I wonder if dating apps (Tinder, Bumble, etc.) are leading women to have sex with a smaller cohort of desirable men. Years ago, OkCupid noted that a small percentage of men get an overwhelming percentage of messages from women. With the rise of "swipe right, swipe left" mobile dating apps, where people choose partners based almost solely on looks and status indicators, I can imagine it's getting even more unbalanced.
I dive a bit it that topic in "Dating for nerds (part 2): gender differences" https://p.migdal.pl/2017/09/30/dating-for-nerds-gender-diffe....
>If you firmly believe we are blank slates, and the only innate difference between the sexes is body shape, take a look at this thread:
But very few people believe this; it's better to characterise the argument as saying that many of the differences we see relating to the dynamics between the sexes are a product of society and culture, and the Reddit thread you linked underneath doesn't really refute that notion. I think it's more important that we try and understand the culture that produces these effects rather than inferring essential traits about humans without consulting the historical record.
The first model is where a supremely desirable male has many female partners, who get a little of his attention; and the second model, monogamy, where two partners pair up exclusively with the bulk of attention dedicated to each other [1]. Both are apt given different circumstances.
Without trying to put any morality on to it, dating apps/hookup culture seem more predisposed to tapping in to the first selection model.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Red_Queen:_Sex_and_the_Evo...
If you're a 28 year old woman without a partner you only have a few more years of being physically optimal to give birth to a healthy child.
So the average-looking men suddenly become more interesting. They have a career going, they are stable, aren't womanizers, and won't gather too much attention from the competition.
I'm definitely average looking and I didn't get much attention in my late 20s. Only in my 30s I started getting attention from women who would formerly only go with the types of men they now avoided like the plague.
One of those guys is a good friend of mine. Great looking guy, just a great person if you're... not a woman. But he's the "bad boy" women fell for when he was in his 20s. Now he's in his 30s and still playing his old game.
Take a pick:
Option #1: An 9/10 looking 6,2ft tall guy who had over 100 sexual partners, constantly plays the seduction game just to get laid, is constantly flirted with by younger women, can't hold a conversation unless it's about sex, booze, or soccer, still goes to clubs several times a week.
Option #2: A 7/10 looking 6ft tall guy who had 4 sexual partners in his entire life (all longer-term relationships), can hold a conversation, has female friends, worked on his career instead of being in clubs 5 times a week.
Sure, there are still women who fall for him. His most recent relationships were women in their early to mid 20s. He's actually trying to settle down and find a long-term partner, but he has no clue how. The last 5 of them he fell in love with, all left him hanging just a few weeks into the relationship.
I am in my 30s and when I was on dating apps I'd suddenly get a ton of matches. Obviously also from women who are like my friend: promiscuous (no judgment here) women who, in their 20s, got pregnant and were left by the father.
It’s a very destabilizing trend. Not only are these same men being economically disadvantaged, but they’re being socially isolated. Perfect way to increase violent tendencies, drug addition, and so on.
However, I expect a lot of the consequences to society will reveal themselves when the female user base grows older, as it'll cause missed opportunity to raise children, childs without father and fathers uninterested in sticking around as they easily find younger partners as age generally favours men in attraction dynamics.
Also, a certain mass of single young men will end up broken in the exercice. They'll either urged to compete in dishonest ways or give up entirely.
No, the article points out thar fewer (proportionately) young men are having sex, while the same proportion of young women are having sex. That's not the same as the less often / same rate description you give.
> I wonder if dating apps (Tinder, Bumble, etc.) are leading women to have sex with a smaller cohort of desirable men.
Social acceptance of homosexuality has increased, and every study I've seen shows that it's higher among women than men (and I think also higher for homosexual behavior by women than by men). Why do you assume that women must be only having sex with men?
If we assume that people with homosexual orientation attempting to conform to a heteronormative society would tend to have more trouble maintaining stable relations and thus cycle through relationships more frequently (which I think is plausible though not necessarily true), then a greater reduction in the number of members of one sex trying to conform that way would result in the kind of unbalanced drop seen in these statistics.
Thanks. That's what I meant, but I certainly should have worded it better. I've updated my comment.
> If we assume that people with homosexual orientation attempting to conform to a heteronormative society would tend to have more trouble maintaining stable relations and thus cycle through relationships more frequently...
So if I understand you correctly, your theory is that closeted lesbians were sleeping with so many men that it inflated the statistics? And now that homosexual women no longer feel constrained by societal norms, a significant number of men are left with nobody to have sex with?
I have single male friends in their thirties and they are generally content with life, holding no grudge to the opposite sex.
For every content single man in his late thirties I se 2-3 disgrunted and bitter single women ranting about how they are slighted by the patriarchy.
People choose partners based on chatting after the swipe and the overall impression/feeling they have when meeting in-person.
The belief that the majority of women on the dating market choose partners primarily based on looks and status is a fiction that's part of a broader narrative insecure men tell themselves to help rationalize the resentment they experience-- and a result of men projecting their own preferences and motivations onto women.
See my other comment in the thread. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19603329
Yes, for the tiny fraction of women on dating apps seeking hookups, attractiveness and status may be important factors. Many men may never have hookups. But the obsession with hookups is a male phenomenon, and the majority of women find them off-putting.
