Apps like Tinder are a symptom of gender imbalance in the dating market
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
Are the so-called "mixed-collar marriages" that uncommon in the US? Here it's a rather normal thing. It's true that many graduates end up with other graduates because they meet at university or at work, but I know a lot of those "mixed-collar marriages" and almost no one I know, except for one or two gold-diggers, thinks that people with more or less studies than them are outside their dating pool.
Also, the concept that women invariably want long-term relationships and marriages while men want to hook up is something that I associate with past generations. At least here, now it tends to be the opposite. In the vast majority of young couples I know, it's the man who wants to get serious and pushes for more commitment (living together, marriage and so on); while the woman wants to be free and keep things more informal...
The perceived push for stability from the make partner is probably strongly related to traditional gender roles (at least here in Germany, a crazy stronghold of the housewife idea), which make the female partner correctly or indirectly, consciously or subconsciously fear that she could lose her career in the process, while the male partner would at most risk money and a few years.
But from what I understand, Germans are a lot more status-conscious than the surrounding countries, with more hierarchy, people often expecting to be addressed by their titles, bosses not wanting to be addressed by their first name, etc.
But I'm Dutch, and I know several men who work in construction, who are married to university-educated women. I don't know what degree my brother-in-law has, but he hasn't been to university, unlike my sister (though I wouldn't call him less educated; he educates himself). And since I never graduated, I'm technically also married to a woman with a higher degree (though her degree is lower than the one I would have had if I'd continued, so I consider myself higher educated than her until she gets that MBA).
So I'd say it's fairly common here.
But in Europe it's going to be just the same the chances of some one with say graduate or doctoral degree being in a long term relationship some one without a similar degree is fairly low.
People meet at school at in work, they usually have social interactions with their peers, and most importantly educated people prefer to date other educated people because they are more likely to share interests, world views, and could hold a conversation with each other.
And as far as true "collar" difference goes than you need only too look at old money families all those "new age aristocrats" while they might "sleep around with the help" they usually don't mix with others especially in countries where familial history is very important like the UK.
I have been out of the dating market for almost three decades, so I can't tell you. A friend did say that young women he knew regarded marriage as a system of control they didn't care for; but he is my age and I don't know how big his sample is.
It's literally 25-28% women and 72-75% men in the Bay Area. These are the numbers I got from scraping OkC profiles that had words in them. There are more college educated men than there are women. There are more masters+ graduated men than there are bachelor+ women.
Even in NYC, there is something like 60% men compared to 40% women (and I'm being generous here).
From anecdotal evidence, you are also much more likely to get a boyfriend as a girl than a hookup on OkCupid compared to Tinder.
I asked several girls why they use Tinder, and they basically tell me that it is because they think that by having an intercourse, they can get the guy to like them more, leading to an instant relationship. But why not just start with an instant relationship and not go through something you don't want to do?
Asking women is not the answer here, because you still go through that societal filter. Besides, rarely does someone know what they want, in the first place.
"Ask a customer what they want, and they'll say they want a faster horse."
Then it argues that it is because the ratios are skewed.
I am arguing that the ratios are only skewed if they look in the places where the ratios are skewed.
It is possible that the assumption is not correct, but then the whole argument about the ratios being skewed makes no sense, because the "fling problem" disappears.
well It's a US article and they give the sats for the US, as well as some major metropolitan areas. Where else should they be looking?
>The article makes an implicit assumption that girls don't want a fling and want marriage instead.
They do address this, for Silicon valley they show that in an area where the gender ratio favours women there are more marriages which are more stable. It's just one data point, but addresses your concern and this is an article not a study.
This is not the case, as there are dating apps where the ratio of desirable men to desirable women is large and where LTR is emphasized compared to instant sex.
Women aren't using these sites/apps.
So either the assumptions about women are wrong, or the argument that women are in this terrible situation where there are not enough educated men on dating sites looking for a LTR and where women are forced to have sex to possibly get to a relationship is incorrect.
