I can recognize the attitude from my youth and I think it is really counterproductive. It leads to the kind of bitterness expressed in this line:
a starving entrepreneur who (unlike you) gets kicked in the face every goddamn day.
a man who sees himself that way isn’t going to be attractive to women.
If you restrict yourself to thinking about meaningless sex, then yes it is true that the relationship between men and women is pretty asymmetrical. An average woman can probably consume as much meaningless sex as she wants without too much effort, whereas for most men there is a lot of effort involved in obtaining meaningless sex. However, if you consider quality monogamous relationships the situation is much more symmetrical. There is a significant search effort for both sexes in finding a quality compatible partner that reciprocates their feelings.
For most people long-term committed relationships are the goal, so for most people the world is fairly symmetrical. It may not feel that way in your early 20s though.
For most people the goal is medium term relationships, interspersed with meaningless or nearly meaningless sex, and eventually a long term relationship with perhaps children.
Women (who want this) tend to get it. Men who want this, in many cases, get nothing for the first 10 years and then jump straight to the long-term relationship stage. Saying “it doesn’t feel that way in your early 20s” seems to imply your teens and 20s don’t really matter if it turns out all right in the end?
For most people the goal is medium term relationships, interspersed with >meaningless or nearly meaningless sex, and eventually a long term relationship >with perhaps children.
I was thinking about it across people rather than across an individual lifetime. If you asked all the adults in the US what kind of romantic relationship they are most interested in, most of them will say long-term monogamous. After all, most of them are in long-term monogamous relationships. This is consistent with what you are saying, just a different way of looking at it.
I will say though that while this kind of path is very common its not the only desirable or good one. Tons of people get married as virgins and lots of other peoples have lots of other different romantic paths. I also don’t think that the involuntarily celibate path (at least up to a certain age) is the worst one available. Who would you rather be, a 24 year old nerd who has never had a date, or a 24 year old playa appearing on Maury for the 8th time to be told “you are the father!”?
Saying “it doesn’t feel that way in your early 20s” seems to imply your teens and 20s >don’t really matter if it turns out all right in the end?
Now that I am happily married the utility difference to me of one more or less relationship in my past is really small. So, in that sense my lack of romantic success between say 16 and 20 really doesn’t matter. It matters about as much as the fact that I got a C in 9th grade geometry given that I went on to kick ass at math later on in high school and in college.
That being said, 9th grade math was really frustrating for me, as was trying to date in high school and college. One way I could have dealt with that frustration was to learn PUA techniques to increase my success. I doubt that would have worked well for me. I think it would have helped me if I had known then that it was only temporary. Once I got a good paying job, spent some time at the gym, and gained a little maturity, suddenly girls started wanting to go on a second date, even though I still wasn’t a great conversationalist. In that case I still wouldn’t have gotten laid much, but I would have stressed about it less.
Now that I am happily married the utility difference to me of one more or less relationship in my past is really small.
But for the person whose present became your past, the utility difference was enormous. And that’s what really matters. Even if you’re sure you’ll be happy later, you can’t ignore being unhappy right now.
Once I got a good paying job, spent some time at the gym, and gained a little maturity, suddenly girls started wanting to go on a second date, even though I still wasn’t a great conversationalist.
It’s perfectly reasonable that you needed more skills or attributes for this success. But age should not, of itself, be one of these attributes, as long as you’re dating people your own age.
But for the person whose present became your past, the utility difference was >enormous. And that’s what really matters. Even if you’re sure you’ll be happy later, you >can’t ignore being unhappy right now.
I guess. I certainly felt back then that my lack of success with women was likely permanent. I think that if I had known then what my future was going to be like it would have increased my happiness, but I don’t know for sure.
It’s perfectly reasonable that you needed more skills or attributes for this success. >But age should not, of itself, be one of these attributes, as long as you’re dating >people your own age.