You make a regular guy say those things and his dating life would be dead quiet. If you want success with women you should do your best to become attractive.
Also, in your efforts to combat generalizations "against" women you did the same about men without skipping a beat.
The final choice is then made out of settling down by lowering expectations when prematurely optimizing for low priority variables in the first rounds.
I am amazed that men are adjudged to not have basic intelligence to see this through but are shoehorned as nursing their wounded ego. Nah man, Most men into adulthood are mature enough to not fall into simple biases unlike the feminist level misandry that concocts otherwise. Most men are optimistic than pessimist, more so, in the initial years of dating pool. That is why they test themselves repeatedly in dating market to draw such conclusions and eliminate the confirmation bias.
Why does your comment that you linked not explain the reasons and spend much/all the time in dispelling "myths"?
Abuse or PUA algorithms is all the more reason to not swipe left because you would expose yourself to more good people to bad people if statistics of society is anything to go by. Or why wouldn't you entertain the thought that women spread this rumour among themselves or play such hypothetical scenario in their minds more than the credibility associated with it?
> Yes, for the tiny fraction of women
If this sentence after this quote should continue to maintain what comes , then you must change the word tiny to majority. Match.com, Tinder and plethora of research contradicts you.
Men don't self select themselves out of dating pool. No numbers say that either in absolute or relative to women or men along time axis. That must bust the myth that they are somehow insecure.
The moment I read your "proto incel thoughts" as a warning signal in a HN community that isn't, is the same moment I got convinced the legitimacy of incels in this tiny subdomain of hatred they spew.
Sadly, we can see this kind of winner-takes-all dynamic play out in every part of our society now.
This worries me greatly.
* Dating apps, not good looking people have hard time getting any match on those kind of apps, so for those that use app and don't try to meet any other girls in real life I can easily understand that they don't have sex with any girls. Also these apps tends to increase expectations of people because they see beautiful people all day.
* Porno, porno is more and more present, and more and more flexible to people tastes, so it is not uncommon to find people be more happy watching porn than having real life sex
But I suspect they only watch porn because they can't have real sex or don't know how to get there.
Riiight, but it is much safer for a woman to hookup on Tinder with a hot stranger than to watch porn like the nerds who absolutely preffer porn to actual sex do.
I believe everyone would like to get together with the most attractive people, however in practice it doesn't work like that and there's a distinct gender skew in that area.
In the sea of disgusting theories and toxicity that is the red pill there is one thing that they got right: Men should approach and try to "pick up" as many women as possible. The guy that's 1/10 as desirable as another guy will get more dates if they attempt to "pick up" 20 times as many women.
Of course, it's a bit like the Red Queen running as fast as you can to stay still. If every man tries approaching 20 times the women eventually you end up back where you started but worse. You can see it online. The success rates for men outside of the top 5% are abysmal. You almost have to spam in order to have any reasonable chance of getting dates.
Similarly, technology may be shifting the dating/intimacy market toward a winners-take-most equilibrium, which favors the most attractive young men.
I am a little worried about the medium/long-term impact on society. Not because I find non-monogamy morally objectionable or something, but because having a stable long-term partner seems like it can be beneficial in helping people through hard times. It also seems to me that if a sizeable chunk of young men end up feeling undesirable, unwanted, and frustrated, the consequences won't be pretty, we all lose.
This goes hand in hand with my thinking that no one knows how to do poly “right”. They appear to be tools for people to stay blissfully ensconced in their regimes of self-care. I remember in my first poly relationship I was ready to go to war for my partners. But I almost never felt this readiness returned. To them, it might have been so much adornment for an aesthetic life holding little in the way of deep and lasting engagement.
For an image of what this could look like, Bertolucci’s “The Dreamers” hits the spot.
Pretty much. This is the demographic most susceptible to radicalization.
Not having long-term stable partners is also not mutually exclusive with being polyamorous and many poly people (again, in my experience) benefit from having multiple deep relationships with whom they can share their problems and struggles with. Load-balancing actually benefits all in this case.
A better comparison would be that children growing up in a polyamorous environment are more like a tribe of people instead of the classic family.
This becomes truer with age, too. How much extra energy do you have at 45? Do you have an extended family to help you? Not everyone has a good family, but with a marriage you have two chances at having a family. People will say polyamory doesn't preclude this, but there are hardships I'd never consider outside of a serious marriage. (full time financial support, integration into a family structure, etc.)
Those young men need to stop basing their self image on their own ego and sense of sexual entitlement.
What we're seeing here, in my humble and uneducated opinion, is the end of a period in societal history where women served the role of sexual currency in a market of male status. The social and religious pressures on women to validate men through sex and marriage are no longer relevant, and women are now seeking sexual fulfillment and relationships on their own terms, rather than those dictated to them by patriarchal society.
However, many men are still wedded, as it were, to the old model whereby their social status is accounted for by the number of women they have had sex with, and whether or not they are in a sexual relationship at the moment. They feel cheated because society has told them they are entitled to sex, and that there is something wrong with them if they don't get as much of it as they want.
What bothers me about this conversation is that disastrous, society-shattering consequences are always mentioned if women keep choosing not to have sex with more men, but no one seems willing to suggest that men need to change the way they view sex, relationships and themselves.
