Explaining Sex Rate Changes
overcomingbias.com
overcomingbias.com
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.
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.
* dating apps aren't the only way to meet people; you can still meet potential partners at parks/bars/work (Americans love office romances apparantly)
* dating apps do favor the conventionally good looking folks but its also about presentation, which can be gamed and its not a secret how to.
I agree that its a little unfair that the men who are good looking get all the benefits without having to put in any effort. But hasn't that been the case with inherited wealth too?
The focus on the visual to the exclusion of body language and personality chemistry just makes it a bad all around deal. From my experience, naturally meeting girls in the world is a much more pleasant experience.
As they say: a picture is more than a 1000 words.
It's much more prone to manipulation than direct, spontaneous contact.
If you look for anything else, like long term happiness, its a very hard find a partner on such platform. Maybe I am naive but I still think this is what most people want in their lives. But it ain't as easy as swiping around - one needs to go out there, make some effort to look attractive, expose oneself to as many potential partners as possible. And have patience, tons of patience.
It is how women are genetically programmed to be; it is why the Sabines accepted their raping-roman husbands, why Helen left with Paris, it is why Cleopatra accepted to be the mistress of Caesar and Anthony.
It is why women lubricate when they percieve a threatening male, it is why the Stockholm syndrom exists -- because it increases the chances of survival of a woman and her children if she can become the 10th wife of a man who just recently slain all her male relatives.
I wouldn't put to much blame on dating apps in general, as the whole category of "dating apps" has become rather large and differentiated. And the more differentiated it becomes, the more I see it reflecting existing social behaviour.
On Tinder a small number of attracive men gets to hook up. But hasn't that always been the case when the objective has been to "hook up"? When you pick someone up for the night at you local bar and have rather free choice, hasn't the choice always rather fallen on the hot guy?
But there is a whole world of other dating services outside of Tinder, that are not focused on hook ups, but rather on finding a partner, and the difference shows!
My a piece of anecdotal evidence:
On Tinder I got ~0 matches - I'd say I'm "average" looking, not "hot" enough for Tinder - but on Bumble I get regular good matches. In contrast one of my "hot" friends has no problems getting matches on Tinder, but when he tried out Bumble his number of matches were just slightly more than mine.
I still prefer dating without apps, and the overreliance on them in my youngish (~25) age group is worrying me a bit, but the world for non-hot men is not as bleak as it's often made out to be.
Think about doing a job search. You could find a potential employer at a park/bar/whatever, but it's a lot more efficient to go to a job site where people are actively looking to employ you. It's similar for dating. It's definitely possible to meet someone to date in the real world. It's just a lot less efficient than doing so in a space where the only people there are those actively looking for the same thing you are.
Plus, people typically go to the same bars/parks and have the same circle of friends. The absolute number of single people will be relatively small and you can go through them relatively quickly. There's also the awkwardness of dealing with failed relationships.
Of course, "attractiveness" is exactly this, the amount of partners you can get. We are certainly wired to consider the latter as an indicator of the former. Like a share's value is only marginally determined by its fundamentals, and more by how much is bought by others.
Might be helpful for some guy to bolster their confidence. This is extremely superficial of course, so comparable with tinder.
But: Any advice on safer sex should include "do not marry" in this case :)
But from the position of a guy that has few or none experience in dating, this might not be a bad choice.
Especially, as you mentioned, because it is very true that relationships are about expectations and managing those. And starting a relationship with someone who has basically always been in a relationship is very difficult for someone that was not.
Especially if the plan changed that you suddenly want to have a "serious" relationship. That is not very realistic and for the guy it doesn't really make a difference emotionally at this point.
The woman looking for greener pastures actually do have quite high expectations for economic safety, but that would make it more manageable for some guys at least.
And there is still opportunity for love here, and guys having problems with dating should know their options. Everything is allowed in love, right?
Disclaimer: I only ever at least partially defend the use of mail order brides on mondays. damn...
The risk is also in sort of men attracted to this proposition. They are literally dangerous ones to date, whether physically or for mental abuse.
Having to run out of abusive marriage sux big time and have long term consequences for women.
Abusive marriages have nothing to do with if they wedded out of mail order or love. Either can turn abusive.
> Because he bought her,
Buying humans is illegal.
> She will never be respected partner with equal agency.
There is never a grain of truth in it except for vastly simplistic generalization.
> They are literally dangerous ones to date
Again! premature judgmental attitude.
That is simple risk factor evaluation one does when selecting partners. Normaly you guess on small hints, in this case it is pretty easy to see where you stand.
For sex, there is prostitution. This mail oder thing is about other wishes. And plan to be cool with whatever she decides to do is not one of them.
Men are not some robots that us pessimists programmed to turn into all the list of attributes that you just now prescribed when met with so and so situation.
Just because I bought a cat or dog doesn't mean I am going to abuse by feeling entitled and owning it.
With mail order women, women get just the same rights as any other women in marriage. Police would be after me otherwise. It is the responsibility of such women who voluntarily participate as mail order brides to educate themselves of their rights to assert them whenever apposite. Mail order transaction is perfectly legal and has no more abuse risk statistically than other kinds of mainstream marriages.
>It is not like they would be ordering her for any other reason.
Actually plenty said it is like they would be ordering her for other reasons - love, companionship and marriage.
You are again and again drawing premature conclusions like "People who own a kitchen knife are damn sure to be murderers!".
Udik explains it better -https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19622835
Anyone remember that story?
You insist on the idea that the wife has been "bought", and that it implies some sort of dominant/ controlling attitude on the male's part. In fact I would argue that the opposite could be true: men who resort to "mail brides" are simply trying to find their way around a system that puts them at the bottom of the ladder, often exactly because they are not dominant enough. Dominant psychopaths don't need mail order brides, they are often successful and can find plenty of partners anyway.
Also, if we're authorized to draw psychological inferences from these choices: what do you think of women who choose to date (relatively) wealthy foreigners online, refusing to find a partner in their own country? It's not that there is a shortage of males in Ukraine or Brazil or the Philippines. These women are choosing to ignore local partners for the prospect of a life of comforts (because this is the idea you get from foreign media).
So if we inform our psychological insights to our moral biases, who's the psychopath here? The naive loser who thinks he can trick the system and get a partner above his level, or the ambitious girl who shuns her local suitors for the prospect of a wealthy life abroad with a stranger?
And wide spread religiously backed monogamy stabilisation didn't save us from two world wars.
[0]https://medium.economist.com/big-love-and-big-war-exploring-...
Just look what long celibate does to priests. Soldiers in war have to be 'neutralized' via some mild suppressants in the rations (at least WW II was done like this from what I had read).
Also, if you survive the war and come home, being a war hero is very attractive to the ladies. You can speculate about an evolutionary background to that.
When all those things travel together, it's not clear that polygamy should be viewed as the primary cause.
It’s not clear to me how the first three would lead to social instability though. There have been plenty of religiously authoritarian cultures that were quite stable. Similarly gender inequality and reduced education for women have been common historically and it’s hard to see how they would lead to social instability and violence. After all it’s not very common for women to rise up violently against gender based oppression, that just doesn't seem to be the dynamic.
I can certainly see how low productivity and standards of living could lead to violence. Desperate people can reach for desperate means. Nevertheless there are many very poor countries round the world and only some of them are significantly polygamous. The fact that the most unstable 20 are all to some degree polygamous seems to me to be a pretty strong correlation. If polygamy can be a driver of social instability though, it’s fairly straightforward to draw a logical causal link from that instability to all sorts of other social and economic ills.
As for conquest and Imperialism, Islam has strong polygamous tendencies and has been very aggressively expansionist in it's history. It even has formal rules spelled out in the Koran for acquiring women through conquest (their non-Muslim marriages are automatically rendered invalid on capture).
Funnily enough Muslim countries rank high on instability metrics, and we can see from recent history how stable and developed Muslim countries under autocratic rule collapse into chaos once that autocracy fails.
If even just the top 10% of men only have one extra wife, or 'girl friend' in a flat and secretarial role, as is common for middle eastern businessmen and politicians, that means the bottom 10% of men cannot ever marry. People will go to great lengths to get out of that bottom 10%.
I wonder to what extent the recent shift in sexual access for young men is a factor in political radicalisation in America. There seem to be a lot of angry young white kids around these days.
