Dating Sites Are Not Built for Men
sashachapin.substack.com
sashachapin.substack.com
Just look at the relationship patterns of gay men vs. lesbian women. About 40% of gay men in America are in an open relationship. The practice is basically unknown among lesbians. Infidelity is reported as slightly more common among gay men than among heterosexuals. Nearly unknown for lesbians.
Pornography, sex clubs and hookup apps are close to ubiquitous among gay men. To the point some have sardonically argued these things are gay culture. They exist for lesbians too, but comparatively speaking they're niche; lesbian culture is, arguably, centred on poetry.
Left to their own devices without the other sex to mess things up, the pattern is clear enough.
On the flip side though, homosexual men tend to have the highest relationship satisfaction levels nationwide:
https://www.advocate.com/people/2020/2/13/study-gay-people-h...
While female homosexual relationships tend to have the lowest satisfaction and heterosexual relationships fall right in the middle for both sexes.
There’s probably a lot to do with that (biological imperatives, DINC, etc); but it’s telling that people always point to high incidents of open relationships or promiscuity despite the evidence of happiness.
* Also worth pointing out that this only focuses on binary relationships and not alternative situations (translesbian/transgay, fluid, poly, etc).
Far too many straight people have bought into this nonsense - thinking that men and women are 100% identical, which is not based in science (at all) but in ideology via indoctrination and bullying.
You have to become "red-pilled" (which is primarily a rediscover that there are biological sex differences and they affect behavior) to realize this today as a straight male.
Women only have an incentive to think about it otherwise when they hit the fertility wall and it's (often) too late.
The world is more complex than woke left vs redpilled right that most propaganda on the Internet would have you believe.
As another gay man chiming in, it’s totally my experience that in the self-described queer/woke circles I traffic in it’s almost exclusively the lefties that have morphed into insufferable moral-binary authoritarians.
As a younger person, it seems like it used to be that LGBT people were on the margins of society and since they had a unique vantage and couldn’t care - they were able to say the things that couldn’t be said.
But now it’s the complete opposite, and queer people are precisely the first ones to tell you what can’t be said.
These are a few names of Radical Feminist thinkers who ascribe to the view that gender is a "fashionable concept" or the concept of femininity is "ritualized submission."
http://meetinggroundonline.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/GE...
And of course most feminists (FWIW I consider myself one) are not tabula rasa types. Very few people worth taking seriously believe that literally, these days. The evidence is overwhelmingly against the idea.
More often you'll hear something like that the slight male tendency towards asserting dominance and impulsive behaviour compared to women is just that, slight. And that it is greatly amplified by culture and socialization. (And well, this is probably true to some degree?)
One can, of course, believe the sexes are somewhat different on average, while believing in their equal value, ability and merit in all the things that are actually important.
If you're genuinely interested in an introduction to the idea of femininity / the female as a social construction actually within the main leftist/feminist discourse I recommend Julia Serrano's Whipping Girl, or if you really want something controversial Andrea Long Chu's Females: A Concern. And yes, in those case you will find xyzzy21's and AndrewKemendo's claims are strawmen.
But both data and research and confirm that.
Also there is plenty of anecdotal evidence especially in IT of highly successful career women that would drop everything just to have have children.
“The”.
Based on my experience — I know plenty of feminists and lefties, and my ex is a literal self-described “eat the rich” revolutionary communist — “The feminist left” is about a coherent a group as, say, Scorpios.
For example, I don’t know anyone who believes human minds are blank slates, and the last time I even discussed the topic was 20 years ago in my philosophy A-level.
Pardon?
In the 1990s, back when we had physical bookstores, and when such things were even segregated sometimes, this was pretty in your face. If you went into a lesbian bookstore you would find a great preponderance of poetry. A gay men's bookstore would, by contrast, be relatively overloaded with how-to manuals and erotic novels of the more descriptively explicit kind. To this day, there are simply far more lesbian literature periodicals, especially poetry ones. This shouldn't be too surprising; straight women also read a lot more poetry than straight men in the USA today.
When I look at typical lists of prominent gay men and lesbians in the American arts, I see a pattern. The men tend towards film, photography, dance and musical theatre. The women towards poetry, modernist theatre, and perhaps in conflict with my hypothesis, comic novels.
There is no gay male equivalent of similar status to Audre Lorde. It's hard to imagine, really, what that might even be like. And there is no lesbian equivalent of John Waters. Even within their genres, I find the likes of Bechdal and Baldwin have different... natures? I admit it's a little hard to articulate without sounding like some sex-essentialist mouthbreather.