It seems like you are making the assumption that women and men of the same age have the same average attractiveness. I think that assumption is a cause of a lot of frustration among young men and leads to erroneous theories about how women date up and men date down and stuff like that. In my model of attractiveness, the average 21 year old woman is much more attractive than the average 21 year old man. Consequently, if you are a 21 year old man, and you want to date a relatively pretty girl your own age, she is probably way out of your league. Unless you have something exceptional going for you, or you get really lucky, its likely not going to happen.
Happily, attractiveness in men tends to rise in the 20s (and even into the 30s and beyond depending on career trajectory & fitness regimen) while it declines pretty rapidly for women in that time period. Even by 25 things will have converged a great deal. But especially for men who are still students, a girl who is the same age as them and in the same percentile of attractiveness as them for that age will be much more attractive than them when judged against the population as a whole.
If a man wants to date at 21 then yes, he either needs lots of charm, or he needs to go for women that are more his overall level of attractiveness. For instance, very overweight/ugly 21 year old women, high school girls, 32 year old trailer trash with 3 kids and a drinking problem, etc.
This sounds very much like an armchair investigation. Most modern marriages, i.e. today, not 15 years ago, are between couples of very similar ages and similar incomes. You’ve got an assumption that women strongly prefer older men—your conclusion that a young man will have difficulty dating at his own age requires this. This may have been true back in the day, before women could pay their own bills. It’s certainly true of some subset of women. But if marriage numbers mean anything, and I would rather think they do, women in general aren’t after meaningfully older men, which suggests that younger men are not at as strong a disadvantage as you have assumed.
I’m not sure what kind of attractiveness you mean to be talking about, but I’ll chip in that maturity tends to be greater in young women than in young men. This equalizes as much as it ever does by the mid to late 20′s.
An effect such as you describe certainly exists to some extent. I don’t know from personal experience if it’s as large as you say. (I suspect it varies a lot across different cultures.)
The question remains: when 21 year old women see that only men who are at least e.g. 25 years old are attractive enough for them, do they consciously rank attractiveness by age, or does age translate into other objective attributes like e.g. experience?
An average woman can probably consume as much meaningless sex as she wants without too much effort
Is this actually true? Seriously appealing for evidence either way. (I have a pet theory that we overestimate how attractive the “average woman” is for Reasons.)
Your theory doesn’t seem to stand up to the data, here and here. It seems it’s women that underestimate male attractiveness. Men’s judgments are almost symmetrical. Data is from Okcupid surveys.
(obvious confounds: people that use okcupid may not be representative of the population generally, both for the raters and ratees.)
In order to make the data from OKCupid correspond to an underestimation, you have to equate the arbitrary 1-5 rating with some absolute measure like “quintile of attractiveness.” This does not necessarily hold.
There is some grounding in the OKCupid data, but it comes from the functional meaning of the point scores: when two people mutually rate each other four or five stars, they’re both notified. A score of four or five is therefore a weak way of saying “I find this person attractive enough that I’d like to meet them”. (We aren’t necessarily talking strictly physical attraction, though; “everyone knows” that the scores are based on photos more than profile text, but I have no idea how true this actually is.) Scores in the 0..3 range have no direct effects, but they may be anchored in some way by the fraction of people rated 4 or 5.
This is all to the best of my knowledge; I haven’t been active on OKCupid for a couple of years and they might have tweaked the interface since then. On the other hand, I do remember seeing those analytics pages when I was active.
It seems it’s women that underestimate male attractiveness. Men’s judgments are almost symmetrical.
I’m not sure “underestimate” is the right description here; my opinion (as an androphile) is that the male attractiveness distribution is heavily skewed, basically in the way that women think it is, if the 1-5 scale measures the underlying strength of attraction rather than quintiles. (3s, 4s, and 5s all fall in the top quintile of male attractiveness, but it seems that there are much larger gradations there than there are in the top quintile of female attractiveness.)
And for the underlying question of access to sex, the message distribution is more important, but isn’t scaled correctly for comparisons between the two.