Most people in western societies at any given time are engaged in monogamous relationships. In fact, it's a crime in the U.S. to get married when you're already married to another person. Western governments don't recognize polygamous arrangements for tax purposes, etc.
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.
Which is another problem men in their 20s face. They're competing with men in their 30s for the same women. There's simply a larger number of men trying to date a smaller number of women. The numbers mean someone gets left out.
Even in western cultures where monogamy was pretty strictly enforced by the church and society, I doubt that more than 80% of men procreated (wish I could cite sources, but there doesn't seem to be good data about this)
We also need to do away with the stigma that you can't have a fulfilling, productive and contributive life without children.
[1] https://psmag.com/environment/17-to-1-reproductive-success
If you read my post carefully, you'll see I only estimated the percentage for societies where monogamy is enforced (either through peer pressure, religion, or both)
I also did not cite the source you did, because I consider it of enough poor quality to be unreliable in debate.
- 6th grade - extraordinarily unattractive to the opposite sex.
- 8th grade - not outwardly reviled.
- 9th grade - outwardly reviled again.
- 12th grade - actually dating, with a bit of interest here or there.
- Freshman year of college - lower relative interest.
- Senior year of college - enough girls are interested that they're fighting with each other.
- 1st year in the workforce - outwardly reviled again!
- 5-10 years into the workforce - hard say, got married, so I must have been doing something right.
So, did I change much between 8th and 9th grade? Or between 12th grade and freshman year of college? No, obviously not, but my status relative to the bellcurve of available men did change quite a bit. This was most evident from my senior year to college to my first year in the workforce. I went from amazing, to worthless all due to graduation!
Please bear in mind, I'm not complaining about the nature of female preferences here. However, I do wish someone had explained that this would occur, and also why it would occur. I remember being quite surprised at the time.
It's quite cynical, I know.
It USED to be be the same thing when you were in highschool before tinder and social media: as a male, the more senior the higher status you had -- i.e. 9th grader males will just drool at their female coleagues going out with more senior males, until in 12th grade you finally hit payday.
Not so anymore because tinder and social media allow females to reach a much broader male audience.
It's the same thing with women in their thirties -- they notice they get a lot less male attention -- first the bad boys stop noticing them and a couple of years later even the nicest of guys won't give them that sweet validating attention women crave, so the smart ones settle down with a nice guy in her early thirties, the not so smart ones end up basically cat ladies.
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?
Well, it's an effect which would explain the results. It's not really my theory, which is that it's a complex of different things, including several that the author explicitly dismisses without any significant basis (or by citing a basis which seems incorrect.) The homosexuality one is one of them.
Most of the series of things the author asserts affected both sexes similarly (“obesity, porn, video games, social media, dating apps, and wariness re harassment claims”) seem likely not to have done so similarly (that's seems particularly true of both porn and wariness re: harassment claims.)
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.
Sadly, we can see this kind of winner-takes-all dynamic play out in every part of our society now.
This worries me greatly.
It seems that things are even getting to that point.
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.
I do realise though that you're posting in the context of a society in which the necessary causal chain between sex and pregnancy has been broken, but the moral systems we have built around sex and relationships are predicated on that link for perfectly rational and valid reasons. Also ultimately we still need people to have children and bring those children up. The moral factor in sexual behaviour can't simply be discounted.
At a deeper level, both morality and evolution are all about encouraging survival of genes.
And so does historical data, isn't it the case that many men didn't reproduce historically, which can be seen through genetic analysis?
Edit: cursory googling turns up this, for example: https://psmag.com/environment/17-to-1-reproductive-success (8,000 Years Ago, 17 Women Reproduced for Every One Man)
Also from the article: "In more recent history, as a global average, about four or five women reproduced for every one man."
> throughout the entire history of the human race, maybe 80% of women but only 40% of men reproduced.
https://psy.fsu.edu/~baumeisterticelab/goodaboutmen.htm
As someone who favours individualism and was brought up in a culture where arranged marriages are the norm I found this most shocking and interesting at the same time.
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/7bdwyx/inside-the-global-...
Historical reproduction ALSO isn't useful when contraception is now a prevalent thing the numbers would in no way match. Regarding the last I couldn't find the claim that 4 to 5 women reproduced for every man so I'm just going to assume you misread. I cannot imagine how this could possibly be so unless you meant within a narrow age range considering men can reproduce for most of their lives and women most do so within a narrow range.
Looking at the same graph at the head of the page in 1998ish there was about 20% of the most effected age range who hadn't had sex in a year. It's now 28 and in fact the graph goes up and down and it seems that other age ranges are less effected.
I think by recent history, the mean thousands of years, not the last ten years. So most of the time before contraception was available.
Men being able to reproduce for most of their lives doesn't help much if they have nobody to reproduce with. I guess it helps if you can afford young wives even as you get older.
Of course it doesn't seems as if he is taking on 50 women, so the women are stuck with Joe Average for the most part.
Just because women would prefer George Clooney, doesn't mean they can get him.
And sure, modern society (at least for a while) has made monogamy the norm. Doesn't mean it is best suited for women's preferences.
Assuming all of a woman’s needs are financial, sure. But unless he is hiring Joe Averages to provide personal attention and emotional support (and there are issues with the viability of that), not really in the universe of what appears to be real human needs.
Maybe their preference would by monogamy - with George Clooney. But since that is not an option, the bets are off. In general, there may not be enough rich men willing to take on multiple women for a significant number of women to choose that option.
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.
A better advice would be for men to understand this tendency of women, what it means to be attractive to women and make an informed decision if they want to play the game of becoming more attractive to women.
They can also learn to reverse the game in their thirties and only date women 4-5 years younger, thus penalizing women who wait until their last fertile minute to settle down.
Because if you don't your outcome is worse than it otherwise would be. It's like weight cutting in boxing. Ultimately it serves no purpose. Both fighters do it so neither gets an advantage. Neither fighter can stop doing it, however, since it would give an advantage to the other fighter.
>A better advice would be for men to understand this tendency of women, what it means to be attractive to women and make an informed decision if they want to play the game of becoming more attractive to women.
These aren't mutually exclusive options. Making yourself more attractive will, of course, increase your chances for success.
>They can also learn to reverse the game in their thirties and only date women 4-5 years younger, thus penalizing women who wait until their last fertile minute to settle down.
Excluding a group isn't going to increase your chance of success.
And then you hear 'there are no good men'
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...
Young men have it worse list like older women have it: because men are attracted to youth and beauty and women are attracted to resources and status.
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.
* 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.
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.
Also, in your efforts to combat generalizations "against" women you did the same about men without skipping a beat.
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.
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.
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 gender wage gap is the clearest example at the moment, which was able to get people riled up on the 77 cents on the dollar figure, as purportedly being not only due primarily to environmental reasons, but specifically due to patriarchal socialization and sexism. The thing is, the initial figure was incredibly irresponsible, as it didn't control for field worked in, let alone specific profession, let alone seniority, output, hours worked, rate negotiated. The more of these figures are controlled for, the more the gap diminishes. But the problem is, people still look at the remainder as "okay well then there's a 7% gap, and that's still a problem." But my question is, "why?" They default back to the assumption that the remainder after what has since been controlled for is specifically the result of patriarchal sexism, simply because of a remaining disparity. That is ideological.
Its amazing to me that someone can claim "its not due to sexism" and then, in the very same sentence, make a long list of how its due to sexism. But its somehow ok.
how is it sexism that nurses get paid less than office workers? thats wage inequality, not sexism.
And honestly, women tend to be more amicable... thats a trait thats hard to have if you want to get higher in the work hierachy, as thats often gained by walking over other people.
take a step back and reread his comment. each of his points are valid.
There are many reasons for this, and the argument is that not all of this can be attributed to direct 'sexist' (bad) practices, but are instead the result of preferences that are more common to women than men (while this is indeed gendered, the accusation of 'discrimination' is more complex - if you somehow convinced all women to share identical preferences to men, these 'preference' differences would effectively disappear)
[0] https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/bolotnyy/files/be_genderga...
1.) population outcomes being different are okay because men win
2.) population outcomes are different because women don't want certain careers
3.) promotions are fair
The problem is that I didn't make any of those points, nor do I believe them.
