If a woman doesn't want to feel like an option, shouldn't she stay far away from Tinder? It's not like there isn't a million other ways for women to meet men, if she has the slightest inclination.
However, as someone said, the door swings both ways, but the way women devalue men is far more subtle. From the perspective of the heterosexual female, the goal is to acquire mating capital (i.e. "catch a husband or sugar daddy"). What's mating capital? It's a man who is an ideal mate: good genes and conditions to be a provider (good job/career or money/power).
A guy being primarily interested in a woman because she has a great body and a pretty face is really no different than a woman being interested in a financially stable guy with a good job that is taller than her.
The double standard in articles like the one posted is that somehow it's bad if heterosexual men are out to acquire sexual capital but somehow it's totally acceptable for women to seek out mating capital.
How often do you see that it's perfectly acceptable for a women to reject a guy based on his height or the fact that he might be showing early signs of male pattern baldness. I'm tall and still have my hair, so I benefit from such "de-valuing", but I also recognize that for the same crap that guys get judged negatively for.
I recently came out of a relationship where I was clearly not a good fit long term for my partner because we had different values, life goals and lifestyle preferences. For example, I'm poly and she was monogamous. I eventually persuaded her to date another guy, who ended up meeting her needs in all the ways I didn't. Yet she still preferred me because I "had my shit together" and was a better option when it comes to raising a child. Because of that she couldn't imagine being with the other guy.
At the end of the day, heterosexual women treat men as options too. The difference is that the capital that heterosexual women seek in men needs to be far more "durable" value than that which heterosexual men seek in women.
Sex and sexuality are ultimately about power. People who have high sexual value can totally let that power get to their heads and start taking advantage of others. This isn't gender-specific, but simply the way the world works.
This article is super one-sided and makes it sound like all these women in New York have no choice but to be on Tinder. Can't have it both ways.
But I find it strange that the women are apparently such willing participants. If they don't want to get dick pics from the "fuckboys" (as the article calls them), why are they hanging out online with these people?
With it "smart" people, don't have to feel responsible for what they get "dumb" people to do.
hanging out, in some cases, for twenty hours a day, according to the article.
Everybody constantly gets evaluated in two seconds. Mates very nearly are commodities. People claiming otherwise are just uggos, or class-ists.
Once we get video of some interaction + voice + smell, that's really 99% of the mating game. Nobody really gives a shit about anybody's resume. They may claim to when asked, but in reality we're dealing with systems much lower down towards the cerebellum.
Thinking caps come in a range of fashion colors.
"When you meet somebody for the first time, you're not meeting them. You're meeting their representative."
The women on Tinder, and every other online dating site, they don't all want dick pics. It does get annoying. But, they still like to feel desired, and getting a bunch of responses from men validates that a woman is still sexually viable, attractive, and that men want her. You can say that it's a confidence booster.
Maybe but I think the problem is more general. It is not just women who get de-valued. Human relationships of all kinds suffer from a society that sees people more and more as means to an end thanks to the redundancy that social online networks of all kind enable. For example, it seems to me that people these days accept several private invitations that take place simultaneously only to decide last minute which of the available options they like best. I think this is rather sad. But then again I entered the world of grown ups not so long ago. Maybe society hasn't changed that much after all?
I'm not a Tinder user, how does it reduce the biological risk? wouldn't the risk of an STD be just as great, if not greater, than the status quo?
And vetting them how, anyway? You might be able to find out whether someone is a felon, but I have no idea how I would (legally) find out whether someone has a transmissible STI.
This seems like a product of some kind of cognitive bias.
Fact is, I see very little correlation. Intelligent, well-paid, well-groomed, well-cultured men who bitch and moan and complain about having to use condoms only wondering if the girl is on birth control.
I don't think you can vet someone for STDs ahead of time. You can only practice safe sex and hope for the best.
The idea that non-promiscuous people having more sex can reduce STDs is more that the risk to a person having sex is lower, the more non-promiscuous people are options for them. Which is true - if only promiscuous people are looking to have sex with you, then every sex act is more risky.
