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Comment by PaulHoule | Hacker News Reader

Part of the story of men and women is that a women's sexual value is at a peak very early (let's say 18) but a man's sexual value peaks later (at least 30+).

The sexual invisibility many men feel as teenagers is a trauma that will live with them for the rest of their lives.

Eva Illouz writes about this stuff eloquently

https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofbooks/2012/05/24/book-rev...

and says that 30+ women who are still single want more of everything out of relationships than men will give them, including sex.

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Pre acquisition, Okcupid’s data scientist cofounder did a bunch of research on this and confirms your assertion.

https://www.npr.org/2014/09/06/345884282/online-dating-stats...

And it looks like I wrote a comment about this five years ago!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12710536

OkCupid blog post I cited: https://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/the-case-for-an-older-wom...

> Okcupid’s data scientist cofounder did a bunch of research on this and confirms your assertion

said assertion:

> women's sexual value is at a peak very early (let's say 18) but a man's sexual value peaks later (at least 30+)...sexual invisibility many men feel as teenagers...

OKcupid data scientist cofounder says in that article:

> Women generally like a guy to be the same age as them up until the guys hit about 40. But when you flip it around, when you look at how men perceive women, it's pretty much a just straight ticket vote for 20, which is the lowest age I looked at in my data set

So young men aren't invisible according to this data. And:

> This is just measuring people's opinions, not what they actually go out and do. What you see when you actually look at what people do, you see the realism set in. So these 40-year-old guys ... they people they actually have the courage to actually go out and message are a lot older: it's 30, 35-year-old women

So stated value is 20, but in actual practice women older than this are also doing just fine.

In practice though, 15–30 year-old single women get much more romantic attention than e.g. 45–60 year-old single women do. Some older women miss the kind of attention they used to get when they were younger (while some are indifferent, and some are relieved).

Many young men feel rejected/alienated. By age 35 or 40 men have often figured their life out (figured out what they want, found a partner, become more effective at approaching people, whatever).

I haven’t heard any men in their 30s or 40s mention that they aren’t being chased around by eager suitors the way they used to be. And I haven’t heard any women in their 20s complain that they can’t get a date however hard they try.

OkCupid is one of those dating sites that have a high bar to entry (you need to invest a lot of time in just creating your profile), so that people who are there are looking for serious relationships.

If you did the same analysis for Tinder you would probably see that guys 35+ do message girls under 21 years old A LOT, but that isn't meant to last, both sides are typically just looking for casual sex.

Good news is that one of the OKCupid cofounders (the one who wrote those original data science blog posts) ended up writing a great book called Dataclysm[0] that expands on top of that earlier research + tons of completely unrelated and interesting research and analysis. It is really well written, the writer definitely has his way with words, and his analysis is very careful and reasonable. I heavily recommend.

Back to the original point I was trying to make, in the chapter of the book on that topic (as opposed to his earlier data science blog posts), he uses not only OKCupid data, but Tinder and other dating apps as well. I remember there were a few small outliers, but in general that trend from the original data science blog posts still stands. Oh, and he also explicitly compares his old analysis vs. his present one. Definitely an interesting topic, and the book, luckily, applies similar rigor to a bunch of other topics completely unrelated to dating dynamics.

0. https://www.amazon.com/Dataclysm-Identity-What-Online-Offlin...

Most important, many women start off with little urgency to have children, but at some point in time it becomes clear that their fertility span is limited. Then they feel a tremendous feeling of urgency and often aren't happy with their prospects.

Observe the growth of subs like https://www.reddit.com/r/FemaleDatingStrategy/. It was satirized as "FreeDinnerStrategy," since one of their overt mantras is that the man should pay for significantly more than half of expenses in a relationship. The overall goal is to extract as much benefit, money, sex, status, from a man as possible, and consider them resources in life more than anything. They demand that a man not have any female friends. The difficulty they run into is finding a guy who's solid in his life while allowing himself to be walked all over like this by his partner.

The front page of that sub currently has a meme about women feeling a need to pay for the first date so that men don't feel they are owed sex. As a hetero dude who was recently doing a decent amount of casual dating, I can tell you that this is a very common fear. I would say that you are possibly missing the message.

edit: honestly, five minutes of casually browsing that sub, and I don't see a thing about "men should pay for more than half of a relationship" or anything about "extracting value."

Seems like a sub that's really into respecting oneself outside of the context of a boyfriend, and women unpacking and de-normalizing the toxic behaviors of previous partners.