I’m not sure “underestimate” is the right description here; my opinion (as an androphile) is that the male attractiveness distribution is heavily skewed, basically in the way that women think it is, if the 1-5 scale measures the underlying strength of attraction rather than quintiles. (3s, 4s, and 5s all fall in the top quintile of male attractiveness, but it seems that there are much larger gradations there than there are in the top quintile of female attractiveness.)
I’m not an androphile myself, but that’s my impression too, for various reasons (see e.g. the paragraph starting with “Similarly” in this post).
Huh. Those are some very interesting numbers, I’ll have to look over those.
I was talking about people (possibly) overestimating how attractive the median woman is*, though, not people failing to identify how attractive specific women are—which I think is what those graphs relate to? How well estimated attractiveness actually predicts people being attracted?
*(leading to suggesting strategies for most women that actually only work for a high-attractiveness minority, perhaps.)
I was talking about people (possibly) overestimating how attractive the median woman is*, though, not people failing to identify how attractive specific women are—which I think is what those graphs relate to?
okCupid lets users rate other users on a 0-5 scale from pictures; for each user, you can average together all of the ratings to determine their mean attractiveness. (They’re also stored such that you can only look at women’s rating of men, and men’s rating of women, rather than also looking at men’s rating of men.)
When you ask men to rate women on a 0-5 scale, they do it basically uniformly- about 5% of women have an average rating close to 5, and about 5% of women have an average rating close to 0, and 20% of women have an average rating of about 2.5. When you ask women to rate men on a 0-5 scale, they skew heavily towards giving men 1s. Now, for your question what actually matters is the “would bang” line, which has to come from some other source. I would be amazed if there were not sufficient men on the margin willing to bang a 2.5. According to women, the median man is about a 1- it does not seem surprising that there are insufficient women on the margin willing to bang a 1.
It doesn’t show that woman underestimate male attractiveness. It shows that in online dating woman are in generally able to focus on the more attractive candidates.
It seems it’s women that underestimate male attractiveness.
What would that even mean? Remember that attractiveness is a two-place word. Women are underestimating how attractive men are to whom? Would a more natural description of the OKC data that men are in average less attractive to women than vice versa?
(I think you misunderstood what MugaSofer meant, which he better explained in his reply. IIUC what he hypothesized is that if you picked an actually median women and you asked people what fraction of the female population are less attractive than her, you’d get an answer much less than 50% -- e.g. because below-median women are underrepresented in mass media compared to above-median ones, or something.)
(obvious confounds: people that use okcupid may not be representative of the population generally, both for the raters and ratees.)
Well, for starters, it’s mainly used by single people, so very desirable people are filtered out unless they are also very picky.
(I have a pet theory that we overestimate how attractive the “average woman” is for Reasons.)
Agreed.
(Exercise for the reader: next time you are in a bus/classroom/mall/somewhere, look at all the women around you, mentally sort them by attractiveness, and look at the median one.)
Yes, If one assumes that homosexual males and females have the same attitudes toward sex on average as their heterosexual counterparts. For example, there is no lesbian version of gay bathhouse, as far as I know.
It doesn’t tell us about voluntary vs. involuntary abstinence, but it does have information about frequency, etc. Men are more likely to have had sex in the last year then women, but young women are slightly more likely to have had sex in the last year then young men.
Indeed it does—it seems more probable under the standard assumptions than my pet theory, hence my interest in whether this prediction/folk wisdom has been empirically confirmed.
There is a significant search effort for both sexes in finding a quality compatible partner that reciprocates their feelings.
doesn’t prove this:
if you consider quality monogamous relationships the situation is much more symmetrical
which is false. Alpha men have are just as disproportionally desired as relationship partners, as they’re as sex partners. Gotta ask where’d you get your conclusion anyway? What are your citations?
Actually, I think joe might be right. Think of it this way: Women are dramatically more selective than men about sexual partners. Yet are they dramatically more selective about relationship partners than men? I doubt it, and I would anecdotally suggest that:
P( man is interested in a relationship with a woman | he is interested in sex with her ) < P(woman is interested in a relationship with a man | she is interested in sex with him )
So the selectiveness would then be more symmetrical for relationships than for casual sex.