"yeah dating apps are likely to be the only major environmental change in the past decade to have had such an effect - but the mechanisms around this are manifold and complex and we must avoid being too simplistic in our models for how matches occur"
Yeah, so billions the world over progressed from their local musicians and folk tradition to Kanye West, Coldplay, Taylor Swift, and Nicky Minaj.
If you're a great-looking guy and you can't start or hold a good conversation, you can still get laid on the basis of looks. But if you don't look good, you don't get those grace points. I've seen guys (who look much better than I do) fail at getting laid on dating apps after LOADS of attempts, and despite being their friend, I must say the messages they've shown me are AWFUL. Not just "this isn't that great", but "WHAT WERE YOU THINKING???". When I was single (despite my looks), I found it really easy to get dates and get laid using dating apps, because I could actually hold conversations. And I know others just like me, who've gotten similar results.
>> If you're a great-looking guy and you can't start or hold a good conversation, you can still get laid on the basis of looks. But if you don't look good, you don't get those grace points
If it helps to know, a lot of us share screenshots of our conversations with our friends and get advice about what to say, how to start a conversation (or, I'll admit, to laugh about the ridiculous ones - consider this as us sharing risk-knowledge). Maybe get some advice if you're not sure how to go about it at first.
Which is impossible for everyone. Only a small percentage of people can have "really interesting" photos. If everyone suddenly got photos that today are really interesting the photos would become mundane.
>All you need is the swipe-right then use your confidence and humour to get a date.
Which is another problem. A lot of men lack confidence and humor.
I think you've hit on the path to success in online dating. My pictures from the traveling I did in my early 20s set me apart. If I didn't have those? I probably would have been lost in a sea of averageness.
EDIT: By this I mean, how much unattractiveness can actually be compensated for by being more interesting. Specially since you can't do that much with photos.
These "creepy" guys would likely be totally fine in an informal, real-world situation. They would be all right in the workplace, sports club, college study group or by coming along a group of friends, being introduced in person. They can hold conversations, but are subject to the imbalanced dating mechanics as discussed exhaustively in this thread. (This doesn't excuse some of the weaker shit that some guys seem to try though.)
Fortunately there are niches in society where regular guys are in high demand by attractive women, and observing that is fascinating. Has there just been a war and all the decent guys died? Ah no, were are just here.
1. Forced puns about the girl's name.
2. Long, extremely high-effort descriptions of hypothetical scenarios to establish how "unique" the suitor is.
3. Awkward double-entendres and transitions to a sexual topic.
It just strikes me what a weird filter this is for who gets to have sex, and how nice it is to meet people in real-life.
I think one of the saddest things, if true, are the reports that younger generations are more likely to view any real-world approaches as inappropriate as the online alternative has now been designated the official channel for meeting people.
- When you were writing good messages, were things very conversational and informal?
- Did you ever get reviews from women about how you were good at conversing? It also counts if they told you how the other guys they talked on dating apps were mostly awful at talking
- Would you are cognizant of messaging social norms (e.g. you know when to omit punctuation, shorten words, keep your messages short, avoid "double-texting", space out the time between texts, etc) and were good at following them during your online dating?
- Were you in the age range that the article talks about?
Putting effort into a messaging is definitely important, but there are a lot of small and strange details that make large differences in how those messages come off and how much people enjoy them. I'm not trying to bash you, just wondering if you're actually great at these conversations, in the age range I'm in, and yet still not getting good results.
> That's why you see men writing a bunch of generic low effort messages to women: because it is ultimately a more successful strategy.
If you're very attractive, yes. But if you're aren't very attractive and you're sending bad messages, how is that more successful than sending good messages? Perhaps I'm misunderstanding you. By "low effort messages" do you mean "bad messages" or do you mean "fluid messages without overthinking or too much detail"
If you're not after a relationship but to get laid, then that might be a good strategy. Yes you'll get much fewer positive responses but but the false positive rate should be way lower.
Why not replace your headshot with a dick pic, in that case?
Without giving an opinion on any side: there is (and will continue to be) growing instability when inequalities (relationship, wealth, or otherwise) result in a large portion of the population disaffected. Historically the solution to this particular problem has been enforced monogamy + the risk of pregnancy. Clearly that is no longer an option in the West, as sexual attitudes have become more open and birth control is widely available. It remains to be seen what the end result will be this time around.
Personally I think that technology will try (and largely fail) to address this imbalance. Think of K's "girlfriend" in Blade Runner 2049. This seems to be the route we as a society are heading toward. A civilization of hyper-individuals that attempt to fulfill all social and human needs through market-based product solutions.
The risk of pregnancy is a biological fact with far more severe penalties for women. Enforced monogamy in western societies is part of a broader history of social control that came to exist because it was good at perpetuating itself-- and which also unfairly disadvantaged women.
It's unfortunate that we evolved to be the way we are, but the "instability" we're seeing now is partly a result of fixing much deeper inequalities that've existed for most of human history.
The real source of the present instability is socialized (and partly biological) gender differences in how men and women approach courtship.
It's one interpretation, good for those who accepts the faith tenets of post-structuralism. The other is that it came to exist because of its viability in particular economic conditions.
Also, if acceptance of promiscuity as a social norm really benefits exactly women is a really big question.