I'd add a big "but" here. There are pleanty of women who speak out and say that, yes, sometimes women just want a fling. Ask a woman who identifies as a feminist. They are usually less concerned with upholding traditional gender roles, and often can speak freerer.
However you're right that the societal filter can apply. If a conservative older, more powerful, man asks a woman (e.g. a 40 y.o. boss asking a 20 y.o. new employee), then yes, sometimes people don't tell the boss everything.
A general advise of "don't listen to women!" is very disturbing.
With OKC you have you go through a whole set-up process and monitor it more like you would Facebook.
With Tinder you install, login with Facebook which pulls in all your photos/interest, swipe left + right, wait for a response, message and hope luck ever falls in your favour.
The actual important thing to realize about Tinder is that it maximizes the only metric that matters: face to face contact. Everyone on there is on the same page: lets get together and in 30 minutes we'll have a WAY better idea of whether we vibe than reading a glorified resume online and going back and forth trying to by witty (often to then find out we have no chemistry in person!). Ironically enough Tinder actually uses technology to rehumanize the dating experience: its always been about going out and meeting people, Tinder is a simple extension of that, OKCupid tried to replace it with a "compatibility score".
The other half is that many women enjoy looking for casual hookups, just as men do. Certainly this can be (and is) done on OkCupid, but on Tinder the cultural expectations are more tailored towards something short-term.
OkCupid, POF etc is like a scene from World war Z - hoards of men pinging girls with messages constantly.
The downside is that Tinder requires less investment - most don't even enter a bio - and so things kick off with a match based on physical attraction rather than any other attribute. I call that a 'downside' but guess that's only true if your criteria for a partner extends beyond looks.
In which case there's OkCupid. So yeah I don't see the problem here. The optimal choice may be to install both apps and filter accordingly.
I guess all they could do is just filter all messages and only keep the quickmatch mechanic? Initially, they had something like that as well!
Basically a forced requirement that someone can set. Such as... you can only message me if this or that. One would be only if I first match you. They had more success when they got rid of that mechanic.
What makes you think that (i)women don't frequently use both, if they're interested in online dating and (ii)the Tinder profiles aren't at least as skewed male-wards?
The simple fact is that men are generally more proactive in looking for dates/hookups and so are more likely to go to the effort of registering for a website to find members of the opposite sex to meet, so basically every dating website not created exclusively for lesbians is majority male. Also, as others have pointed out, Tinder's selling point is that women get to choose which proactive men actually get to talk to them, which saves the rudeness of having to ignore/block lots of men rather keener on the idea of an instant relationship than they are.
https://www.globalwebindex.net/blog/what-to-know-about-tinde...
62% of dating app users are men. This is actually much better than OkC. Also, Tinder has 2x more users in general:
https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=%2Fm%2F05rbwm%2C%20%...
For guys with higher "market value", OKCupid is really a waste of time relative to Tinder, and so fewer of them will use OKC. That makes the 72-75% figure quite misleading, since a good deal of those men might not be considered particularly desirable.
I mean, come on, it's not that hard to see the overarching point here. Even pop culture portrays it this way (see Knocked Up, Trainwreck, etc.).
Let's stop expecting things and expressing them openly.
I'm sure the vast majority use it for hookups, but you can't generalize everyone.
The people I was responding to were saying "Women use Tinder for sex" (implying everyone), and "Everyone knows what Tinder is. It's a hookup app." (implying everyone)
My comment was to point out that you can't say things like this without implying that 100% of people feel this way, which is not the case.
Most men and women use Tinder for hooking up. It's my experience that even women that say they are interested in a "serious relationship" are actually quite interested in the opposite. Because there's probably some stigma associated with women simply enjoying casual sex.
yet
> but men generally must earn more in order to attract a wife
What kind of sexist crap is this? The problem for men in such an environment, is that a lot of women start to accept the sex object treatment they get, and hence aren't really the people you would want to be with for a long term.