This is compounded by the fact that since women are hypergamous and tend to try to “date up,” the men at the top of the ladder have lots of options and can afford to be very picky about relationship partners. Anecdotally again, at the highest ranks of desirability, men seem to be at least as picky about relationship partners as women are.
which is false, as evidenced by the large number of men who are willing to enter into a relationship just for the sex and still aren’t getting any.
But these aren’t the men that women are most likely to want relationships with. Men at high levels of desirability don’t need to enter relationships to find sex. Getting those dudes into a relationship is much harder for a woman, and takes skill. (This is where I think many female dating complaints come from. My suspicion is that females are typically trying to “date up” in terms of percentile attractiveness, while males struggle to date at their same level (or lower) of percentile attractiveness, because their female counterparts are busy chasing men of higher percentile attractiveness who just aren’t that into those women.
If I’m right about the math and the empiricals, then we have an inevitable situation where both sexes experience a challenge: what you want, you can’t get… and what you can get, you don’t really want. Women (on average) are struggling to date up, which means that men are struggling to date people of similar percentile attractiveness.
So who wins in this situation? That’s a complex question, and all I’ll say for now is that the variance in the advantages of this system are probably greater for men than women: I bet the men at the top do better than most women, who in turn do better than most men, but I’d need to think about it more and conceptualize how I’m defining “better.”
The standard advice is that if your standards for being in a relationship are too low, to the point where it seems as though practically everyone meets them, this is called being “desperate” and will make people want to avoid you.
As with most sound dating advice there are exceptions and in most cases doing the ‘wrong’ thing with confidence and intent ameliorates or even reverses the effect. If a man chooses to date below the maximum attractiveness that he could get with effort for reasons other than desperation he can be expected to have more success (in the short term) than if he pushed his limits. The challenge he faces to maintain social dominance is reduced. Laziness (or pragmatism) is not the same as neediness.
I’d guess that your formula is correct and relationship selectiveness is indeed more symmetrical than sex selectiveness on average, but most of the equalization is due to the higher selectiveness of high-status males. At the lower rungs the asymmetry should stay mostly intact. But this is only a guess, I have no citations in support.
It’s kindof late in the discussion to ask people to get out of their armchairs. A good deal of the disagreement here has been people disagreeing about the bare facts.
Really? I haven’t seen too much disagreement about bare facts. I have seen more disagreement regarding the way things should be, the applicability of certain analogies, the validity of lines of reasoning and the relevance of refutations. Bare facts about the external world barely played a part in the disagreement.
Alpha men have are just as disproportionally desired as relationship partners, as they’re as sex partners.
Are they? ISTM the men most likely to have been in a stable, happy relationship with an awesome woman for years don’t much resemble the men most likely to have one-night stands.
I can recognize the attitude from my youth and I think it is really counterproductive. It leads to the kind of bitterness expressed in this line:
a man who sees himself that way isn’t going to be attractive to women. If you restrict yourself to thinking about meaningless sex, then yes it is true that the relationship between men and women is pretty asymmetrical. An average woman can probably consume as much meaningless sex as she wants without too much effort, whereas for most men there is a lot of effort involved in obtaining meaningless sex. However, if you consider quality monogamous relationships the situation is much more symmetrical. There is a significant search effort for both sexes in finding a quality compatible partner that reciprocates their feelings.
For most people long-term committed relationships are the goal, so for most people the world is fairly symmetrical. It may not feel that way in your early 20s though.
For most people the goal is medium term relationships, interspersed with meaningless or nearly meaningless sex, and eventually a long term relationship with perhaps children.
Women (who want this) tend to get it. Men who want this, in many cases, get nothing for the first 10 years and then jump straight to the long-term relationship stage. Saying “it doesn’t feel that way in your early 20s” seems to imply your teens and 20s don’t really matter if it turns out all right in the end?