You can't make the case that our arguments are symmetrical, because they're not. Yours is an assertion, mine is a claim of insufficient evidence to substantiate your claim. The burden of proof is yours. I'm not making the claim that all population outcomes are the result of biology and everything is perfectly fair, you seem to just believe that this is my claim. What I'm actually saying is that I have a problem with an ideological position which assumes in the absence (or sometimes in the presence of) alternative explanations for why populations arrive at different outcomes, there is a tendency to be satisfied with a de facto position stating that outcomes are necessarily due to sociological forces, specifically patriarchy/sexism/racism. I'm saying that this is a totally unjustifiable position to work off of as a baseline. Working backwards from default conclusions, particularly when it comes to things that are as complicated as this, is not an acceptable strategy.
Because they view the issue as being conditioned by today's society; while I admit it's not best to jump to such a conclusion without serious critical investigation, I find it tiresome that you call it "ideological" - as if an explanation which specifically seeks to avert any critical view of the development of Western society isn't itself "ideological". Is it the result of the sexism of patriarchal society? Let's find out by consulting sociology, critical theory and philosophy. A critical understanding of the issues wouldn't stop at merely controlling for the pay gap, for instance, it would ask why women negotiate less, why they tend to work fewer hours etc. Roswitha Scholz put it well:
>We have also to account for the fact that under capitalism reproductive activities emerge that are primarily carried out by women. Accordingly, value dissociation means that capitalism contains a core of female-determined reproductive activities and the affects, characteristics, and attitudes (emotionality, sensuality, and female or motherly caring) that are dissociated from value and abstract labor. Female relations of existence — that is, female reproductive activities under capitalism — are therefore of a different character from abstract labor, which is why they cannot straightforwardly be subsumed under the concept of labor.
>[...] Prior to this, women were largely regarded as just another variant of being-man, which is one of the reasons that the social and historical sciences have throughout the last fifteen years stressed the pervasiveness of the single-gender model upon which pre-bourgeois societies were based. Even the vagina was in the context of this model frequently understood as a penis, inverted and pushed into the lower body. Despite the fact that women were largely regarded as inferior, prior to the development of a large-scale modern public, there still existed for them a variety of possibilities for gaining social influence. In premodern and early modern societies, man occupied a largely symbolic position of hegemony. Women were not yet exclusively confined to domestic life and motherhood, as has been the case since the eighteenth century. Women’s contributions to material reproduction were in agrarian societies regarded as equally important as the contributions of men.
Those reproductive activities can be viewed across the near entirety of the animal kingdom.
And the societal "value dissociation" of child-rearing is not a product of capitalism. Across large communities, the value of child rearing is mostly realized within the context of a family unit. That just means that to entities outside of the family unit, the caring for the child has very little value. That's not to say that the general wellbeing of children across the society has no collective value to those within, which is why most people support access to education, child protective services, and things of this nature. Within a family unit, however, the person handling the child-rearing is of substantial value.
Your claim seems to be that:
1.) capitalism results in the dissociation of value for reproductive activities
2.) capitalism results in these activities primarily being carried out by women
3.) therefore, capitalism is responsible for assigning women a role and simultaneously undervaluing it
If this is not your claim, and please note that it is extremely difficult to actually discern a logical position from the text provided, please feel free to clarify.
If that IS your claim, then I would suggest that my counter is that:
1.) Capitalism only undervalues child-rearing if you fail to understand that the objectives of capitalism are predicated on the individual objectives of the entities within. The reproductive interest of a particular entity tends to be disproportionately valuable to that entity and their partner, much more than a third party. To say that capitalism undervalues that objective is simply contingent on the context.
2.) Capitalism "results" in these activities primarily being carried out by women only insofar as capitalism is a system in which individuals can act according to their own objectives. Many women do not want to reproduce at all. Many women do not want to be with men at all. This is completely fine, and never-married women with no children tend to be highly successful in other dimensions. Many women, however, do want to reproduce, and the fact that women and men tend to diverge in their roles regarding child rearing is not simply something that can simply be asserted as being a consequence of capitalism. Our capitalist systems are not collapsing under the increasing likelihood for a woman to be partnered with someone is less educated and makes less money.
I don't think this is true at all, since the ideological role of capitalism (and its class role) tends to encourage accumulation of capital above all else, so whatever can be made into capital-accumulating value will be, for instance over the past 50 years digital goods (and other otherwise freely reproducible goods) have been subsumed into capital - capital did this through its political arms, e.g the creation of copyright law. In the same way, capital may use its political arms to encourage 'family values', in a non-obvious alliance between the neo-conservatives in the 80s and the neolibreals. I understand value in the Marxian sense as a social relation, not value as in a purely "subjective" judgement. Value is both objective and subjective, in that it exists supersensibly but that existence is conditioned by a variety of objective social factors.
> Many women do not want to reproduce at all.
I find this line of argument relatively unconvincing, because it only works by assuming we are in total control of what we want, and that being ignorant of the origin of our desires, we assume them to come from within ourselves. It's a neat ideological point, but from social psychological perspectives is too simplistic to have much explanatory power. The point of my critique is that capitalism not only arranges society in a particular economic mode, but that this arrangement is therefore reflected in culture and society. Your argument is that capitalism gives the choice, and the choice is being taken, but this does not at all explain the context in which the decision is made in the first place, which is usually for economic reasons (whether the choice maker knows it or not).
>Many women, however, do want to reproduce, and the fact that women and men tend to diverge in their roles regarding child rearing is not simply something that can simply be asserted as being a consequence of capitalism.
I didn't claim that the difference in roles is solely due to capitalism, my claim is that the division of the roles between men and women works well with the liberal distinction between public and private - what is private ostensibly cannot be touched (by capital, by the state, by anyone) but what is public can be regulated by society in general (through the market) or by the government. The choices to remain an unmarried woman or to marry and have children are greatly dependent, before they reach the forefront of the mind, on the economic conditions of society.
The "family unit" is ideological, the free choice to "work hard" is ideological (see Weber's dissection of the "protestant work ethic" and capitalist society), the notion that many (even today) hold that women should be primarily caregivers in the home is ideological (along with its cousin, the belief that emotional or even reproductive labour does not truly count as labour because it is not valorized). These ideologies come about due to the economic system that underlies them, capitalism. Under different economic systems, or even different time periods, these ideologies are not present, or they are in a different form (see the last paragraph of my comment).
This is false. The default of critical rationalists is not to avert critical view. It is directly the opposite. There is nothing to support the claim that criticism of the 77 cent theory is specifically out to avert critical review.
I would claim that it is very likely that those who disagree with the science behind the 77 cent theory are more than willing in participate in a critical view of the development of Western society. A common theory among those is that society forces men to prioritize higher income over other life choices, leaving them with fewer choices compared to women. Relative low income has a disproportional negative effect for men on the Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs scale compared to women. Thus men are more likely to take higher risk jobs if it rewards higher pay, have a higher risk profile in negotiations, sacrifice health in order to work more hours etc. It is just as much an critical view of the development of Western society as the theory of "patriarchal socialization". It just not the same view.
Though, I used to interact (online and offline) with quite a few such people. In this case, even bringing a possibility that there may be any biological differences was crossing a taboo.
If you believe that were are both products of innate biology and culture, we are in agreement.
It would be interesting to see more formal studies on the topic, but as far as I know there is no collaborating data to support the theory that the data we have is an artifact from the dating app.
Did you ever get around to writing part 3?
"Social skills (not only) for aspies" and "Nice guys, friend zone and creepiness". Though starting is easy, finishing is hard.
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.
That needs good coordination even in mom-dad situation. And gets more and more complicated if more people are involved.
More specifically for polyamorous, it seems to keep much harder a stable, jealousy-free, neutral relationship. Even in mom-dad, kids tend to pick favourite parent or parent picks a favourite kid and that creates all sorts of issues. This would definitely add much more tension with multiple "moms" and "dads" around.
Don't they always adapt to different rule sets anyway? There is one set at home, one at school, one when they go visit the grand parents and one for whoever is babysitting. There is a lot of overlap but a lot of exceptions/infractions depending on the context. Plus kids are more or less constantly probing for edge cases and try to push the boundaries naturally.
Isn’t this observation kinda the point of the assertion kids need a stable set of rules at home going back to one source above others whether that is either parent or both as a pair. That’s what prevents them from endlessly pushing their boundaries out.
Also this kind of reasoning is hard in forums because people on forums seem to have a lot of difficulty not crossing generations for groups with specific examples and hypotheticals.