This is arguable with modern society ensuring that support is provided from men. Men are wising up to the long term consequences of pregnancy and relationships with women - see the MGTOW movement.
FWIW, enforced monogamy is harmful to women in some ways (hard to leave a bad relationship), but helpful in others (it's hard to end up a single mom when the norm around unexpected pregnancies is a shotgun wedding).
Anyway the result of that is a decline in birth rates which will eventually lead to stabilizing or decreasing population. Which I think, in theory, is fine as long as it's stable for a long period of time and evenly distributed among age cohorts (which isn't the case in Japan). In practice though, the current economy is trained for a constant population increase; a lot of countries rely on immigration to maintain said population (and economic) increase.
Er, no, it hasn't. Risk of pregnancy predated the problem, it was not a part of a solution to it.
TFA mentions the low sample size of the original study, and augments it with Twitter polls. But TFA author's Twitter follows aren't exactly a representative sample of the population...
Furthermore, monogamy and sexual activity remains strong for people in their 30s, and I expect this will continue to be true in the future. Women are having children later, but there's still a strong preference for monogamy among people who choose to have children.
This article does a good job at summarizing the problems with the narrativein OP's post: https://ifstudies.org/blog/male-sexlessness-is-rising-but-no...
> It remains to be seen what the end result will be this time around.
More men will learn how to make themselves attractive people, so that women who aren't ready to have children yet are none-the-less invested in forming a strong and lasting relationship that includes a sexual component.
Some men won't accept this and they will be celibate for a good chunk of their 20s.
Oh well.
What should not happen is a regression to the sexual and gender role "morals" of the past. Quantitatively, there are at least as many women as men in the world. Qualitatively, "celibacy during your 20s" is not even remotely similar to the level of harm experienced by the bottom third of women for most of human history.
I also think that will not happen, and fears about social stability are enormously overblown. It's exceptionally unlikely that a small subgroup of men who already refuse to adapt is large enough and motivated enough to hold the rest of society at gunpoint.
I agree, and even if their followers were, all it takes is a single retweet by a popular user, or post in a high-traffic subreddit or Facebook share to wildly skew the results.
Offering the Twitter poll as any sort of evidence at all without major disclaimers makes me quite skeptic of the author's qualifications, to be honest...
Isn't it the point that it's something like 80% of men that are becoming disenfranchised? That hardly seems like a small subgroup to me.
I think this is wrong. I don't believe these things effect all ages and genders similarly. For instance, I think we would find that the rate of young men playing video games and watching porn are much higher than for young women. I'm not saying that young women don't do these things, but I don't believe these things are engaged in at the same rates as young men.
Also, many older men are already married. Even if they do view porn at similar rates to young men, this might not affect the rate at which they are having sex with their wives. And, in my experience, older men and women are not playing video games at the same rates as young men.
I don't know about porn, but data strongly disagrees with this when it comes to gaming.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_and_video_games#Demograp...
\* I'm using "nonmarital" here to refer to sex outside of a long-tern committed relationship. I originally referred to this as "casual sex" but I think that may be more loaded than what I'm looking for.
Edit: "extramarital" -> "nonmarital" as per respondent's suggestion
Alternatively they can offer a greater degree of commitment to female bottom 20%ers who presumably ALSO aren't getting a lot of casual interaction.
I'm 33 now and in the last 2.5 years, I've slept with more women than I did from 16-30 despite the fact I work full time, study full time and am a single parent (i.e. I have very little time for dating). If I lost some more weight, spent more time dating and attempted to have casual sex I could probably sleep with 20+ women per year fairly easily. My facial features are at best average, likely below average but I am tall and muscular (10 years Army).
(This kind of) economics is valuable when it can tease out and explain underlying trends that you can't figure out from just looking at the world. But in this case, the only thing you'll be missing if you proceed by intuition is, like, numbers on the size of the effect. If you want to solve the problems at a societal level, while numbers are useful for prioritization, maybe, you're going to be trying to solve the actual problems that you identify with your human analysis.
For instance living in this world provides me ample evidence to dismiss the line "It also won’t do to point to changes over this time period that effected all ages and genders similarly, such as obesity, porn, video games..." as laughable and clueless with, say, 99.99% confidence.
This kind of wishy washy thing I'm sure feels nice to say but doesn't seem to me to have any real explanatory power except at an individual level, which is not what this discussion is about.
I bet you anything that if I had access to tinder backend data and a couple of hours to mess around in Python, I could show you the similarity in the supposedly "non-existent" market forces there to well-studied phenomena in the world of economics and finance. Just imagine a lorenz curve describing the # of "swipes" a user gets!
I can't speak to the accuracy of the article though.
Absolutely wrong. Dating is one of the most efficient markets. Every individual decides who they will sleep with, date and marry based on a hierarchy of what they can get, what they think they're worth and how attractive they find the other person. There is far more agreement than disagreement in standards of attractiveness from person to person, if not, it would be fairly easy to go out and date just anyone. But no one wants to do that. Everyone tries to date the most attractive person they can get.
And I think that people who _do_ "play the dating game" don't realize how many don't. Among people going on dates every week, perhaps there is an economy. Among people who don't go on dates because they don't really try, because optimizing for partner-finding isn't even on their radar -- of course there is not a market there.