I was thinking about it across people rather than across an individual lifetime. If you asked all the adults in the US what kind of romantic relationship they are most interested in, most of them will say long-term monogamous. After all, most of them are in long-term monogamous relationships. This is consistent with what you are saying, just a different way of looking at it.
I will say though that while this kind of path is very common its not the only desirable or good one. Tons of people get married as virgins and lots of other peoples have lots of other different romantic paths. I also don’t think that the involuntarily celibate path (at least up to a certain age) is the worst one available. Who would you rather be, a 24 year old nerd who has never had a date, or a 24 year old playa appearing on Maury for the 8th time to be told “you are the father!”?
Now that I am happily married the utility difference to me of one more or less relationship in my past is really small. So, in that sense my lack of romantic success between say 16 and 20 really doesn’t matter. It matters about as much as the fact that I got a C in 9th grade geometry given that I went on to kick ass at math later on in high school and in college.
That being said, 9th grade math was really frustrating for me, as was trying to date in high school and college. One way I could have dealt with that frustration was to learn PUA techniques to increase my success. I doubt that would have worked well for me. I think it would have helped me if I had known then that it was only temporary. Once I got a good paying job, spent some time at the gym, and gained a little maturity, suddenly girls started wanting to go on a second date, even though I still wasn’t a great conversationalist. In that case I still wouldn’t have gotten laid much, but I would have stressed about it less.
But for the person whose present became your past, the utility difference was enormous. And that’s what really matters. Even if you’re sure you’ll be happy later, you can’t ignore being unhappy right now.
It’s perfectly reasonable that you needed more skills or attributes for this success. But age should not, of itself, be one of these attributes, as long as you’re dating people your own age.
I guess. I certainly felt back then that my lack of success with women was likely permanent. I think that if I had known then what my future was going to be like it would have increased my happiness, but I don’t know for sure.
It seems like you are making the assumption that women and men of the same age have the same average attractiveness. I think that assumption is a cause of a lot of frustration among young men and leads to erroneous theories about how women date up and men date down and stuff like that. In my model of attractiveness, the average 21 year old woman is much more attractive than the average 21 year old man. Consequently, if you are a 21 year old man, and you want to date a relatively pretty girl your own age, she is probably way out of your league. Unless you have something exceptional going for you, or you get really lucky, its likely not going to happen.
Happily, attractiveness in men tends to rise in the 20s (and even into the 30s and beyond depending on career trajectory & fitness regimen) while it declines pretty rapidly for women in that time period. Even by 25 things will have converged a great deal. But especially for men who are still students, a girl who is the same age as them and in the same percentile of attractiveness as them for that age will be much more attractive than them when judged against the population as a whole.
If a man wants to date at 21 then yes, he either needs lots of charm, or he needs to go for women that are more his overall level of attractiveness. For instance, very overweight/ugly 21 year old women, high school girls, 32 year old trailer trash with 3 kids and a drinking problem, etc.
This sounds very much like an armchair investigation. Most modern marriages, i.e. today, not 15 years ago, are between couples of very similar ages and similar incomes. You’ve got an assumption that women strongly prefer older men—your conclusion that a young man will have difficulty dating at his own age requires this. This may have been true back in the day, before women could pay their own bills. It’s certainly true of some subset of women. But if marriage numbers mean anything, and I would rather think they do, women in general aren’t after meaningfully older men, which suggests that younger men are not at as strong a disadvantage as you have assumed.
I’m not sure what kind of attractiveness you mean to be talking about, but I’ll chip in that maturity tends to be greater in young women than in young men. This equalizes as much as it ever does by the mid to late 20′s.
An effect such as you describe certainly exists to some extent. I don’t know from personal experience if it’s as large as you say. (I suspect it varies a lot across different cultures.)
The question remains: when 21 year old women see that only men who are at least e.g. 25 years old are attractive enough for them, do they consciously rank attractiveness by age, or does age translate into other objective attributes like e.g. experience?
Is this actually true? Seriously appealing for evidence either way. (I have a pet theory that we overestimate how attractive the “average woman” is for Reasons.)