That assumes that their parents are the ultimate source of authority and in many cases they aren't. Parents don't typically enforce much of a dress code for instance, but schools will often require uniforms. Kids have to learn a different set of rules for different contexts.
> That’s what prevents them from endlessly pushing their boundaries out.
The only thing that seems to prevent it (or limit it anyway) is constant enforcement, but that's also usually limited to where they have authority. A rule not being enforce in one context is a rule that will probably be broken in that context. Once in a while breaking these rules might even make them appreciate them.
They're in early age.
> Parents don't typically enforce much of a dress code for instance, but schools will often require uniforms
Ultimately it is on parents. If parents DGAF, kids are likely to stretch the dress code. At least here, schools can only call home and ask parents to make sure they will wear uniforms. Worst school can do is send kid home. Then it's on parents to enforce the uniform.
> Kids have to learn a different set of rules for different contexts
Different context. But multiple-mom-dads at home would be same context with simultaneous nodes.
> The only thing that seems to prevent it (or limit it anyway) is constant enforcement, but that's also usually limited to where they have authority
And with multiple-mom-dads it's likely there won't be constant, consistent enforcement.
We've a saying in my mother tongue that roughly translates to "9 nannies and the kid is headless". So far in my observations it's 120% true. Both in kids raising and elsewhere in life, e.g. project masnagement. If there's no single person who takes responsibility (or multiple persons coordinating fantastically well), you're in for a rough ride.
This is more about toddlers than school-age. By the time they hit school, they're already building on top of early age experience. Which is crucial for later development.
The problem is they don't know what to expect. Humans are pack animals. As long as they know what rules to follow, they tend to follow. But once they don't know what to follow... They start making their own rules since, well, they need some sort of rules.
This is one of the reasons why dropping the kid off at different places with different people at early age (like 0-2 years) is not that good. My wife used to work at kindergarten and according to her experience, there's a massive difference between classes where they have same people working with them and where staff changes every few months. Same applies to elementary school. Much less effect after that though.
> There is a lot of overlap but a lot of exceptions/infractions depending on the context. Plus kids are more or less constantly probing for edge cases and try to push the boundaries naturally.
Yes. But the problem is when there're lots of people with different edge cases and different boundaries. Then they learn that if one person doesn't bend, they can just go to someone else and that person will do what they want. Thus boundaries effectively don't exist. Only obstacles you can go around.
Pretty much. This is the demographic most susceptible to radicalization.
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.
The Extension of the Domain of the Struggle (Whatever) is his first novel. The motif is that similar to economic inequality, due to sexual liberation, the sociosexual arena has become more winner-take-all, hence the extension in the title. The plot chronicles the disillusionment of a sexless programmer in denial after going on a road trip with a similarly dysfunctional co-worker who ended up commiting suicide. The story ends the protagonist going postal but offers no practical solution.
His next book The Elementary Particles follows two half-brothers who were dysfunctional in opposite ways. One was a complete sex addict who failed to individuate and the other became a monk like molecular biologist responsible for making sexual reproduction obsolete.
His next novel Platform is an in-depth analysis of the discontentment of sex tourism from the perspective of his alter ego, which is clearly formed by his own lived experience in Indonesia. I think it's his least coherent work FWIW.
The Possibility of an Island arguably follows the timeline of Atomised and describes the nature of love through the narrative of three clones of the same person from the hedonistic present, totalitarian future and hunter-gatherer post-apocalytic future.
Submission is about the return to traditionalism after a Muslim party won the election in France. The effect is complex but nominal as we all know there is no going back.
I am waiting for the English translation of Serotonin which should be released before end of next year.
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.
It certainly is not an "old" model since most of society still ascribe to it. Men with many partners are still seen as more desirable due to network effects.
Yes, the model is still prevalent, but I'm arguing that's exactly the problem. Basing status and self-worth on sexual conquest makes no more sense than basing it on the number of slaves in one's retinue or the size of the pile of gold in one's treasury. It's a ridiculous and archaic way of thinking.
edit: I may have lost vouching privileges again, so to address blockmarker's dead comment below, unlike other animals, humans are sapient and capable of acting beyond the limits of mere instinct. The entire premise of human civilization, law and society is that abstractions beyond our animal nature are not only possible, but desirable.
Yes, it may be part of our biology for males to want to seek out multiple mates, but it should also be part of our biology, then, for males to murder the children of other males in order to maximize the spread of their own progeny and genetic lineage. And we should be marking our territory with our urine and solving all disputes with ritual violence rather than a system of laws.
We don't have to act like gorillas, we can be people if we choose.
Absolutely. However basing your self worth on acceptance/rejection of people you are attracted to or admire is perfectly normal. Note I'm not saying it's perfectly rational, or even healthy - but I do think it's normal, for people of any gender.
I guess we probably disagree on what the majority of men are after - a hookup or a relationship? And if men who are looking for a hookup instead looked for a relationship, would they have more success?
I think that even if all men were looking for a faithful, committed, relationship, then we would still see to some extent the unequal sex rates cited in the article. I don't know the solution to this however, just like I don't know the solution to the many other inequalities that are unfair towards women instead - the gradual liberation and increase in power of women is a great thing, and for anyone to suggest moving back to increasing male dominance is abhorrent.
If I managed to convince 10 hot chicks to have sex with a virgin nerdy guy(say by paying them), he won't be able to get the 11th by himself.
On the otherhand if a virgin rockstar decided to lose his virginity, there will be dozens of women lined up to have sex with him.
I may have missed part of this conversation but I don't think there's a suggestion that women are doing something /wrong/ or that they need to be the ones to "fix" this problem. Although admittedly the framing kind of makes it look like this because it appears to be women's behaviour and attitudes that have changed over recent decades, rather than men's.
I agree with you; Since this is the way things are going, men need to find a way to change their expectations and entitlement and adapt. Unfortunately discussions around this often get over-run with misogyny and bitterness (MGTOW/red-pill) and it's remarkably hard to find safe spaces for men to talk openly about their issues while keeping out that subset of men. (shout out to /r/menslib)
If the adaptation required is to become part of the 20% of men that 70% of women pursue, bitterness from the 80% of less-desirable men is inevitable since they can't compete, which inhibits their ability to obtain a mate and have a good life.
Sure, a mate isn't _technically_ required to live a good life, but in our intensely individualistic society where the number of friends men have is dropping precipitously, relationships form a core of socialization for many men.
Perhaps this is the part where we need to change and improve? Rather than expecting the world or women to align to us.
Perhaps this is the part where they need to change and improve? Rather than expecting the world or men to align to them.
Isn't it a good thing that men who feel they are not attractive to females quit for good the dating scene?
Isn't part of the problem the narative that females have been fed -- that they can just have fun in their 20s and then settle down with a nice guy in their 30s?
If females knew they won't have the backup option in their 30s, maybe they'd be more willing to choose the monoganous option earlier in life?
As an aside, why do you refer to men as "men" and "guys", but women as "females"? The asymmetry there felt quite jarring to read.
It's not jarring, in the context of the comment. The first letter of MGTOW mentioned in the earlier sentence is "men". "Nice guy" is a trope which has seen some usage when talking about relationships.
I'm married and have been with my wife since our early 20's and we have a baby daughter, there is no bitterness towards women in general.
I just find that monogamy is a pretty good compromise and the kind of bullshit happening in the western world spreads everywhere and ultimately is responsible for so much missery in both women and mens lives and society in general.
I don't want to impose my views or tell people how to live their lives, I know not all people are the same, some(overwelmingly men) are quite ok in the long run with polygamy/polyamory, BUT I'm against the modern bullshit "anything goes,go get it!" -- I'm absolutely on the "think very carefully how you live your life, the years where you can mess around without big consequences are far fewer than you realize" camp.
I am absolutely against enforced monogamy, I am 100% for honesty and people understanding the consequences of their behavior-- and MGTOW or the herbivore men of East Asia is such a natural consequence. I am absolutely disgusted by how people try to spin this from "natural consequences" to "it's the mens fault, of course young women go and have sex with top men, it's the herbivore mens fault that women do this".
I am however bitter at the vilification of men in general, the brainwashing of young men, the mistification of women and the relationship between the sexes.
I am against false naratives such as: "men are expendable violent pigs that just want sex and are responsible for all the bad things in the world and women are good fairies, women should pursue careers in their 20s and have fun and settle down in their 30s, and men and women are exactly the same biologically".