[.. edited to be less combative]
So you end up with a society where everyone is unhappy. The hookup culture devalues the woman, competing for a slice of a shrinking desirable pool of men, while the undesirable men become angry and frustrated. But desirability is more about status IMO. Status can be decoupled from wealth and the economy. If you’re not playing the status game, even if you’re wealthy, women will not find you attractive.
Late 30s male software developer - my long-term, live-in gf dumped me a few months ago and I got on the dating apps. Holy cow.
I get dozens of "matches" every single day on Bumble and Hinge, it's overwhelming. Don't even bother with Tindr or OKC (I tried OKC for a week and I had literally over 900+ "likes"). I'm not saying this rub it in anyone's face, just to confirm the hypothesis of many in this thread: the dating apps have redistributed matches to the top 20%.
I have friends and coworkers who are totally normal, regular-looking dudes and they barely get any matches -- my results piss them off so much they won't even talk to me about dating anymore.
I'm a decent-looking person but no male model and not rich, I can't even imagine how much more intense it is at that level.
That being said, I don't like the apps and wish there was a different way. Some kind of combination of internet matching and speed dating so you didn't have to waste days of your life endlessly texting or drop hundreds of dollars buying drinks (and/or dinner) for women who text you after the fact that they're not interested.
Not that anyone feels bad for me, but even getting a ton of responses it's not a process I enjoy either.
Now, as a young man who has gone through counseling, I have begun to have success in dating within the last two years. I've gone on about 25 dates last year, more than my entire life put together before. I even had sex twice last year, which I had never had before. One time was horrible, but the other time was genuinely wonderful. I loved cuddling in eachother's arms and talking about what was deep and meaningful and lovely within our own lives.
I remember the feelings of worthlessness, looking at statistics from online dating websites and population studies, remembering the hundreds of women who weren't interested, comparing myself with other men who were genuinely horrible, cowardly, and lazy people being very successful sexually from a young age, speaking with friends who were girls who complained that their lives were hard because they hadn't had sex in so long (2 months). Add onto this, there is a stigma of being extra-broken or unclean or an 'incel' if you have these problems.
The reality is this: most of the dating advice, from various sources, given to young men now doesn't work. Young men are given few other options other than rehashed 'self improvement' lectures, dating-game philosophies from pua, or arranged marriages. It's no wonder to me why young men my age are buying into some crazy nutcase ideas like government-given girlfriends. The reality is that no other genuinely dating-helpful options are being given to young men.
What helped me was slowly loving my life whether or not there was a lady present, not really caring about what people I don't know think about me, and most importantly getting out more and interacting with more people. I am not sure that this would work as well for everyone I know though.
Dating is still extremely hard for many young men. Counselors need to be ready to deal with this as an increasing issue. Solutions and answers need to be found and given to young men rather than casting them out or patronizing them.
However, I don't believe you are the type of people we are talking about. You say "being punished for girls being attracted to me", which implies that you were already attractive.
It might have helped you because you were already physically attractive. The problem is for those who aren't (and aren't able or willing to get surgery). If physical attractiveness is so important, many men, including myself, might not be able to do anything. Not get a girlfriend, nor get just sex, which is still important. Can you ask any trusted friend to tell you how attractive you are? I would love that you are average or below and still have success.
In any case, your solution seems to me to be a good idea even if you don't get laid. If I might ask, how did you do that? Changing my mentality and habits is something I've not had much success in doing.
Lower % males will always be aware of this
At some point this leads to increased violence and conflict
There's no way to put any of this back into the bottle (how can you enforce cultural (or even enforced) monogamy given free information and anonymous encounters? It's harder than trying to prevent people doing drugs, incel fantasies aside.
The closest thing to a way out is to try and change the culture of sex as power and status and deconstruct the whole thing somehow? (As in all you change point 3, get low status guys to care less). It seems difficult though, it's beyond politically incorrect to say but I can't imagine guys ever being happy to know that they were a compromise choice by their girlfriend who had to really prove himself after 10 years of sleeping with men far more attractive than them that just had to swipe. Hard to see outside your own culture though, maybe that will just become accepted.
"An ironic side-effect of feminism is to free men from the burden of being the head of the house." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RPETpCVrH9Y
"Why you can't find a man: Hypergamy Floats" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4UWpmd1yjVc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UaFJ18aENkc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9W6wvHSMmzY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PqSCRnrq5I0
Some more:
"More" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ud3PgQ_y170 "No Eligible Men" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tTxP7fPMnK4 "Seeing the hook" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nv4jnWYCuEs "Remaining unplugged" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0KfQIEAGqhg "Hiding in morals" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBslYOWiJlI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LnWV4Yy6dOs
But hey, it may be just porn and videogames after all... who knows...
How does this work in societies where rich/succesful males can have multiple women? Are there simply a bunch of leftover men? Or is the number of men who have multiple women today too small to make a dent?
Assuming there's 50/50 men/women there too...
You can have multiple wives even if you are not rich or just look average. I would say the majority of men stick to monogamy (90% probably). Having more than one wife comes with a lot of restrictions such as:
- All your wives have an automatic stake in your inheretence. In islam you can't choose who inherits what, its already set in place for you.