But the risk for those non-promiscuous people goes up the more sex they have.
STDs exist that are like vampires in modern entertainment - once you become one, you are one forever, and you have a chance of turning others into one as well. Vampirism therefore spreads without limit, and so do STDs, if enough people have sex, for STDs that are incurable are not entirely preventable by condoms.
If people are having a lot more sex due to Tinder, as the anecdotes suggest in this article, there is no doubt that we will see a surge in STDs.
"Internet’s Dirty Secret: Assessing the Impact of Online Intermediaries on HIV Transmission"
http://money.cnn.com/2015/05/26/technology/rhode-island-tind...
"Tinder and hookup apps blamed for rise in STDs"
With broadcast mediums and technology, we first made it easy to compare any potential with the pool of all potential partners, and so many women (the historical gatekeepers of sex and relationships, fair or not) began to hold out on local suitors because they didn't meet some platonic ideal they'd seen once somewhere.
Now technology has ticked again, and men have access to a marketplace of potential mates. Unfortunately, women are no longer the gatekeepers on relationships or sex, and the winning strategies in this new market happen to be uncouth and crass and, most importantly, effective.
Speaking frankly as a somewhat bitter and jilted engineer:
If they'd wanted traditional relationships, they should've been friendlier and less aloof when they were being courted earlier.
Now that we're older and wiser and more financially secure, and with the technology giving us a ripe marketplace for relationships, why settle for anything less than convenience and our own arbitrary standards?
Citation needed. Pretty sure women had standards before television and movies.
"If they'd wanted traditional relationships, they should've been friendlier and less aloof when they were being courted earlier."
Ah, the 'nice guy' argument. Plus a bit of generalizing. It disturbs me that you refer to women as 'they' as if they all collectively decided to ignore you.
Assume women are looking for mates (reasonable). Assume women will more favorably choose a mate the farther they are above some arbitrary standard (reasonable, though at the extreme end we see falloff--"I don't deserve him, he'd never date me, etc."--sames as we do in the other direction). Assume that these standards are the result of exposure to local norms (an example: as a friend returned from Kazakhstan explained to me, "A good Kazakh man is one who doesn't beat his wife after bedding down with a whore"). Assume that mass broadcast and the internet have redefined what local is (reasonable).
It follows then that standards are being influenced by members outside of the physical local community of women (for an example of similar issues, consider the body image research done with Barbies and other deconstructions of beauty).
That being the case, it seems perfectly reasonable that these same standards can be raised above local market rates.
Ah, the 'nice guy' argument.
Well, no, not really--the observation is that, at a time where there was a large supply of men looking for traditional arrangements, they held out, and now with the advent of technology, that supply has decreased because of the substitute good of hookups enabled by Tinder et al.
There's no point in being mad, for example, that carriages are hard to come by if you didn't buy until cars were widespread.
I'm a bit bitter because it all seems like such a waste: some of us were disappointed before, some of them are being disappointed now, and the sum total of unhappiness in the system (taken through time) has increased unnecessarily. It's just unfortunate, and could've been avoided.
It disturbs me that you refer to women as 'they' as if they all collectively decided to ignore you.
Don't read too much into it...it's just a useful and short pronoun in English to refer to women, saving a few characters.
Reality: Women made individual choices as to which relationships they wanted to pursue. And being rejected by a woman still doesn't give you the right to be an asshole.
"“It’s a contest to see who cares less, and guys win a lot at caring less,” Amanda says."
"“No, like 90 percent,” said Ashley (the same as mentioned earlier). “I’m hoping to find the 10 percent somewhere. But every boy I’ve ever met is a fuckboy.”"
As for the rest...you keep wanting to insert the "all" qualifier into things as though that is some kind of legitimate critique. The use of "women" instead of "all women" is intentional, as it denotes a sort of large number instead of universality.
If I'd said "all women", "all men", etc., I would agree with your critique--but I didn't.