Generalising a gender as only driven by dumb sex is sexist, even if that gender is male.
If you want others to actually listen to your view and not dismiss as meaningless, you have to present data that contradict the premise you are contending - especially when your view flies in the face of anecdotal evidence all of us already possess.
For bonus points, you could try and prove why one would need evidence in this particular case to prove that sweeping gender generalizations are sexist?
I care about facts being true or false.
For example here is a page that explains the issue: http://www.webmd.com/sex/features/sex-drive-how-do-men-women...
PS My dad's name is Yevgeni :)
You aren't defending the truth, but a simplistic model that can be used as an excuse to be condescending and rude, where you take one assumptions as true in all cases and troll on the internet.
It's simple predicate logic and is only accidentaly related to politness (not political correctness). Saying "all heterosexual men are driven by sex" is false when tested empirically. You can leave a million links in the comments, but that statement will still not be true (excluding some trivial cases, like non-existence of heterosexual men).
Even statements like "all men have a penis" or "all men are born men" will fail. On the other hand, statements "some men are driven by sex", or even "most men are driven by sex" will not fail. Interestingly, these statements wouldn't be considered sexist by most. Which might suggest that sexism and stupidity don't only go hand in hand, but are strongly related.
The article's wording is however absolute: "sexual nirvana for heterosexual men" - no quantifiers that might suggest any kind of relativity - and therefore sexist and stupid. Asking for empirical evidence for my opinion is like asking for empirical evidence of the fact that the set of all integers is infinite.
If it helps you feel in control in a discussion, then please, be my guest. But don't spout that self-righteous BS about "truth".
P.S. Not surprized about your dad, considering your Pelevin inspired nickname.
That is my pet peeve - current climate of PC whereby certain things that are true should not be mentioned, lest they perpetuate the sad (in the eyes of the speaker) status quo.
Now that you have clarified your position, it seems that you're mostly unhappy with absence of the words 'in general' before the generalization. Ie the phrase "“add up to sexual nirvana for most heterosexual men" would pose no problem for you.
This is a different type of issue - I don't mind people obsessed with semantics (identity politicers are a different matter). What you are basically saying is that 'Even if there is 1% of men who are less interested in sex than women - that sentence if false'. While being technically true it misses the fact that any statement concerning large sets of anything can have excptions. The question is whether these exceptions are singular or sufficiently numerous to render the generalization false.
I think that anything over 90% doesn't require qualifiers. Others may feel differently - for example note that the author already went out of his way to accommodate gays by talking about 'heterosexual men' as opposed to 'men'. So he is effectively tipping his hat to you in order to satisfy the 4% of the population who might react to the sentence with 'I don't care for sex with women at all, what a stupid generalization that is!'.
Overall - I don't think you've made a case why the author is wrong to generalize that men are more interested in casual sex than women.
Yes, I guess this is where the evidence on both sides need to come in: whether it's just semantics or not.
And I still think that such flagrant generalizations are harmful. We had the same type of BS with "women are bad drivers", "women are bad at STEM", "women only want to marry" and so on. It is as if some authors want to deliberately pigeonhole groups of people, just to sell more books...
The 90% is a stretch I think. This is just a cartoonish view of men. Also one has to keep inherent biases in mind when talking about social issues. Say you have a group of people, about 60% of which like the colour purple. Chances are that most of the other 40% will say they like the colour purple, just to fit in the group. Show them movies where all the heroes like the colour purple, make all the celebrities profess their love the colour purple and 99% of the group will say they adore purple.
But that won't be true.
The mechanism described by the article is quite simple: for women as a group, achieving equal or better education/career while at the same time insisting on only considering a spouse of equal or better education/career just isn't sustainable. The failure mode turns out to include easy sex for a few lucky guys. Not exactly what feminism had in mind.
What the article completely ignores: it also means even less females for males of the low education/career range, who were already hard pressed by "marrying up" alone. This kind of gender imbalance is often comes with violence and is therefore a much bigger problem than some prudish outcry over sinful tinder.