It almost seems as if you’re saying this is how things should be and that men should be the ones to change their views to accept it. From a sociological perspective, men (or any specific population) who aren’t able to form meaningful relationships) can cause problems for society just as the original post stated. Women are the ones who headline this discussion only because they lead the power dynamics which happen to be extremely unfavorable to a large population of men.
I'm not sure that's so true. Plenty of people are talking about that. It's hard for them to get a fair hearing and a good-faith discussion, given the modern state of affairs, in which the most extreme voices are given all the attention.
Edit: below you wrote:
> Basing status and self-worth on sexual conquest makes no more sense
which I profoundly disagree with and sounds to me about as tone deaf as "let them eat cake".
Reproduction is at the core of our existence, we are programmed to want to do it. This 80 % of men aren't simply going to roll over and say "oh well, I guess I'll forgo sex and female attention".
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.)
"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.
https://i.imgur.com/HO430mM.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/4WPshhw.jpg
This has been done many, many times. The keyword is "chadfishing"
>> 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
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.
Those curious messages in your inbox are not just as your personal trouble (why don't more suitable mates show up?) but also as a symptom of a changing society that sees growing individualism, stratification, weird one-way relationships with social media and much more... and that all of this produces many losers that no one gives a shit about.
As someone who has also struggled, I can tell you the biggest thing (once you've both swiped right, and before you've actually gone on a date) is conversation. Because they've swiped right, they already accepted however you looked in your tinder pics. Now you just need them to actually like the conversation you have with them.
I'm pretty good at conversing in real life, but initially found it weird that I'd struggle to write out a message when there was so much more time to respond. There were even times when I thought to myself "man, if I could just meet up with her in real life this would go so much smoother", and I occasionally even tried (and always failed) to speed up the small talk and get to the dating part. But after a good 2 days, I realized I was treating texting differently than real life conversations because I was giving myself too much time to respond. So I stopped doing that, started treating texting more like real, face to face discussion, and did very well (again, all despite my looks). I'm not a woman telling men "It's easy to date us, you just suck." I'm a man who has been in your shoes, and is telling you how to step up your game (without saying outlandish things like "get plastic surgery" or "completely change your personality").
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.
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.
Good question - IDK! Based on what I've heard and seen (I have a lot of close friends who are women my age), there are a lot who talk about wanting someone super attractive, but all of them have also dated people who are noticeably less attractive than they are. So I'd guess the answer is somewhere between "a lot" and "a good amount". I'm sure if someone's absolutely hideous it will be a lot harder, but outside of the bottom ~10% of males, being good at conversing can make up for a lot.
> Specially since you can't do that much with photos.
As someone who isn't very attractive, I disagree. Photos can be a chance to make someone laugh or show them you have a (not-boring) personality. You can show people that you travel or do something adventurous, show people you like cute animals or are affectionate, show people a party pic so they see your wild side, etc. You just show them the attributes you want them to see, and make them want to be with you based on what they see.
>You just show them the attributes you want them to see, and make them want to be with you based on what they see.
That makes a lot of sense. It's not one scale from uninteresting to interesting, but rather showing what makes you you, and prioritizing which.
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.
True, but this isn't the problem we have yet. So start getting more interesting/funny/hot pictures. Once they all become mundane, people will start to look for other things (maybe even normcore pictures)
> A lot of men lack confidence and humor
I agree on this, and it sucks. Low self-esteem does a lot of harm, and yet is so easy to fix because "fake it till you make it" literally solves the problem. Not being funny is also easy to solve by just watching and imitating funny videos, and learning about popular things so you can make jokes about them. But if you have low self-esteem and are told you aren't funny, it probably seems like becoming funny is an impossible feat, and unattainable. Definitely sucks.
Sure, it's relatively easy to be in the top 80% of men. But the point, which I don't think I made clear enough, is that there's always going to be a bottom 20%. Evening out everyone in one area just means that some other area is going to be the differentiating factor. More realistically, if the 20% improve their game in one area the 80% are just going to one up them.
>I agree on this, and it sucks. Low self-esteem does a lot of harm, and yet is so easy to fix because "fake it till you make it" literally solves the problem.
IMHO the people that say fake it till you make it are the ones that have above average inherent natural ability regardless of what skill "it" refers to. Someone lacking in confidence and small talk type skills isn't likely to naturally get better. Like any skill, the best way to improve is directed practice and repetition.
How are the 80% going to one up them? One thing about dating apps for straight people is that you don't know what your competitors are doing. If the 20% up their game, most of the 80% won't know how. Also, remember that there is a 20% for women as well. I know that standards for men are crazy high on dating apps, but I also know some of the 20% women. They usually don't end up with the 80% men, and they often end up with men who are AWFUL (not just in terms of looks). 20% men can date 20% women.
> Someone lacking in confidence and small talk type skills isn't likely to naturally get better
I agree that small talk takes some work (just like becoming funny), but confidence is truly something you fake until you make. If you act confident, people will think you're confident. Then you pick up on people thinking you're confident, and that makes you feel even more confident. If you don't act confident, people won't think you're confident, and that will be one more thing holding you back from being confident.
I'm am not naturally confident. I've had my fair share of self esteem issues and have doubted myself on many other fronts. Fake it till you make it is terrible advice for a lot of things, and you also shouldn't always fake confidence (sometimes it's good to let it all out), but if you start faking it (especially with people you don't already know), you will make it.
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?
- 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"
What else would they be?
> Did you ever get reviews from women about how you were good at conversing?
No, but women rarely respond at all so I'm not exactly surprised by that. Even the women I eventually went on dates with never mentioned it.
> Would you are cognizant of messaging social norms
I would say I actively detest messaging social norms. I write legible full English sentences just like you see here because I'm an adult. I specifically ruled out women who obviously felt differently.
> If you're very attractive, yes.
If anything I would say that being very attractive is the only circumstance under which you can reliably get results without spamming low-effort messages.
> But if you're aren't very attractive and you're sending bad messages, how is that more successful than sending good messages?
Numbers. What my experience taught me was that message content was basically unimportant, what mattered was reaching out to as many potentials as possible in the hopes of a few being receptive.
It was a strategy I detested. Combined with the general tediousness and awfulness of the online dating experience I decided I'd rather not date than engage in it.
By "low-effort" I mean messages that are basically form letters one can apply to anyone so you don't have to put any thought into crafting them for the person you're trying to talk to.
> No, but women rarely respond at all so I'm not exactly surprised by that
Really? See, that's very weird to me, because I rarely saw women not respond at all. They've swiped right on you, so they've already accepted your pictures and bio, they're willing to be with you if you have a good conversation. If they weren't, why would they swipe right? Tinder, for example, limits the number of right swipes you're allowed to give over some period of time. So that right swipe truly means that all you need to do is have a good conversation with them. Again, I'm really not trying to bash you, and I personally enjoy having this debate with you on HN. But being good at a HN debate is very different from being good at a dating app conversation. I suspect that there was a problem with the conversations (despite the effort and best intentions - conversing well can be hard, especially for my/our generation). But I am sorry that you went through the pain of not getting replies most of the time - that definitely sucks.
>> Would you are cognizant of messaging social norms
// Wow, seeing that I wrote this makes me feel like such an idiot!
> I would say I actively detest messaging social norms. I write legible full English sentences just like you see here because I'm an adult. I specifically ruled out women who obviously felt differently.
Ok, perhaps this could be a big factor in why we had very different results. Unless we're surrounded by very, very, very different sets of people (or we're in very different age ranges), you're specifically ruling out most candidates. In my experience, even the people who write complete sentences in their bios will often follow messaging social norms once you start messaging with them. For a lot of people, following those social norms is required for the messages to feel casual. If I matched with someone and they used complete sentences with proper punctuation in 100% of our messages (e.g. sending "Hey." or something that looked like it could be in a letter), I would instantly feel like I'm in a more formal setting and cross them off the list of potential dates, and the most we'd become is friends. And I know people with much stricter rules about messaging social norms than me, such as feeling like things are too formal if there aren't enough emojis/memes/GIFs.
I'm not trying to convince you to change, and I respect your passion for detesting messaging social norms. But I do believe your messaging style could be a significant factor in why putting effort into conversation yields you no results. I'd be curious to see if the same happens with other people who also don't follow these norms. Thanks for all your responses!
> you're specifically ruling out most candidates.