Is a pet theory a formerly stray theory that you decided to start feeding, because it was cute, and that you stroke in your super villain moments?
I used to have a pet theory but it died when I stopped feeding it evidence.
Your theory doesn’t seem to stand up to the data, here and here. It seems it’s women that underestimate male attractiveness. Men’s judgments are almost symmetrical. Data is from Okcupid surveys.
(obvious confounds: people that use okcupid may not be representative of the population generally, both for the raters and ratees.)
In order to make the data from OKCupid correspond to an underestimation, you have to equate the arbitrary 1-5 rating with some absolute measure like “quintile of attractiveness.” This does not necessarily hold.
There is some grounding in the OKCupid data, but it comes from the functional meaning of the point scores: when two people mutually rate each other four or five stars, they’re both notified. A score of four or five is therefore a weak way of saying “I find this person attractive enough that I’d like to meet them”. (We aren’t necessarily talking strictly physical attraction, though; “everyone knows” that the scores are based on photos more than profile text, but I have no idea how true this actually is.) Scores in the 0..3 range have no direct effects, but they may be anchored in some way by the fraction of people rated 4 or 5.
This is all to the best of my knowledge; I haven’t been active on OKCupid for a couple of years and they might have tweaked the interface since then. On the other hand, I do remember seeing those analytics pages when I was active.
Good point. That thought never influenced me when I was on OKCupid, but maybe that’s just a guy thing :P
I’m not sure “underestimate” is the right description here; my opinion (as an androphile) is that the male attractiveness distribution is heavily skewed, basically in the way that women think it is, if the 1-5 scale measures the underlying strength of attraction rather than quintiles. (3s, 4s, and 5s all fall in the top quintile of male attractiveness, but it seems that there are much larger gradations there than there are in the top quintile of female attractiveness.)
And for the underlying question of access to sex, the message distribution is more important, but isn’t scaled correctly for comparisons between the two.
I’m not an androphile myself, but that’s my impression too, for various reasons (see e.g. the paragraph starting with “Similarly” in this post).
BTW, here’s the post the graphs were taken from.
Huh. Those are some very interesting numbers, I’ll have to look over those.
I was talking about people (possibly) overestimating how attractive the median woman is*, though, not people failing to identify how attractive specific women are—which I think is what those graphs relate to? How well estimated attractiveness actually predicts people being attracted?
*(leading to suggesting strategies for most women that actually only work for a high-attractiveness minority, perhaps.)
okCupid lets users rate other users on a 0-5 scale from pictures; for each user, you can average together all of the ratings to determine their mean attractiveness. (They’re also stored such that you can only look at women’s rating of men, and men’s rating of women, rather than also looking at men’s rating of men.)
When you ask men to rate women on a 0-5 scale, they do it basically uniformly- about 5% of women have an average rating close to 5, and about 5% of women have an average rating close to 0, and 20% of women have an average rating of about 2.5. When you ask women to rate men on a 0-5 scale, they skew heavily towards giving men 1s. Now, for your question what actually matters is the “would bang” line, which has to come from some other source. I would be amazed if there were not sufficient men on the margin willing to bang a 2.5. According to women, the median man is about a 1- it does not seem surprising that there are insufficient women on the margin willing to bang a 1.
It doesn’t show that woman underestimate male attractiveness. It shows that in online dating woman are in generally able to focus on the more attractive candidates.
What would that even mean? Remember that attractiveness is a two-place word. Women are underestimating how attractive men are to whom? Would a more natural description of the OKC data that men are in average less attractive to women than vice versa?
(I think you misunderstood what MugaSofer meant, which he better explained in his reply. IIUC what he hypothesized is that if you picked an actually median women and you asked people what fraction of the female population are less attractive than her, you’d get an answer much less than 50% -- e.g. because below-median women are underrepresented in mass media compared to above-median ones, or something.)
Well, for starters, it’s mainly used by single people, so very desirable people are filtered out unless they are also very picky.
Both correct, my bad.
Agreed.
