding 80% of males are rated below average, what does that data actually tell you? These are some of the inferences on r/PurplePillDebate that users have made from this data:

  • 20% of males are Alpha

  • Males who are not in the top 20% are fighting for scraps

  • Females are only attracted to 20% of males

  • 80% of males are invisible to females

  • 80% of females chase the top 20% of males

Now obviously these examples are more simplistic than the actual claims, but this is really what it does come down to. Being in the 80th percentile is quite different than being in the 95th percentile, and even in the 99th percentile. Right now, check twitch.tv and look at the games being played, despite there being hundreds of games, as of the time I am writing this post, League of Legends and DotA 2 have a total of 370000 views put together, that is more views than most of the games combined are currently receiving, examining the next 4 games, they have roughly 130000 views, then if I look at the next 4 games, they have roughly 85000, then if I look at the next 4 games, they roughly have 60000, as one goes down the list they keep dropping. It is a tenable conclusion to make that 80% the viewers on twitch.tv are watching 20% of the games.

As a thought experiment, imagine if the female population was able to choose which male they wanted to date/marry/have casual sex with, and that choice was one-sided and indefinite, it would probably look similar to how viewers select watching games on twitch.tv, where it would be a very small pool of males being chosen from. This inference is most likely true, because male celebrities would have literally millions or hundreds of thousands of dating options, in theory. Likewise, it would be a similar distribution to if males were to choose from female celebrities, if they could have any choice they wanted.

The reality is that you are most likely not going to be your partner's first choice in theory, which could leave one in a bit of a dejection, just as celebrities would never have enough time to have sex with/date the amount of individuals willing to do so, or that they would even want to date those people. In the case of this melancholy reality, the why is irrelevant, what people people are actually doing is, people are still dating despite them not getting their ideal partner, people are having sex with those people they are dating, despite them not being ideal and they are even happy, despite their partner not being ideal.

Edit: inaccuracies