Yes, because the reality is I just can't stand emoji-laden text communication or single letter representations of words. Many of the women I messaged had said something similar in their profiles. If someone is going to be bothered by that then it was never going to work anyway.
They switched from TCP to UDP because speed/reach is more efficient (in their mind) than deliverability/customisation
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.
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.
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'd probably be better if I just ignored the comment. But I think the claim "harms far more people" is absurd if you consider the unequal harms done to women through history, and the fact that they're half the population. The commenter didn't make an effort to engage in good faith discussion with my post so it's unreasonable to apply the same standard to me.
I'm happy to reply to comments like yours though.
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.
"Acceptance of promiscuity" is a bit of a contradiction in terms since "promiscuous" is inherently pejorative. I will say this: "promiscuity" has always been far more socially acceptable for men than it has been for women. Despite "enforced monogamy" prostitution is called the "oldest profession" for a reason and extramarital affairs have been happening for a long, long time. If you want to get nuanced, "enforced monogamy" doesn't really mean "enforced monogamy" because affairs were accepted in certain sociocultral contexts in England and France far before the sexual revolution.
Philosophy is a deep rabbit hole but cursory philosophy should really be mandatory in secondary education.
I'm not at all affiliated but I found the podcast Philosophise This to be very informative and interesting.
Promiscuity is at first, and foremost was (and still is, in spite of contraception availability) practically more acceptable for men. And monogomy among other things is a constraint on men's behavior - forcing to accept social, and economic responsibilities before fulfilling sexual urges. You are right noting that it rarely worked in any absolute way, but I don't think any law, whether written, or not can be 100% effectively implemented. People steal all the time, but I suppose you wouldn't say it's because related norms are not enforced, right? Monogomy's real application varied over times, cultures, and spaces, but it was certainly enforced by societal pressure, and legally too. Actually, in my father's youth years (and it's not that deep in history) it was hard to have sex before marriage. It was for sure possible, but dangerous for reputation of both participants (probably more damaging for a women, but damaging for both nevertheless). It wasn't US, and "sexual revolution" came to us much later, so that's probably why you may have no living witnesses for it.
Also, prostitution was until quite recent times seen as a moral compromise acceptable only because of long serving soldiers, and sailors. In most societies it wasn't ok for a family man to visit a house of prostitution, and in some cases it was even criminalized.
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).
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.
Are you arguing men have a right to sex? Disenfranchisement is the taking away of rights, that's it's definition. If not, you should be more careful using that phrasing.
This is what I mean by overblown. People's perception on this issue is just ridiculously out of whack. Young men aren't as dangerous to civil society as a lot of people like to imagine. The violent ones get jail and the rest grow up.
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...
My point is: the perception that most gamers are men, who on average spend more of their time gaming than women, lacks supporting data. It is easily explained by psychological factors such as confirmation bias and stereotyping.
I think your comment on perceptions of gamers misses the point that "gamers" are people who spend lots of time playing video games. The research on the wikipedia page isn't about "gamers". It's about people who play video games at some level of frequency, which is a much broader category. This is why our intuitions about "gamers" turn out to be accurate, even though they are not consistent with the data about the much larger category of "people who play video games".
\* 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.
Granted, there may be some sort of lag between economic changes and the effect on sex lives. E.g. a boyfriend loses a job in 2009, fails to find work in several years, and then gets dumped. But that seems like more of a stretch, and it seems like the pattern of less sex particularly among men is occurring even among people in age cohorts that weren't affected by the economic downturn during the end of the last decade.
Also I think you're referring to the trap of the law of averages incorrectly. The trap of the law of averages is the erroneous notion that because a random even has diverged from the average then the likelihood of it returning to the average is higher. "The coin toss came up head five times in a row, so it'll probably be tails this time" is falling into the trap of the law of averages.
GP's point is that while the economy as a whole is doing great, nearly all the gains are concentrated in the top quintile, and the remaining 4 quintiles have seen real wages stagnate, older men drop out of the labor force, and young men fail to enter the labor force, all while watching other people pull ahead with fortunes they could only dream of. All of this is consistent with women partnering with the portion of the population that's actually doing well economically and ignoring everyone who's struggling.
True, sorry, I was referring to the typical "3 chickens were eaten by 3 people, 1 chicken per person on average; in reality one man ate 3 chickens and the other zero"
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 are cultures where sex ratio has been manipulated, e.g. India and China, to favor males, but this is not the point of the research and I lack relevant data for these.
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.
That is by most peoples' expectations widespread, up to some allowance for out-of-wedlock births (which the Catholic Church in Ireland famously acted forcefully against).
Historically if you weren’t celibate there was going to be a baby.
> Our knowledge of biology is not innate
It's not,but we've known what the result of "seeding a woman" has been for several thousand years so I have a hard time believing it took that long to come up with the pull out method. For the poor bedrooms are also a recent invention, they probably got a lot more sex-ed passed down directly.
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-...
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.
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.
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...
Not true and a willful misinterpretation of the phrase "toxic masculinity".
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.
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?
Of all the women I've dated, only 1 said she noticed me (either way) before first developing a reasonably close friendship.
For the big middle, personality has a huge effect on perception. See e.g. https://psychcentral.com/news/2007/11/30/personality-influen...
> why won't you care about your physical appearance? Why leave something that important on the table?
Well, certainly don't be a slob. And not just because of dating! Dressing poorly and appearing unkept effects other parts of life too (e.g. career). Also, exercise is important for all sorts of reasons aside from attractiveness.
But other than being generally healthy and well-kept, I don't focus on my appearance because grooming is boring. Why spend your time grooming beyond a level of general acceptability when you could learn to play an instrument, learn a new language, read a book, or go for a hike?
If all you focus on is appearances, don't be surprised when the only people who find you even remotely interesting are other people who focus a lot on appearances.
You're right. But I never said that we should focus on appearance to the exclusivity of everything else. In that we agree.
But there are people laboring under the idea that you can neglect it by making up for it in other areas. That's what I am trying to refute.
This is really only true at the margins.
> Why would a woman settle for a friendly 165 cm guy with a good job, if a 185 cm "lumberjack" is only few swipes away (in theory, because there are many more women competing for him)?
For the same reason most people choose friends based on who they get along with instead of who has the most money/status. After all, why spend time on a friendship that only gets you a beer now and then when you could spend your time befriending people with yachts and ski lodges?
People crave closeness and belonging. Being close with someone who you actually enjoy spending time with feels better than having sex with someone you don't care about.
Note: few people enjoy the company of another person merely because that other person "has a good job" or is merely "friendly". How many of your male friends do you enjoy spending time with because they make good money and aren't assholes? Probably very few. For the rest, you have something in common that drives the friendship. The same thing is true in romantic relationships.
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.
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.
There are studies linked there.
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.
What does leaving the house accomplish? It's not
like you suddenly will interact with people.
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?
If someone considers relationships with other people to be an "incomprehensible minefield," then the problem is with them, not the nature of human relationships.
Too many people overthink things, seeing each potential relationship as a puzzle to be solved, or searching for some general purpose sexual algorithm for which they can provide the inputs and recieve sexual or emotional fulfillment, or they expect hostility and deception and treat dating like an interrogation.
And of course some people just don't have empathy for the opposite sex and don't understand social boundaries or cues.
Is it a reasonable position to tell a disabled person who considers a society with no handicap accessibility that the problem is them, not with the nature of society?
I was under the impression we were talking about a general majority of sexually frustrated young men.
At what point does lack of ability to engage socially become a disability? Your statement already acknowledged their difficulties.
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?
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
Unless, of course, using Tinder unevenly weights physical attractiveness and going to community events more evenly weights other forms of attraction (which is probably the case), in which case going out more could be better than using Tinder for some people.
I am very convinced this would be the case.
I remember reading about a study a while ago about relative attractiveness in heterosexual couples (i.e. how the attractiveness of the man compares to that of the woman). The finding was that there was a strong correlation in relative attractiveness in couples who started dating shortly after meeting, and less of a correlation in couples who knew each other for a long time before dating. Both groups of couples reported similar overall relationship satisfaction.
It makes sense if you think about it: if you get together right after meeting, you probably didn't have much to go on besides the superficial. Things like personality take longer to understand. Tinder is like a distillation of the superficial.
The question isn't if online interactions can produce meaningful relationships but rather what is the expectation of people that do it this way. Because if the expectation is that online dating is just for one night stands and "fun" then the increase in such interactions won't bring an equivalent increase in marriages.