I figure one perspective is a bit more emotionally introspective than the other, and one perspective is a bit more embodied than the other. And it tends to be reflected in the kind of arts and the nature of the arts produced. If this is more than just an observation bias on my part it is of course only a slight tendency and it should not be taken too seriously; Alan Ginsberg was not a lesbian.
"Similar status" is frustratingly vague if someone wants to argue this. Fame? Whitman. Canonical? Wilde. Political? Gunn.
> And there is no lesbian equivalent of John Waters.
You're implying the difference must be something quite fundamental, but every time I read a statement like this I'm reminded of Gregory Corso's comments when someone asked him why there were so few women among the beat writers.
There were women, they were there, I knew them, their families put them in institutions, they were given electric shock. In the 50s if you were male you could be a rebel, but if you were female your families had you locked up. There were cases, I knew them, someday someone will write about them.
Monogamy is, more or less, a female fantasy. All women love the fact that birds mate for life. Meanwhile males fantasise about polygamy. That's why porn exists.
It's no surprise that the original "tinder" was Grindr, a gay app. It's perfect for gay men. Tinder, on the other hand, doesn't change the game at all. If anything it concentrates even more attention on the top men as men swipe right on about 80% of women and women swipe left on 80% of men.
This is such a grotesque oversimplification that it's basically wrong. Both men and women have each evolved optimal mating strategies involving a calculated balance between gene-seeking and mate-seeking. It's in a man's interest to find a partner with good/compatible genes and invest his energies into high-success-ratio children. It's also in his interest to "spread his wild oats" as far and wide as possible, since it costs him basically nothing. On the woman's side, children always come with heavy biological strings attached, which shifts the balance - men she sleeps with need to offset that cost with either exceptionally good genes or by committing to help, if not with raising the children then at least during the pregnancy (I imagine hunting for food is no picnic when you're 8 months in).
So men and women both engage in "casual sex", at different rates. Men and women both seek committed long-term relationships, at approximately similar rates. Men and women also cheat situationally within those relationships - men with whoever they can get, women with the exceptionally attractive. Men and women aren't the same, but they're fundamentally playing a similar game.
Maybe there is a kernel of truth to it deep in our evolutionary/reproductive drive, but every guy I know, without exception, wants a monogamous relationship.
If you truly believe men want monogamy then how do you explain porn? It's a huge industry and more an accepted part of life than ever. Do you think it's all being consumed by a few guys you don't know?
As a gay man, it's been my experience that quite a few men are totally monogamous, and not for any particular reason. For all the usual ones you hear, even just that the idea seems unsettling or angering to them.
Many men are not. Some do not get much if any jealousy. Some can easily put up with monogamy if it means they get to keep their monogamous lover. Some cannot.
The non-monogamous still seem to do well with "monogamish" in many cases. It can be an open pairing of various kinds of arrangements. Sometimes it works as a well-defined polyamory-style group relationship. Sometimes a small group of best friends and lovers, long-term and even life-long, and a fuzzier shifting periphery of old and new friends and ongoing acquaintances.
And a few are simply not interested or capable of long-term romantic interest of any kind. Not much to say there. Some amount of casual sex in proportion to their sex drive.
Very, very few other mammals have flown to the moon, or surf the internet, or eat BBQ. I’m not sure we should really base our expectations or behavior in what other mammals do, especially given how much animal behavior is unique to a single species.
You must be traveling in some weird circles, because more than half the lesbians I know are in open or poly relationships. (Me, my wife, and most of my social circles are wow, so it's not like I'm basing this off of knowing four lesbians.)
> lesbian culture is, arguably, centred on poetry.
Okay, yeah, I'm not sure you really have met any lesbians.
I was being too hyperbolic in my writing and it did a disservice to the ideas I was trying to communicate. I am sorry.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5958351/
> 32% of gay participants, 5% of lesbian participants, 22% of bisexual participants, and 14% of those who described their sexualities as “other” reported being in open relationships; approximately 8% of heterosexual participants, 14% of gay participants, 6% of lesbian participants, 18% of bisexual participants, and 6% of those who selected “other” for sexuality reported nonconsensual non-monogamy
Those numbers surprised me too, in many ways.
> Okay, yeah, I'm not sure you really have met any lesbians.
Again, I am sorry. I was being a bit tongue in cheek and failed to pull it off. Obviously sex clubs do not define gay male culture. either. I explained what I was thinking there elsewhere in a reply in this thread.
There are other signs that point the same way. In 2019 a Canadian survey on open relationships (which did not look directly at sexual orientation) they found a remarkable gap between the % of men and women who report such a relationship would be ideal: 18% of men and 6% of women. -- https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30932711/
The data on number of sex partners is telling too.