Hopes should go towards self-correction in the shape of considerable erosion of the "marrying down" taboo. Once that happens, the observed disbalance will have been just a temporary fluctuation on the road to greater equality.
Women like and think about sex just as much as men, but it's unfortunately still not socially acceptable to believe that. The women on Tinder treat the guys there just as much as potential "sex objects" (whatever that is supposed to mean) as the guys do with the women. And there's nothing wrong with that.
The hookup culture/Tinder may suck for the people who want serious monogamous relationships with marriage and children (although I disagree with the premise, I think Tinder makes those kinds of relationships easier to initiate too, but I digress..), but to make it seem like it's bad for women is absurd.
Women like sex and men like relationships. Women who have casual sex aren't victims, just like men in relationships aren't victims.
> In the Vanity Fair article, David Buss, a University of Texas psychology professor, claimed that apps like Tinder contribute to “a perceived surplus of women,” among straight men, which in turn leads to more hookups and fewer traditional relationships. Here’s the thing: This surplus of women is not “perceived” at all but very, very real.
Okay, so according to Mr. Birger, we have we have a surplus of women. He fails to qualify it here, but later we realize this is true of only a few places (Manhattan, for example) and not necessarily true in the general case. In fact, women generally outnumber men in college[1].
> As I note in my book, today’s lopsided gender ratios “add up to sexual nirvana for heterosexual men, but for heterosexual women — especially those who put a high priority on getting married and having children in wedlock — they represent a demographic time bomb.”
I don't really get this. It smells of thinly veiled anti-male sentiment ("sexual nirvana for heterosexual men") -- as if women don't enjoy casual sex? It also seems that Birger doesn't think relationship goals are discussed by both parties. Men aren't the only ones that "decide" where a relationship heads -- Vanity Fair disagrees, but I frankly think that's complete nonsense and does a disservice to young women. Furthermore, women aren't indentured -- they can leave an unfavorable relationship at any time. Specifically, the Vanity Fair article was referring to hookup culture. Presumably, if you want a long term relationship (and put a "high priority on getting married and having children in wedlock"), you won't meet someone on Tinder Friday and have sex with them on Saturday. Even a dating neophyte can tell you that much.
> Regardless of orientation, obviously not all women place a premium on marriage, or even monogamy. But for the straight, college-educated woman who is eager to get married and start a family, the question becomes how best to deal with a dating market in which men have too much leverage.
Again, the Vanity Fair article specifically dealt with Tinder. You put a high premium on long term relationships and wedlock? Don't use Tinder. There's OKCupid, Match.com, eHarmony, and PoF; most of these are aimed towards relationship-building and not necessarily thrill-seeking. Tinder is primarily a hookup app. Kind of how the Silk Road was mainly used for buying and selling drugs. Sure, there are edge cases, but it's important to see the salient point here.
> Unsurprisingly, men tend to be less — I’ll say it — promiscuous when women are more scarce.
This is a (stupid, and again, thinly-veiled anti-male) truism. Female scarcity by definition implies less male sex going on. Mr. Birger managed to say absolutely nothing while at the same time making it Tweet-worthy.
But really the article fails at a much more basic level. Some people are looking for relationships while others are looking for hook-ups. Without quantifying these two segments (and the cross-pollination between these groups), Birger's claims are meaningless. At least the Vanity Fair article didn't particularly try to make any sweeping generalization and was somewhat of a showpiece: an excellently written, wonderfully researched, and fun to read collection of interviews. Birger's, on the other hand, makes claims it can't possibly prove and reduces some of the most complex human social interaction to "leverage" and "priorities". I think he took the Vanity Fair article a bit too seriously.
Finally, the entire Birger article makes a huge assumption: that most women are interested in a "boyfriend" rather than a hookup. Without the data to back this assumption up, we're stuck in the middle of nowhere.