As for the extroverted person , maybe they only go to bars to pickup people for quick lays, they don’t contribute to community like helping build a house or work on community plots of land or help paint a mural etc , it could balance it out
If you want to encourage face to face events then you need to transform urban spaces to be more walkable and create more public spaces people actually want to hang out at. If I go outside I could walk around for hours and the only people I would see are out there for fitness and do not wish to be disturbed by random chats.
Forcing people to do things is never as effective as making people want to do them in the first place.
I agree forcing is not nice but tell that to all the children who don’t want to go to school haha
Can you imagine how your friends would feel if you stole from their wallet to plan a party and told them you would steal some more if they didn't come?
Is their a particular reason you aren't suggesting organizing more events say in your locality and encouraging rather than forcing people to join?
If it’s a party that had cake which cured a bad recurring disease that I’m too lazy and stubborn to fix then I’d be grateful for those friends
I am doing the above, I do encourage people and really it’s not high on my priority list — it’s just a suggestion about how we could remedy a gaping problem in our modern social fabric
Laws are fundamentally enforced by ya know force. Taxes are enforced by taking your money by force, taking your freedom by force if you disagree strenuously enough, and taking your life if you fail to submit to losing your freedom.
You can't legally force someone to associate with others because we put that in the constitution centuries ago. It's also codified in the European Convention on Human Rights, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
Your idea pisses on rights fundamental enough and universal enough that the entire free world agrees they are a good idea.
If it didn't you would still have to deal with people with social anxiety, people with other obligations including unplanned ones.
Would we have to go to the doctor (if we can afford to go to one) to avoid having our medical or mental safety taken from us? Perhaps go to a government office to plead our case for an exemption or excuse for not going to a party within the right time frame.
But the harshest criticism and the must fundamental is that this solution is a solution to a wholly imaginary problem. It's not substantially harder to interact with the feminine half of the species than it ever was.
In fact its always sucked if you didn't have much social status. Its worse to be low status than it is to be ugly or stupid or both.
This isn't new or shocking. If you want a mate find an individual with shared interests and use that to springboard into dating -> relationship -> partnership. If you don't like where you are at improve your position rather than asking society to fix imaginary problems with the dating and mating game.
Opting out would mean I was paying for other peoples parties when I can barely at this point cover medical expenses.
This remains a terrible idea.
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.
For all the stories about large alimony, such situation not the norm.
So I would expect divorce issues not to influence causual sex rates, but rather marriage rates.
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.
In general, even happy "normal" relationships are a ton of work. They also anchor you to certain expectations and when you try to change something in life, you risk upsetting your partner. Want to study for an exam? Good luck having scandals about "not enough attention."
Furthermore, a lot of the time your partner won't grow with you. That's why you see a lot of people divorcing once they "make it".
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.
Along the lines of sex and reproduction, the real dark-horse is CRISPR-CAS9 and the genetic revolution in general. That's not just readjusting the mating process/markets, it's a wholesale tinkering into heritability and sex as an idea. Eukaryotic sex goes back about 1.2 billion years. Suddenly leaping back to the 'genetic transfer soup' of bacteria is going to rock the boat in way we can't really see today. The entire idea of 'family' and 'child' is up for debate soon.
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.
It is true that most people, as you indicate, are apparently unable to live an awesome life without sex in horizon. But that does not automatically make sex a "necessary condition" for an awesome life.
> Not sure how you can live an "awesome life" without your basic natural desires being met.
A desire, unlike a need, is not set in stone. Aggression is a "basic natural" instinctual passion too; does that mean you are rendered incapable of living an awesome life without going about killing your fellow human beings?
It is clear that you are not "well aware" of the difference between a desire and a need.
And yet we know that humans isolated from other humans generally do not turn out well and sexual isolation is a very significant milestone on that spectrum.
need /nēd/
circumstances in which something is necessary, or that require some course of action; necessity.
de·sire /dəˈzī(ə)r/
a strong feeling of wanting to have something or wishing for something to happen.
The fact that you fail to thoroughly appreciate this makes it unsurprising that you bizarrely place the condition of not engaging in sexual acts (an act of desire) with your fellow human beings to be nearly on the same level as living without being in contact (an act of need) with them.
Speaking as a male in his late 20s, I've got fulfilling hobbies such as working on my car, biking, exercising and programming with friends. However none of those scratch the biological itch to have physical intimacy. I am actually quite offended you'd ask of me to deny my desires and to call me selfish for wanting to to pursue what is ingrained biologically in me. There is nothing to be gained from setting my bar low for what I want in life.
The human race, if it wants itself to continue, will make that decision just fine using its thinking brain (we are evolved enough to no longer need to rely on instinctual desires for the continuation of species; if anything it only gets in the way--just look at all the wars and suicides and murders and so on).
And no one here said anything about denying a feeling. Your offense is triggered by something you seemed to have imagined. Is sexual desire the new religion? Is questioning the validity of it to be automatically taken as an act of blasphemy?
By the way, aggression is "biological curse" too. So why are we not equally going about killing others and rationalizing it in a similar manner?
Strong disagreement here.
Sex is not necessary. It's way overblown, and anyone that has regular sex (or the potential to get it) will concede that point. It's definitely not worth the drama that usually follows it.
Food is necessary, cause without it you will die.
Shelter is necessary, cause without it you will die as well (eventually, not immediately)
Sex it not necessary. In fact, I was always confused and flabbergasted by the lengths people will go to to get it. It's remarkable - it's probably evolution at work, but still never ceases to amaze me. People will tolerate the most insane things I've ever witnessed just to put one reproductive organ into another. If an alien race was watching this, they'd die in laughter.
Also, the obsession with sex that modern cinema, newspapers (think scandals etc.), indirectly facebook/instagram, on every billboard hot naked women are selling you something (hot naked women cleaning service, hot naked women car wash/sales/etc.) cannot be healthy. Just cannot be! I don't understand this obsession at all. Don't people have literally anything better to do? Do people really have this much free time?
OT: I'm glad to see this topic on HN cause the human bonding in general is a very interesting topic. Wish we could discuss it more, cause it feels like we, as a society, just go with the momentum instead of sitting down and thinking long-term consequences of what we are doing. It's almost shameful and definitely looked down upon to suggest traditional values and roles, even though those traditional values were result of thousands of years of various attempts. Surely the previous generations weren't all imbeciles that couldn't conclude what works and what doesn't. I think it's safe to say that what we are doing now cannot work long-term.
And personally as someone who favours individualism -- despite having grown up in a culture where arranged marriages are the norm -- I would not go back to "traditional values" especially as there is no indication whatsoever that traditional societies were any more authentically happier than we are today.
The only way forward is individual autonomy (mentally, emotionally not just economically).
It's meaningless.
So it's unrealistic for you to just dismiss it as "unhealthy obsession".
Edit: life would obviously be much easier and better if we were perfectly natural and had complete control over our instincts. But we're not (well most of us) and we have to deal with it somehow. Maybe sex robots or VR :)
Same with food and sex.
Apparently what this pithy aphorism means, for those like me that have never heard before, is that[1] when you have money it is easy to say that there is more life than just being wealthy, and that when you have no money your financial situation negatively affects your entire life.
> Same with food
If you have no food to eat it will not be a matter of it affecting your life, as there won't be one to live in the first place (beyond the number of days of living off body fat). This is what the word "need" refers to.
> and sex.
If you are saying that not engaging in sexual intercourse with one's fellow human beings negatively affects one's entire life (as if it is a fact, and not one's own feeling), and as sex is not a need like food, it can be safely said that your pithy aphorisms are of no use whatsoever to anyone looking to critically ascertain the facts of the matter instead of blindly following whatever is the latest belief being promulgated by the masses.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Showerthoughts/comments/9og6vu/havi...
See my comments on the distinction between need vs desire in this thread.
> should be something that is a bit more in-depth than "you don't need to have sexual intimacy in your life to be happy
That's correct. You can feel happy doing a variety of things, such as hobbies, work, dining out with friends, etc. Your not engaging in sexual intercourse does automagically stop happiness in tracks.
> ... and feel fulfilled."
Nothing in the dictionary definition of the word "fulfilled" -- "satisfied or happy because of fully developing one's abilities or character." -- indicates necessarily having sexual intercourse.
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.
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.