From a recent US population survey, the percent who report 3 or more sex partners in the last 12 months: 35% of gay/bisexual men, 15% of straight men, 6% of straight women, 17% of lesbians. -- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7293001/
A slightly older Australian study from the early 2000s is a bit more dramatic. Asking the number of partners in the previous five years, it found that for men who identified as homosexual, the mean was 32 and the median 7 partners, with the max capped at >2000 to stop skewing the numbers. For women identified as homosexual, it found a mean of 3 and a median of 1 partner with a maximum of 54. -- https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14696706/
Unfortunately all such studies tend to suffer from at least some of the same flaws you mention, with either sample size, reliability of sampling, or issues of identity confusing the situation. (In the Australian study, it seems women who reported multiple same-sex partners identified as heterosexual relatively more often, for example, which follows the pattern of what you noted.)
The particular numbers vary from study to study, but this general pattern is almost always there. While the median number of partners among gay men tends to only be a bit higher than among straight men, the mean is always outright hilarious. A large minority of gay men are quite promiscuous, and there just is not an equivalently-sized phenomenon with women who have same-sex relationships.
Care to elaborate?
I've asked women friends of mine if this was there position, and the general consensus was yes, they agreed - with few caveats.
Why do you not think bachelor pads are a thing? Where do single men live now?
The worst outcome I had from this approach is that sometimes they'd say "yes" and then just sort of trail off in communication. Not really a problem and I took the hint.
As a follow up I also met my fiance on Tinder. Though I didn't approach her immediately for sex, we went on a date first.
Especially Twitter, were women are routinely harrassed by estranged men and will publicly shame them in return.
I don't think it's a good dating strategy at all.
However, what I believe the author meant by using Facebook and Twitter for dating is that if you have already built a community using these sites and if you are active in that community, it may be possible for you to ask out someone else in that community, provided that both of you already know each other and have spent a significant amount of time interacting with each other. I know someone who met his ex-girlfriend via Instagram sometime eight years ago; she saw his Instagram posts and was a regular commenter, and they started exchanging messages.
I think the key for dating, whether it's online or offline, is being part of a community and being valued in it. I agree with the author that the problem with online dating is that the medium for expressing yourself is limited to a profile photo and a profile description; you are reduced to a résumé. When people are reduced to résumés, then whoever has the best-looking résumé ends up getting responses. Not everybody does well under these circumstances. However, if people were able to know a person's desirable traits that cannot be easily captured in an online dating site's profile, then that person's dating chances may improve. Being a part of a community, whether it's offline or online, gives people a chance to see how people in the community behave and what they think.
But, given my limited success in dating, "you don't have to take my word for it" (with apologies to LeVar Burton).
From 2006 until 2013 I met and dated nice and interesting girls my age using MySpace, LastFM and tumblr. It was only a couples, but as I am very introverted, this was already a lot to me.
It was all in the context of specific sub communities in context to specific art form, alternatives form of art, etc.
I had absolutely no chance on regular dating websites however.
By playing the game, you allow your counterpart to choose instictively/optimally and - digitally and anonymously - reject an huge pool of non-optimal choices. Rejecting in the analog world is difficult and time intensive. This precipitates involuntary/unoptimal choices and the odds of a match for the bottom 80% skyrocket.
What men want is more women on the sites and less men, so that's what the successful sites focus on.
Women, effectively, did not exist on the site.
Despite this, many men were messaging women with some frequency. This was because the company had set up a system whereby the men could message a bot, thinking that it was a woman, and the bot would reply back. All costing the cheating men money for each message. To be clear, real men were paying real money to chat with bots, sometimes for months on end. For a select subset of people, the bots may have passed the Turing test.
>So the first priority would make more sense to get and keep women on the platform.
I would agree, if I were ethical.
If I were not, then following Ashely Madison's example, buying/creating simple chat bots would suffice.
> Using social media for dating
In SwanLove, you can verify your Linkedin profile. Basically you put some random string generated in SwanLove in a public post and tell SwanLove about it. SwanLove will open the webpage and check the username and the random string to verify the ownership of the Linkedin profile.
This way, we can separate people who want to date in Linkedin into a dedicated group. So we don't bother/flirt with other people in Linkedin.
Same idea can be applied to other social medias, like GitHub, Twitter, Strava. Basically SwanLove adds dating to any social media.