You're basically talking past my observations. Your inaccurate assumptions are not those that I used anywhere in my reasoning, least of all because of your insistence on prepending "all" in front of everything.
And being rejected by a woman still doesn't give you the right to be an asshole.
On Hacker News we do tend to shy away from namecalling. :)
Anyone who has ever seen a pretty woman's okcupid inbox can attest that being dog-piled by hundreds of desperate men is an odd definition of "power".
Tinder at least requires a mutual match.
The neat thing about Tinder is that nobody has to assess those first-contact messages, they just swipe people they think they'd be interested in and if they both like each other, they can talk. I've never used it but I'd say it's probably equalized a lot of things--men no longer spend all their time carefully composing introductory messages only to be ignored, women don't (necessarily) have to sort through hundreds of "wanna fuk?" messages to find the decent ones.
It's the stable marriage problem. There's higher risk initiating, but higher reward. Being in a receptive position means you're unable to even try for your highest preferred choice. You have to wait to see if that person chooses you.
It's not a clear cut power dynamic of one over the other, though.
I'm inclined to not believe that. Anyone on Tinder, woman or man, is very unlikely to want a traditional relationship. Or rather, people who want a traditional relationship shouldn't be seeking it on Tinder.
1) In terms of physical attributes, women have more options "outside their league", but those options are not interested in a relationship.
2) The men at the top of the physical attributes ladder normally have a slight-to-moderate advantage. Historically, men not at the top of this ladder could still use personality, wit, etc. to attract a mate.
With Tinder, this advantage is hugely magnified because men not at the top of the ladder don't even get an option to use other aspects of what they bring to the table before they are swiped left.
This is so backwards.
Women use tinder to get attention, not relationships. Rarely sex.
Men are the one's in the race to the bottom. They get ignored by all of them. The women use it to treat men like ants.
Yet these studies and willing betas still treat women like the victims.
As men, the larger issue is this cuckold-psychology where you have to sound charitable to females, even if it takes flat out denial of situations. Women still hold the power.
You have it backwards. A paradox of choice for females.
Men aren't picking, they're the one's pasting messages desperately to get responses. It's a hopeless situation.
Ever been to a night club? Male:Female ratio? You have any idea how much worse it is on a dating website?
It's interesting how you say I projected, I'm interested in the tendency of men to fib about their success with females.
Yes, I've seen hundreds of comments like yours, then I saw their accounts get banned out of frustration the next day.
Even if you did have success on a dating website (I have, and have had friends who married), by no means are they in favor of men.
If you need me to elaborate on the data, I can.
You're either someone's option right now until the next better option comes along or you yourself are doing that to someone else.
Tinder amplifies being "next best". You're never "the best" option and the best option for you becomes elusive.
It's the uncanny valley of dating.
We opt for convenience over depth because investment in another person requires acknowledging the risk of a temporal imbalance in the relationship that most people today are extremely uncomfortable with -- to a point, where I believe some choose polyamorous relationships over monogamous ones because there is a perception of de-risking loss.
Hopefully, Tinder will be a fad because even the most beautiful will age and by then maybe aspire for something more meaningful as the tedium of "dating" wears.
Many people don't like answering questions about themselves or filling out a profile so they flock to the quick meet app.
Honestly, I think it's completely their fault for expecting a long term relationship from Tinder.
who treats her like a priority instead of an option
Well I'm sorry but that's what humans are, options on legs. Be it on a job application or in dating. There's fierce competition, you gotta be good or at least better than your competition. This is the normal state of being, and nobody, not even girls (and especially not guys), is above it.
If you want real, emotional bonding, get off tinder and fancy clubs. Such bonds can form in places you least expect them and it cannot be forced.
Saved for future robot-training dataset, thanks.
it's not a stretch to say that contraception technology has directly catapulted women's rights and are becoming more equal to the male counterpart.
Yes she could, or better still, she could get Bumble, which is the female version of Tinder, where the women get to keep guys as options :) http://techcrunch.com/2014/12/02/bumble-is-exactly-like-tind...
I think you have things very mixed up.