(Exercise for the reader: next time you are in a bus/classroom/mall/somewhere, look at all the women around you, mentally sort them by attractiveness, and look at the median one.)
Yes, If one assumes that homosexual males and females have the same attitudes toward sex on average as their heterosexual counterparts. For example, there is no lesbian version of gay bathhouse, as far as I know.
Survey data on sexual behavior:
http://www.iub.edu/~kinsey/resources/FAQ.html
It doesn’t tell us about voluntary vs. involuntary abstinence, but it does have information about frequency, etc. Men are more likely to have had sex in the last year then women, but young women are slightly more likely to have had sex in the last year then young men.
I believe almost all of the effort involved deals with enforcing quality standards, and so as stated it seems true.
Indeed it does—it seems more probable under the standard assumptions than my pet theory, hence my interest in whether this prediction/folk wisdom has been empirically confirmed.
This:
doesn’t prove this:
which is false. Alpha men have are just as disproportionally desired as relationship partners, as they’re as sex partners. Gotta ask where’d you get your conclusion anyway? What are your citations?
Actually, I think joe might be right. Think of it this way: Women are dramatically more selective than men about sexual partners. Yet are they dramatically more selective about relationship partners than men? I doubt it, and I would anecdotally suggest that:
P( man is interested in a relationship with a woman | he is interested in sex with her ) < P(woman is interested in a relationship with a man | she is interested in sex with him )
So the selectiveness would then be more symmetrical for relationships than for casual sex.
This is compounded by the fact that since women are hypergamous and tend to try to “date up,” the men at the top of the ladder have lots of options and can afford to be very picky about relationship partners. Anecdotally again, at the highest ranks of desirability, men seem to be at least as picky about relationship partners as women are.
But these aren’t the men that women are most likely to want relationships with. Men at high levels of desirability don’t need to enter relationships to find sex. Getting those dudes into a relationship is much harder for a woman, and takes skill. (This is where I think many female dating complaints come from. My suspicion is that females are typically trying to “date up” in terms of percentile attractiveness, while males struggle to date at their same level (or lower) of percentile attractiveness, because their female counterparts are busy chasing men of higher percentile attractiveness who just aren’t that into those women.
If I’m right about the math and the empiricals, then we have an inevitable situation where both sexes experience a challenge: what you want, you can’t get… and what you can get, you don’t really want. Women (on average) are struggling to date up, which means that men are struggling to date people of similar percentile attractiveness.
So who wins in this situation? That’s a complex question, and all I’ll say for now is that the variance in the advantages of this system are probably greater for men than women: I bet the men at the top do better than most women, who in turn do better than most men, but I’d need to think about it more and conceptualize how I’m defining “better.”
What would “dating down” look like, for a man?
The standard advice is that if your standards for being in a relationship are too low, to the point where it seems as though practically everyone meets them, this is called being “desperate” and will make people want to avoid you.
As with most sound dating advice there are exceptions and in most cases doing the ‘wrong’ thing with confidence and intent ameliorates or even reverses the effect. If a man chooses to date below the maximum attractiveness that he could get with effort for reasons other than desperation he can be expected to have more success (in the short term) than if he pushed his limits. The challenge he faces to maintain social dominance is reduced. Laziness (or pragmatism) is not the same as neediness.
I’d guess that your formula is correct and relationship selectiveness is indeed more symmetrical than sex selectiveness on average, but most of the equalization is due to the higher selectiveness of high-status males. At the lower rungs the asymmetry should stay mostly intact. But this is only a guess, I have no citations in support.
It’s kindof late in the discussion to ask people to get out of their armchairs. A good deal of the disagreement here has been people disagreeing about the bare facts.
Really? I haven’t seen too much disagreement about bare facts. I have seen more disagreement regarding the way things should be, the applicability of certain analogies, the validity of lines of reasoning and the relevance of refutations. Bare facts about the external world barely played a part in the disagreement.
Are they? ISTM the men most likely to have been in a stable, happy relationship with an awesome woman for years don’t much resemble the men most likely to have one-night stands.