> And your attractiveness level is based on this whole gestalt
So I plan to add accomplishments in the dating profile on SwanLove. You can send your payslip to me so I can verify it. Then you can flex your income. You can link your Ethereum account to your dating profile so you can flex your wealth (your Eth balance, your CryptoPunk, your virtual pets in Axie Infinity). You can link your Twitter to your dating profile so you can flex your number of followers. You can link your Chess.com account to flex your intelligence in playing chess. I imagine, there will be a gym which can release a certificate of fitness. Then you can flex your physical fitness. You can link your Kaggle, Toastmaster, etc, to your dating profile. You get the idea.
This way, a man who is not tall and photogenic has a better chance to show his values to women.
I have applied to YC but I don't think I can make it this time. The product is still rough. Perhaps in next batch, I'll have a better chance. :)
It still baffles me when anyone would want to continue to dump personally-identifiable info into these services. Tying together all of this stuff into one dream is just a tsunami-sized data breach waiting to happen at best, and an open marketplace to lure unsuspecting rubes into divulging all of their info.
There is definitely a problem for dating profile services / apps, especially for men (although I can't imagine emotionally healthy women enjoy getting barraged by a wall of "hey gurl. sup?"). I don't think the solution to the problems involve more apps, but fewer.
Going out and being effective in the world is the best way to find a partner (for men or women, but especially for men). I have found all of my past / current partners this way, as honing some craft in a group setting or taking part in some group activity you actually care about (i.e. not showing up to salsa dancing because you're lonely even though you are quite sure you hate dancing) is not only enjoyable, but it gives you a chance to actually connect with people who don't have their guard up in a realm where sexual tension is a given. Best of all dates are usually just doing the same activity you were interested in in the first place; I have gone on about a dozen dates with women I've found at climbing gyms to go climbing only to realize we weren't right for each other, and we just became climbing buddies. Much better than worrying about posturing for some persona one is trying to present to the world online.
Some women don't like to be hit on social settings. For example, in tech conference, some women complained that men flirted with them.
So I'm thinking a way to separate women who are open to dating and not with SwanLove. Say, you are a yoga instructor. You create a group with SwanLove. Women who are open to dating can set the status to be available in this group. This way, men don't bother women who want to only focus on Yoga in your yoga class. Of course, to some extent, this can kill spontaneity.
> Privacy issue / Cambridge Analytica
I'm thinking of adding some encryption technology like zero-proof knowledge so even I as the owner of the website couldn't see the data. So I put some decentralized aspect onto it.
But fair enough. If this idea is proved to be so stupid, I guess I'll write a boring DeFi app. :)
In my own experience (as a guy), I have never met a woman who was emotionally healthy and would be okay advertising receptivity to advances from guys. The women who I have found in my own life who advertised "hey I want to be hit on" have usually been using attention from guys (usually the "wrong" kind of attention) to temporarily alleviate deeper emotional issues from their childhood. This is not to indict women, however; the aforementioned "men hitting on women at social settings where it is not so acceptable as a default" is definitely an issue, and likely resurfacing some thought patterns in those men who engage in that that they learned early on in their childhood (often due to their parents not teaching them empathy). Unfortunately there is less social stigma around brash pushy guys tryna hit on women at tech conferences than there ought to be, although thankfully this is changing in recent years.
Maybe an app can help with this in the short term, but I think that learning how to put one's own house in order mentally, socially, and career-wise is the best way to build a foundation upon which to seek out others to bring into one's life. (note: I'm aware this overlaps with the Jordan Peterson "clean your room" thing; I agree with the sentiment, but only in its narrow sense of it as prescriptive advice, not in the broader social context of using it as an excuse for not pushing for societal change beyond oneself).
Basically, an app can't solve the problem of low EQ, for either / any gender.
> I'm thinking of adding some encryption technology like zero-proof knowledge so even I as the owner of the website couldn't see the data. So I put some decentralized aspect onto it.
Eventually the data will have to be ingested from these external things (e.g. Strava, linkedin, some crypto portfolio thing, etc). This data will have to be operated on in a way that at least both parties (e.g. a guy showing off his gym / crypto gains, and potential women who would request such data when building their matching profile) would have to agree to decrypt the data (operating on encrypted data is a very nascent part of research; most of it involves simple numerical operations, not complex queries).
That is, by design you cannot have discoverability and privacy at the same time. For example, Tinder would be a strange experience if you had to wait for someone to "approve" you checking out their profile (i.e. providing decrypted data).
Snarfing up tons of data is just a ticking time bomb waiting to happen. If the big social media companies cannot keep their systems safe despite employing tons of highly-paid, highly-knowledgable engineers, I don't think any startup can survive the onslaught of security threats that such an enticing PII honeypot would create.