What to Submit On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
--------------
To me (and many others) this topic is political in nature and controversial. See for example the 2014 Isla Vista massacre. It does not gratify my intellectual curiosity. In fact, it only briefly pretends to be a data driven piece by including a graph at the beginning and citing an informal social media poll. It might be something interesting to discuss, but in my opinion this is not the forum for it.
Edit: And to clarify, lots of science can be political, but that doesn't make it not-science. For example, breaking news about a new discovery in climate change projections is inherently political but it is also inherently interesting from an intellectual standpoint. Something purely political and not intellectually interesting to hackers might be news about what's happening in the White House right now. In my opinion, anything that falls under the science category is fair game for this community because plenty of people who are hackers are also very interested in science and technology.
What I love about Hacker News (usually) is the lack of flame-wars. I know they exist, but they get hidden very quickly. After reading the article in full, and finding it sparse in actual data, I decided it would most likely generate the sort of discussion that does not belong on the site.
Edit to add: If it is merely the "population dynamics and sexual activity statistics" that we should be interested in, why not link directly to the study instead of this meandering commentary on it?
> I decided it would most likely generate the sort of discussion that does not belong on the site.
The current thread as well as the two linked threads have plenty of positive discussion. Again, every topic is a double-edged sword. You're going to get people who agree and disagree, people who are serious and others who are trolls. That doesn't mean threads should be completely destroyed. The best course of action here is to flag the offending comments, rather than the entire thread.
The best course of action for my mental well-being is to flag the whole thread and move on without reading the comments. Unfortunately I'm already in here, so I am flagging the particularly egregious comments, as well as vouching for the dead comments that I think were unjustly buried.
> Just because something gets trolls, doesn't mean the whole thing should be destroyed or censored.
One flag doesn't destroy an entire thread. It's a numbers game and I'm adding my vote to the pile. If the thread dies, people who think it is valuable can vouch for it.
Guidelines:
> Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it. Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead. If you flag something, please don't also comment that you did.
Your comments here suggest that you have a personal problem with the article. Articles should not be flagged for how their words and numbers make us feel, they should be flagged if they are off-topic, spam, or not intellectually stimulating. This article abides by the rules and thus should not have been flagged by a neutral actor.
Oops! I'll keep this in mind for the future. But the cat's out of the bag already here so...
> Articles should not be flagged for how their words and numbers make us feel, they should be flagged if they are off-topic, spam, or not intellectually stimulating.
I maintain that I am flagging this because I consider it off-topic and not intellectually stimulating.
The discussion happening in this thread does not support your conclusions. As per the HN guidelines:
> Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
There is an interesting phenomenon here -- that sex rates are apparently changing very significantly. Whether or not you personally were inspired the post, it is clear that this has provoked plenty of intellectually stimulating discussion here. If the flag button is abused, it makes the moderator's jobs harder. To properly flag posts, a good rule of thumb is to ask these questions before flagging a post:
1. Are people having civil discussions and learning new
points of view in a constructive manner?
Whether or not you are interested or able to
participate in the discussions has no bearing on the
answer to this question.
2. If the post isn't about computers/technology,
is there something academic about the post?
Is there data to discuss, its implications, etc.?
Then you write several comments doing just that.
The best moderators use objective criteria when exercising their powers. You might want to say that you're not a moderator and that you're just a user, but this also misses the point. HackerNews has been kind enough to give users a moderation tool (flagging), so you should treat the tool with respect. You have great power with that tool, and your contributions are very important, so it's important that we contribute in a good way.
How so? It's not about political decisions one way or another but observing a new phenomenon on the market for sex and relationships. There are tons of scientific angles available for approaching the issue. Why is this happening? What has changed? What factors can contribute?
Flagging comments such as "that's good, all sex should happen in a marriage anyway" would be contributing to the discussion, flagging the entire topic would not be.
> How so?
It's in the very next sentence.
But oh by the way, the author doesn't have a great track record on this issue.
https://slate.com/business/2018/05/robin-hanson-the-sex-redi...
> Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon.
I feel like this is on-topic? I feel that the flag button is not there for "I found this uninteresting", because at any given time a significant portion of the articles on the front page are uninteresting to me. I don't go around flagging those because I'm sure others do find it interesting and it's possible to have a valid discussion about it without devolving into flamewars.
> See for example the 2014 Isla Vista massacre.
FWIW, this was not covered by Hacker News.
> I'm really tired of the incel narrative
Men generally play a numbers game, where their romantic overtures get rejected most of the time. It doesn't help that a lot of the time their romantic overtures are annoying [1]. Supposed "incels" just have no idea what it is that makes them so obnoxious [2].
Women have to screen candidates until they find someone they think is interesting.
> Seeing us represented this way really stresses me out.
Maybe the comment section on these types of articles 'stress you out' because you see a bunch of men debating their "flat earth" theories of how women go about relationships, you can tell that their theories are clearly wrong, but there's no point in even trying to expand their 'flat earth relationship' theories?
Sociologists have determined that men peak sexually around 18 years old [3]. Women peak at a much later age (30's and 40's). Hopefully better understanding will help the stress you experience dissipate.
> I'm just here to learn about tech stuff, geez.
Interpersonal relationships can be hacked too. Women especially need constructive strategies to better deal with unwanted overtures from the other gender.
I try to provide constructive comments on the topic. This comment was about how my passengers helped me figure out "attraction": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17810906 (this one got lots of upvotes and downvotes). For the record, I never hit on my passengers, but sometimes they were intrigued by me...
[1] "As a woman, is it simply 'understood' that you’ll have to contend with inappropriate male advances & suggestive language?" - https://www.quora.com/As-a-woman-is-it-simply-understood-tha...
[2] my comment ending with "Relationship coaching for men is mostly about teaching them how to be less obnoxious." - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17554503
[3] "But around the time I turned 29 or 30 I rapidly began to lose interest in sex." - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19602351
This is exactly the kind of harmful narrative I'm talking about.
> Sociologists have determined that men peak sexually around 18 years old [3]. Women peak at a much later age (30's and 40's). Hopefully better understanding will help the stress you experience dissipate.
The stress has absolutely NOTHING to do with that. BUT, since you brought it up, OkCupid had a pretty detailed analysis that showed much the opposite when it comes to the age that people are interested. Linking because you might be interested, not because it's relevant.
https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1600/0*q95i3Ma24k-hxBtK....
https://theblog.okcupid.com/the-case-for-an-older-woman-99d8...
> > Women have to screen candidates until they find someone they think is interesting.
> This is exactly the kind of harmful narrative I'm talking about.
There are more nuances than I allowed. Sorry. I will try to refine my presentation to make it less harmful and simplistic. The narrative is based on Ingo Swann's observations (as told in his book [0]), my own conversations with women, and my own experiences.
> BUT, since you brought it up, OkCupid had a pretty detailed analysis that showed much the opposite.
I think your link confirms what I said (perhaps less than gracefully) about how women figure out what kind of relationships they're interested in at a later age than men [edit: 'sex drive', as used by the other commenter, is the term I was looking for. Women's sex drive tends to peak at a later age than men's]. I have a friend (now 62) who told me about going to classes at a community college in her 30's, and how she was giddy about all the boys, but that she never acted on it...
[0] The original webpage for Psychic Sexuality: https://web.archive.org/web/20060214070448/http://www.biomin...
Swann's estate has republished the books: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/psychic-sexuality-the-bio-p... / https://ingoswann.com/author
I swear everyone I have ever conversed with that believes that attractive men were monopolizing all the women was a 2 with a really negative attitude towards women.
The best part is where they diss the kind of woman they actually COULD potentially date as fat or dumpy and ergo beneath them.
My theory is its a perception and attitude problem not societies problem. The internet shows them an entire planet full of women that are out of their league and they fail to chase the people who actually could be their mates.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19601799
I know it's basically part of the language at this point, and I'm definitely guilty of it too, but really, it's dehumanizing and implies a static unchanging nature to attractiveness that really isn't there.
Women aren't the borg. We're a collection of individuals, each with our own personal preferences, which can and do vary wildly from the personal preferences of other women.
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.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.
Edit-another pet theory is a changing climate. Cultures in drier climates tend to be more sexually conservative. A large portion of the US has been in drought conditions for decades
Granted, as has been pointed out by the parent comment to yours, this study is referring to the US specifically, where there are more women than men in 40 states (https://www.statista.com/statistics/301946/us-population-mal...)