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Comment by insickness | Hacker News Reader

Of course sex is a marketplace. There's a hierarchy with most attractive people at the top, least attractive people at the bottom. There's more agreement than disagreement about which people are "more attractive" and "less attractive"--but there is some disagreement. Maybe a woman I find very attractive, you don't find attractive at all (assuming you are attracted to women). Everyone is competing to find the most attractive/compatible mate. They bypass the less attractive/compatible and go after (or accept dates with) more attractive people. And due to the fact that more attractive people are a scarcer resource, there is a market competition. Yeah, you could say we live in a world where anyone has an equal shot at being with anyone, but we both know that's not true. Sex is a marketplace to some extent or another.

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> Everyone is competing to find the most attractive/compatible mate

Well, is it attractive or compatible? The two are not actually synonymous and it makes a significant difference. While attractiveness may be fairly universal (although not completely so), compatibility is very individual. This would severely restrict the size of any marketplace so as to make the dynamics very un-market-like.

I mean... perhaps I'm not the best person to ask. My wife and I were both the first person the other had dated, and I was very clear on our first date that I was not having sex with her that night, nor any other night, until we married. There were a few other guys who wanted to date my wife, but since my wife and I were dating, it's not like they could outbid me. That's kind of what it means to be in a committed relationship. After marriage, I've had women hit on me, and the answer is a universal back off, because -- you know -- sex isn't actually a marketplace. All the couples we interact with have similar stories (Although obviously, marrying the first person you date is not typical).

Attraction and compatibility are different and both have an effect on whether you want to be with a person. A super ugly person may have all the same interests as you or be compatible in other ways, and you still wouldn't want to date them. The attraction part is the part that is similar to a marketplace.

I think your relationship highlights what incels are talking about. In the past, more people got married like you did. Pre-internet, people's options were more limited. You chose from who ever was in your physical vicinity: at work, in your town, in your school, etc. Now with dating apps, you have an almost unlimited number of choices and you could choose the most physically attractive among thousands instead of the most attractive among the ten or twenty eligible people in your social circle, town, church or school. This makes sexual selection more like a marketplace. If you are an ugly person, you are less likely to marry up because the marketplace has become too efficient for it.

> Everyone is competing to find the most attractive/compatible mate. They bypass the less attractive/compatible and go after (or accept dates with) more attractive people

Correct. Or, as Louis C.K. eloquently put it. "You either F-ck up, or F-ck sideways. Nobody F-cks down."

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_BPt18sbyQ

Isn't the person you f-ck up, effectively f-cking down? Or, more eloquently: without f-ck down, there is only f-ck sideways :)

I suppose it's possible for both sides to feel like or think that they're 'fucking up', or 'down', for that matter.

When it comes to social status, women tend to date up or sideways. When it comes to physical attractiveness, men tend to date up or sideways.

I don't disagree with that, but my point was more that 'dating up/down' is murky/subjective, so both sides could feel like they're dating up or down regardless of what other people might think. So even if two people were to be dating based on physical attractiveness, they could both think they got the better deal.

Setting aside the logical impossibility of people f-king up but not f-king down, that is not true at all: men will f-ck down quite readily if it is convenient and there is low commitment. This is due to the obvious reason that males can have ten kids in a day by ten different women, whereas females can have perhaps 10 kids in a lifetime and each birth is incredibly high risk to her.

The core problem in the mating world is that the middle of the female attractiveness curve is having sterile sex with the top of the male attractiveness curve and then failing to pair bond with the middle of the male attractiveness curve. This is due to female hypergamy coupled with male promiscuity, arising from the dynamics of male and female reproductive constraints.

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