- All your wives need to be provided for by yourself. Even if they are rich. You as a male are required to provide for your wife and Children
- Be just between you wives. You bought a house for one? buy the same for the others. You took your first wife on holidays? same for the others. The quran state that you need to be just, but argues that you might not be able to achieve justice all the time.
Most people I know who have a second wife have specific reasons for doing so. For example a guy in my family had his wife choose his second wife for him. She couldn't have any babies and he was adamant to have kids. She agreed to stay with him, but only if she was involved in choosing his second wife for him. They have two houses one next to the other, and the kids play more with his first wife than with their mum.
For monogamy in general, arab men have it really somehow easy to get married. You just need to have a job and look somehow acceptable. There is no dating culture as in the west. You wouldn't find a man and his girlfriend living together and trying things out for a few years before deciding to marry. You get to know your future wife and meet with her (between a few months to a year most likely) and then decide to get married.
Having sex before marriage is frowned upon, but doesn't mean that it doesn't exist. Most women in the muslim/arab world are actually looking to build a family and have kids. Not all of them agree to you having a second wife.
1. https://www.payscale.com/gender-lifetime-earnings-gap
2. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/31/business/economy/volatile...
3. https://blogs.chapman.edu/crean/2015/09/29/new-research-anal...
4. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/17/upshot/when-wives-earn-mo...
Men's sperm counts are going down 3% a year and have been consistently for over 30 years. Nobody knows exactly why, but environmental contamination through "xenoestrogens" (e.g. BPA in receipt paper) is a major theory.
This is no freak trend and has been researched by over a thousand papers with no good answer (so don't reply with a pet hypothesis like exercise-- it's not).
1. https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2018/10/sperm-cou...
2. https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C33&q=spe...
There is a similar movement growing in the US which is called "MGTOW", men going their own way: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men_Going_Their_Own_Way
Personally, I'm a bit scared that we're going towards a culture of increasing isolation and tension between the genders.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_European_marriage_patt...
> The Western European marriage pattern is a family and demographic pattern that is marked by comparatively late marriage (in the middle twenties), especially for women, with a generally small age difference between the spouses, a significant proportion of women who remain unmarried, and the establishment of a neolocal household after the couple has married. In 1965, John Hajnal discovered that Europe is divided into two areas characterized by a different patterns of nuptiality. To the west of the line, marriage rates and thus fertility were comparatively low and a significant minority of women married late or remained single and most families were nuclear; to the east of the line and in the Mediterranean and particular regions of Northwestern Europe, early marriage and extended family homes were the norm and high fertility was countered by high mortality.
I'm not sure what lessons we can draw from Japan/Korean, though, as these revelations all seem to be from relatively recently and the long-term impacts haven't been seen or explored yet. The main obvious consequence is plummeting birth rates [5, 6], which will probably have drastic economic consequences, but we may not see those consequences for decades.
1: https://www.google.com/search?q=japan+sex+rates
2: https://www.cnn.com/2016/09/20/asia/japanese-millennials-vir...
3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celibacy_syndrome
4: http://theconversation.com/why-young-people-in-south-korea-a...
5: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/dec/27/japan-shrinkin...
6: https://qz.com/1556910/south-koreas-birth-rate-just-crashed-...
We talk a lot about growth hacking and hacking technical systems. Hacking in the meaning of "Using intelligent, unusual approaches to gain an advantage over the typical approach". Yet for sexual market place it's completely silence here on HN.
2) People are way more engaged with screens than in person
3) Masculinity is labeled 'toxic', etc. Young men are not getting the support/encouragement/mentoring they need.
Not true and a willful misinterpretation of the phrase "toxic masculinity".
I hear people talk about this a lot, but don't understand what it actually means.
For example, what kind of support/encouragement/mentoring did men previously get that they no longer enjoy, and how would it have an effect on sex rates?
https://www.theguardian.com/education/datablog/2013/jan/29/h...
Tinder, etc. leads to a skewed distribution of access to sexual partners based on attractiveness, which leads to unattractive men not having as many partners, which leads to pick-your-favorite-bad-consequence.
And there are a lot of men in this thread feeling worried and depressed about this. While it's certainly true that you get more matches on Tinder if you're attractive, this overall narrative is vastly oversimplified, and the conclusions drawn from it are inaccurate. It's the result of men projecting male attitudes onto women's behavior. I understand that it's easy to feel resentful. I don't fault anyone inherently for this-- these are complex issues, there are exceptions to every generalization, and it's difficult to judge because it's hard to experience the dating "market" through different eyes.
But before you buy into that narrative, take a moment to think about what it's like for women. I'll indulge in some generalizations (yes there are exceptions) because brevity is of the essence. Compared to men:
- Women care less about physical attractiveness - Women are less interested in hookups and enjoy them less - Women are more interested in romantic and emotional connections and long-term relationships
Do you really think the majority of women are happy with the recent societal changes in dating? It's not hard to find thinkpieces written by women lamenting these issues. I haven't met a single woman who was happy with it. And I've heard many bad date stories from my female friends and my own dates. One article described it as "searching for a diamond in a sea of dick pics". And you have to worry about physical violence or men who treat you like an object and try to run some PUA algorithm on you. Maybe you believe that some women are doing things you don't condone. But can you honestly blame them? No one's perfect, dating is a shitty and exhausting experience for everyone.