> But fair enough. If this idea is proved to be so stupid, I guess I'll write a boring DeFi app. :)
It is admirable of you to address issues in the world of online dating. It is currently dominated by psychologically distressing players (e.g. Tinder and its ilk). If you think you can solve it through another app or site, you may very well be right.
But think about this: would you want to spend the rest of your life married to someone who considered things like your salary or your Strava data or other such superficial metrics as important markers of your value as a human being?
Obviously most relationships will have discovery of this information at some point, very early on. It is hard to hide the beer gut, or the lack of a car/job/own apartment/other status marker. So being able to filter on it saves time for everyone - and arguably benefits the women who don't fall for the guy who fakes status but who they wouldn't want to spend time with otherwise. Basically what the job of the marriage match-maker was in old times.
(And of course the alternative might be no mate, or a mate found through a hook-up app with few common interests...)
What about a decentralized dating app (it does not have to involve crypto)? So think it as WordPress but for dating. Say, you are a priest and you have a community where you want them to find mates. So you can download SwanLove.tar.gz and install it on your server. Then your community can use your app. So I don't own the data. Maybe you can pay me $10 per month for the license.
> But think about this: would you want to spend the rest of your life married to someone who considered things like your salary or your Strava data or other such superficial metrics as important markers of your value as a human being?
I mean, finding mates is technically superficial. Someone said, "men are pigs, women are gold diggers. But that doesn't mean true love cannot grow between them."
See it from women's perspective, "Do you want to marry a man who is sexually attracted to you?" By the very definition, the man is already superficial. But again, it's nature who forces men and women act this way.
For example: https://www.todayonline.com/singapore/singaporean-women-pref...
"39 per cent of Singaporean women will go out with men who earn less" -> So 61% women go after richer men. By your definition, men should not marry them because they are superficial. But again, it's nature who makes them act this way. It is what it is. I don't blame them. If you want, you can blame nature.
However, I think just because a woman is attracted to a man with high-income, it doesn't mean that they cannot learn the true love. Men and women can learn to build a deep meaningful relationship. But in the beginning, we have to admit that we are attracted to superficial things.
Responding to your point: you don't have to integrate Linkedin to your dating profile in SwanLove. You can integrate Strava account to your dating profile so you can find people who like to run or cycle.
In the future, in SwanLove, you'll have:
https://swan.love/linkedin (for people who want to find mates in Linkedin)
https://swan.love/strava (for people who want to find mates in Strava)
https://swan.love/github (for people who want to find mates in GitHub)
Knowing that your date has a Linkedin profile can give some security to some people. Some people only want to date people with a job.
They do care about being lied to, so if you claim to be a chess master and you're not, that's bad. But a link to your chess.com account isn't the solution. Playing a game of chess together is the solution. The fact that you can beat other people is of little interest, true or not.
Even if she doesn't play chess, and you can tell interesting stories about chess games, that can be successful. But that's not solved by linking to your account. It's solved by telling stories.
Women hate being lied to about your salary, but to a large degree they just want to know if you're comfortable and not have money be an issue. HN often presents a mercenary view of women, and while I'm sure it does sometimes happen, it's just not true very often.
Yes, it's hard to date when you're poor -- because it's hard to date when you're poor. But you can easily make up for it by being entertaining and interesting, which can be free. Meet in a park and just talk. That means far more to most women than anything you could demonstrated on LinkedIn.
As you say, your experiment will succeed or fail on its own merits, and best of luck to you. But I believe you'll be most successful if you treat women as people who are looking for somebody to spend time with -- from a night to a month to a lifetime. Find ways to present men that emphasize those aspects of them, and I believe you'll have a better chance of connecting men and women.
Taken at face value, this is incredibly Black Mirror-esque. There is absolutely no way I will participate in this.
I mean, I still have backup projects if this idea is stupid or does not take off. I can still write DeFi app. I have a part-time jobs board. I have a tool to predict the salary range of jobs. So it's not the end of the world if SwanLove is a stupid idea.
It is also amusing because it's totally How To Draw An Owl.
Approaching them in public is the only viable option now, so hit the gym, brush up on your verbal game and banter, get some fresh style, be hygienic, and work on relaxing and deepening your voice.
We know that at least since Adam Smith, don't we?
They are build to generate revenue, silly.
Of course they are.
We know that at least since porn began.
They are build exactly to exploit male mating quirks, silly.
And it works.
Honestly, you can stop any time taking that drug, can't you?
So, pay for the lottery ticket of the chance for soulmateship, companionship, love and mating or give up.
Come on, you want it...
;-)