The problem for men is that the women generally don't think the average man is good enough.
The problem for women is that they're mostly lusting after and eventually, in the long run, sharing the same top 20% men.
If you're a man, it's a winner takes all market. Either almost all women desire you, or not a single one does.
Arranged marriage used to solve this.
But seriously, think about the implications of these numbers: do 8 women just patiently wait in line for 2 men, doing literally nothing in the meantime while the remaining 8 men just stare at their feet or something? Is it something that people think actually happens in real life?
If anything, our evolutionary history indicates a promiscuous lifestyle with everyone having sex with everyone else and post-spermatic competition.
Where the stat kind of fails flat is that the same is true of the top 20% of women.
That said, the model (with no statement being made of how much that model reflects reality) being described is sequential monogamy. One of the top 20% men will continuously have one or two partners, switching them out for new ones; the rest of the men will only rarely get a partner; and women will fall between those two. Matching them percentile-to-percentile, the average number of new partners in some timespan for a given percentile for women will be larger for women than for men, up until some crossover percentile X% at which point men will have more partners.
I do think that if a person's primary mode of dating is through online apps, they end up with a skewed mental model of what dating is like. They are, however, already the main mode of new relationships being formed, and perhaps are still increasing in importance.
[0] "Top 20%" being defined as the 20% of men who have the most sexual partners
Sorry, repeating the same point won't make it any more true. Still haven't seen any evidence for this stat, only American stereotypes.
It's hard to track people's sex lives for obvious logistical/ethical reasons, but the most accurate study I've read on that was about teenagers in a high-school in a small rural town, so a closed environment that's easy to control. Forgot the link, will track it down if you're interested. But basically the "sex encounter" graph was fairly evenly spread and evenly balanced between men and women. Sure enough there were "clusters" but they were engaged with each other, not monopolizing 80% of everyone.
As it turns out, if your social circle is made up of sociosexually unrestricted people, everyone involved is going to have lots of sex. If it's made up of restricted people, few people are going to have encounters. But one person or two keeping all women in a sort of "serial monogamous schedule" while they do liteally nothing else? That doesn't make sense and I've never seen it happen, nor have I read any actual scientific study about this.
The social skills of the youth are also getting worse due to smartphones, leading to less interaction in schools at workplaces etc
1. The 80/20 rule is a rule of thumb that happens to apply in many fields, but you can't take it as a general law and stipulate that "Probably the top 20% [0] of men are involved in the 80% of heterosexual sexual couplings". It's an empirical question.
2. "the same is true of the top 20% of women". No, probably not. The statistics for men and women look quite different (which goes to show that you can't just apply the 80/20 "rule" willy-nilly).
Firstly, the way you interact with and judge strangers is completely different to the way you behave with your friends who you've known for 10 years. The us vs them tribal mentality is built into our brains. Random people are considered as disposable as you don't have any attachment to them and can effectively never see them again in your life if you choose so. Smartphones allow us to instantly tap into an infinite pool of strangers.
Secondly, social media lets us see the lives of the top 0.1% every day. Beforehand you lived in your small filter bubble and didn't know any better. Most people don't look like or hang around with fitness stars or male models in real life. But when you follow a ton of them on Instagram and see their photos daily, your mindset and standards start to change.
Third, the amount of choices online is effectively limitless and a "candy store" effect happens. Why would you pick an "ok" candy when there's 100 brands to pick from that taste like heaven in your mouth?
It's a little dramatic, but https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fD2briZ6fB0 explains it well.
Certainly not in the environments that I frequent and not in my circle of friends either. Lots of normal couples, though.
If you want to find these people, they will be at the night club. In the gym locker room. In the suggestion list of your Instagram feed.
And really, arranged marriage as a "solution"? Really?
I'm not sure that gp would be the person to implement it, but if the problem is a literal read of the headline then arranged marriages are a reasonable solution. I might be about to learn some, but I'm not aware of any compelling argument that arranged marriage + liberal approach to divorce wouldn't work well vs the western-style dating system.
Something like half of marriages (major Anglosphere countries) end in divorce,and there are some extremely well grounded stereotypes suggesting that people under the age of 30 don't make great long-term decisions. Self-assessing your prospects as a young person is also difficult; there isn't a lot of life experience to fall back on.
In principle it is better for people to organise themselves personally. But if that isn't working out, then a more communal effort is a reasonable fallback. It probably wouldn't lead to worse outcomes.
If the "top 20%" (in the example above) married the opposite "top 20%" and this permanently removed them from the pool of available young people, then the matching could proceed on the rest. But if instead they form temporary bonds, then the system is more complicated, and you can have a state where (perhaps) the top 50% of one side take turns with the top 20% of the other. By "take turns" (apologies if it's a strange phrase) I mean both medium term dating and marriage with divorce, both common patterns now (e.g. some people are coupled most years of their 20s, some just a few).
I always feel like this is swept under the carpet because 1) victims are male, and who cares about males, and 2) there is no easy solution to it.