As a man it's easy to fixate on physical attractiveness because we notice and care about it more. But I assure you, once you meet your date in person your looks stop mattering (as long as you didn't lie) and at that point it's up to your personality. There are a lot of women who'd be excited to date a decent and kind man who's willing to explore some level of emotional commitment without trying to "keep it casual". Explaining these changes purely on the basis of an attractiveness/status market is a cop-out for men who are too insecure to confront whether they're actually enjoyable people to be around.
I see a lot of proto-incel thoughts in this thread. That shit is a downward spiral, you need to pull yourself together and get out of it before you internalize how physically "unattractive" you supposedly are. Once the incel ideology destroys your self-confidence and skews your outlook on the world you will actually become an unattractive person even if you look fine physically.
This is debatable. This is certainly truer for women in more traditional societies where they earned less than men, but as women climb up the corporate ladders you see them doing the same things in relationships as men.When liberated from patriarchal sexual norms female sexuality seems to converge to male sexuality, but cultural understanding of sexual relationship lags actual behavior by 40 years. Studies show that women have the same hard coded visceral, visual sexual physiological response as men, but the social constraints preventing women from acting have been relaxed.
> Studies show that women have the same hard coded visceral, visual sexual physiological response as men
I don't know what studies you're looking at but you're misinformed. Women don't have the same physiological response to visual stimuli as men do.
I don't know what you mean by "doing the same things" but even if we assume that women are doing those things it doesn't follow from that they are the same as men at a sexual level.
Lemon markets are solved by introducing competent gatekeepers.
What people actually want in a dating market is for somebody to vet their dates. People are more willing to take risks (i.e. on somebody less physically attractive, lower income, etc.) if a trusted source certifies that a candidate is emotionally open and physically safe. Similarly, that such a gatekeeper will exclude you from the market if you show signs of poisoning the pool, working with you on whatever issues until you can be "recertified".
It's a great idea for a startup. Except that the certification process doesn't scale and the privacy concerns surrounding the reasons for exclusion beg Murphy's Law to get creative.
Not young women these days. Even "ugly" women detest being approached by men in their looks range. Now, these women are setting themselves up for long-term consequences too. Sure, a bored attractive guy might fuck them (he surely won't actually date them except maybe a going-through-the-motions coffee before asking her to go fuck) once in a while but they'll never get into a good relationship and when they hit 30 they will be miserable as fuck.
There is so much emphasis on physical appearance and status in this thread.
If this is a common mindset among young men, it's no wonder they are lonely. Who wants to spend time with someone who reduces deeply human relationships to status and sex appeal?
Attractiveness is a complicated and extremely individual thing. Appearance and status are much less important than forming an intimate emotional connection through shared experiences and values.
But you can't deny the fact that people do make snap judgements on each other based on physical appearance alone. It's not even about dating. It's probably something wired to our brain.
Now if the above is true, why won't you care about your physical appearance? Why leave something that important on the table?
Maybe it's me, but I get the feeling that even if I improve myself (start hobbies, go to the gym more, etc) That will not be enough to secure a serious relationship because its so much easier for partners to 'upgrade' and find someoene else. There are fewer incentives to stick it out and build on a relationship, not unlike how the norm for getting a raise is to change jobs (instead of company loyalty)
I would absolutely DREAD today’s dating scene through a screen. Maybe older men do it the old way?
I don’t know, this is one revolution I hope regresses.
If you’re young and looking, I’d suggest you try to mix and match your circle with your friends’ circles and hope for the best.
I think this is what he means when he says physiological.
What does leaving the house accomplish? It's not
like you suddenly will interact with people.
Well, that depends where you go when you leave the house, but there are indeed still places where people interact with strangers in person and form relationships,both friendly and romantic, without online interaction starting it.
https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/09/harvard...
https://thetech.com/2009/10/30/survey-v129-n49
Perhaps conforming to stereotype, apparently at MIT 42% of students overall are virgins while at fraternities this rate was 20%.
Beyond sex, relationships with romantic partners are a complex, rewarding part of the human experience. How did that get lost to some?
The same young men then tell me, that I should be worried about race-mixing, and I should be worried that most men are not having sex.
This is, quite frankly, a fascinating duality of thought.
I wonder, if this is a dating app phenomenon, if there's anything that can be done thats healthier for our society. Banning the apps isn't the right way, but is there some means of adding balance?
1. Video games give us fulfillment. If the reason you're looking for intimate relationships is fulfillment in life and video games partly fill that hole, then you're less likely to look for intimate relationships. Men tend to make up a much greater share of games that require a large time investment ("hardcore games").
2. Social media gives us some human contact, but it rarely leads to intimate contact. It scratches the itch of human interaction without needing us to leave the room.
3. Porn. The easy access to porn means that there's less of a reason to search for intimate contact. Men tend to be visual. When you're online, then images of a beautiful woman are only a few clicks away. It doesn't come with any of the baggage relationships come with either.
3. Dating apps. Women on dating apps seem to be harsher when judging the attractiveness of men than men are. This leads to a situation where average looking men will find it harder to find intimate partners on these services. They can't really make up for it by being smart or witty either.
4. Relationships are difficult to start. If a man approaches a woman and fails, then (sometimes) he's considered creepy. In many cases it's simply a misreading of expectations. For example, some women think that a man should always approach first, but some women think that unless a woman explicitly shows interest then a man approaching her is creepy. It's risky for a man to start the interaction, so they are more apprehensive. At least this is the impression that I got based on what I've seen online, particularly Twitter.
5. Divorce. In many of the stories you hear about separation and divorce, it's the man that gets shafted. Women are more likely to get the kids and, at least in the stories, they might get a large alimony too. This means that the man would be severely hampered in any future relationships they seek, because some of their income goes to the former spouse.
Some men add these together and then ask themselves "why bother?" Why risk approaching a woman, if instead you could be playing video games? They are as much fun, and hey, chances are that she wouldn't be into you anyway. As a result, some men opt out from this part of society.
I'm sure there are many other small issues like this that I couldn't think of, but these are certainly things that made me question whether relationships are even worth it. Every time you hear about things like "toxic masculinity" or some such it ever so slightly chips away at some men's interest in participating in society. The small chips have added up. Couple that with compelling alternatives on how to spend your time and I think you get the result we have.
You could also argue that we're simply following in the footsteps of Japan.
The "why bother" effect became very strong in me after my last long-term relationship failed, and I noticed that my advancing age made it even more difficult to get anyone interested in starting a new thing.
My personal disillusionment reached its peak when I realized that dating and marriage are one of these treadmills that just eats away at your life. People who are physically attractive, well-educated, and wealthy are in my opinion much less likely to feel this drain - both because they have more attractive options to choose from and because they tend to have a more gratifying life in general. Whereas people like me would have to expend a considerable amount of energy just to even get an opportunity, only to end up with a less-than-ideal match (because if I'm "settling" for someone, odds are she's also somehow forced to "settle" with a less-than-ideal partner such as me), and I'd have to spend an inordinate amount of effort just to keep up in the long run. If you're someone who is constantly getting the feedback that you're inadequate, every step of this is degrading. So why do it?
So the realization is that striving for partnership is not worth it for many men (and I suspect for some women, too). It's perfectly possible to lead a fulfilling life without it, once you stop running after the proverbial carrot that society would like to dangle in front of you. Instead of being someone whose primary attribute is being a sub-par partner, I can concentrate on being actually valuable at other things that matter to me.
For all the stories about large alimony, such situation not the norm.
And, honestly, it doesn't seem like women are terribly upset about this. This seems to be the world (almost) everybody wants.
If anything, we're returning to the historical norms. Using genetic analysis of the Y chromosome, ASU researchers were able to conclude that the male:female ratio was about 17:1. Meaning that in human history, one man made 17 women pregnant, on average [0].
[0] https://psmag.com/environment/17-to-1-reproductive-success
What is concerning is that our current society is breaking apart.
Similar to how In high school you need 40 hrs of community service to graduate
Edit: ok not ‘enforced’ but there should be some sort of government incentive
Channel that desire into hobbies that are actually interesting to you, and enjoy life.
Sex, intimacy, relationships, marriage and the like do not automatically guarantee you happiness, as perfectly illustrated by this masterpiece: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0147612/
Response to (sridca):
Yes, I'm well aware of the difference between need and desire.
But you can't have an "awesome life" if your major desires ( food, shelter and sex ) aren't met.
Also, I said sex is a necessary condition for most people to live an "awesome life", not all people. You misread that part. And by most people, I mean everyone barring the exceptional minority with physical or genetic ailments.
Can you live without sex? Sure. Can you live an "awesome life" without sex. I highly doubt it. But people are willing to rationalize anything I guess.
Food, sex and shelter are pretty much our biological imperatives. Not sure how you can live an "awesome life" without your basic natural desires being met.
But if you are happy living a sexless life, then all the best to you. This is a difference of opinion that we are just going to live with.
That is, the top 20% of men are the ones that are most desirable(however defined) .
In the past the desire to have kids(and the result of needing the man to stick around), and the shame of being considered a slut if a woman's slept with many men, kept much of this in check.
1. The algorithm is designed to automatically bump
threads down when the number of flagged comments
exceeds a certain amount or rate.
2. The moderators want to simplify their moderation
duties and manually bump the post down to lower
the comment flux.If you want an actual explanation: I am a woman and this does not match with my lived experiences. In fact, the article seems to dehumanize women in a lot of places. I'm really tired of the incel narrative and the sorts of moral arguments that come along with articles of this type in the comment section. Seeing us represented this way really stresses me out. I'm just here to learn about tech stuff, geez.
Second, to explain the effect, I offer the following two theories:
- degraded sexual endocrinology. Hormones are very important in arousal and libido so this is likely the biggest effect.
- society punishing male sexuality. The low evidence standard (in the court of public opinion) to female fake accusers, creates substantial risk for men. Under this theory, the age group effect can be explained as bigger on the young, who are still forming their attitudes about sex and observing society's discourse, than on older people who came of age in a less risky era.
It's unclear to me how "downregulating sex" by social / hormonal mechanisms is affected by the massive viewership of porn.
The other most interesting theories I think are the economic ones (changing income), because sexual biology is intimately wired with resources seeking in our brains, in ways more pronounced for women than for men.