I feel like you're trying to make that sub into something it is not. Why is that?

You must not have looked too closely. This took literally 15 seconds, taken from the "FDS Handbook":

https://www.reddit.com/r/FemaleDatingStrategy/comments/jo75a...

Submitted 1yr ago, 177 upvotes when the current front page is ~1000. I wouldn't call it "the point of the sub."

I just think it's super reductive to look at that sub and decide that the problem is that women are golddiggers. That place speaks to a lot of the fear, frustration, and disappointment that, anecdotally, plague many women's dating lives.

> That place speaks to a lot of the fear, frustration, and disappointment that, anecdotally, plague many women's dating lives.

Funny. That's exactly what the red pill did for a lot of men.

TRP and FDS both use past lived trauma to justify toxic ideologies. The frustrating difference is FDS is feted in the mainstream media, while TRP is considered terrorist adjacent.

I don't disagree that both are toxic in their ways (see also: internet communities), but how many women do we see committing terrorism while spouting FDS-derived ideology?

For what it's worth, all AFAIK the terrorists you're referring to came from the incel-sphere as opposed to TRP.

But more substantively, basically all terrorists are men. This is true of terrorists from every group: white nationalists, black nationalists, Muslims, Christians, Trump supporters, Bernie supporters. If there ever is a terrorist spouting FDS ideology, he will be a man. The particular toxicity of the ideology has nothing to do with it.

All true, I'm just saying that the reason TRP (which is for sure adjacent to the incel sphere; I'm sure the Venn diagram between the subreddits for the two is closer to one circle than two) is considered "terrorist-adjacent" is because they're adjacent to terrorists.

Aren't most suicide bombers female?

> That place speaks to a lot of the fear, frustration, and disappointment that, anecdotally, plague many women's dating lives.

Of course dating is difficult for women. But it's also difficult for men, and that doesn't excuse misogyny.

The obvious conclusion is that there are large groups of both men and women who have very unhealthy and sexist ideas about the opposite gender. How many women on that sub have actually talked to real men about these ideas? "If you wouldn't date a drug addict, don't date a man who watches porn"? Seriously?

Communities like FemaleDatingStrategy are just as bad as incel or MGTOW communities — just a place for sad people to outpour their bitterness and sexism into an echo chamber. Except places like FDS pretend to be feminist, so they get a pass. But they really, really shouldn't, and I hope one day society will see that.

> Communities like FemaleDatingStrategy are just as bad as incel or MGTOW communities — essentially just a place for sad people to outpour bitterness and sexism in an echo chamber.

Yep. There is a reason for why users of that subreddit are commonly referred to as "femcels" by people outside of it.

Lol, that's not "just" what your first comment said. You said: "Seems like a sub that's really into respecting oneself outside of the context of a boyfriend, and women unpacking and de-normalizing the toxic behaviors of previous partners." Your original comment is still up there, directly contradicting what you've now pivoted to. You scanned the sub and couldn't find something that it took several other people less than five minutes to track down.

There is also this

https://www.reddit.com/r/FemaleDatingStrategy/comments/rhd04...

I feel like you don't know how to sort by TOP for the month: https://www.reddit.com/r/FemaleDatingStrategy/comments/rb012...

> The sexual invisibility many men feel as teenagers is a trauma that will live with them for the rest of their lives.

Teenagers? How many teenage women do you know of that are fucking 30+ year old men.

I would say up until adult independence people are far more likely to date someone their own age due to large social interactions at school.

I also think it’s hardly traumatic to not get sex as a teenager

I seem to recall a plotline to a movie where everyone takes a pledge to lose their virginity before end of high school.

With hookups through the internet young women are easily preyed on by older men that know the right words and have the resources to carry it out. Traditionally women would be married to older men, if anything their families found it fortunate to have a "stable man". Only recently has it become more taboo but also the easiest to execute.

Great. But the average teenage girl is still more interested in a teenage boy

Unless things have changes since I was a teenage boy (and they might have, that was 30 years ago!), teenage girls are interested in a very, very small subset of available teenage boys while being visibly, publicly disgusted by the rest.

"interested" or "has access to"? most teenagers meet other teenagers in or through school, where they are rigidly separated by year in most activities. it's not surprising they date people exactly their age when that is the majority of people they encounter day-to-day. by college, it seemed to me that the guy was often at least one to two years older in hetero couples. of course, same year was not uncommon, but I can't remember a single case where the woman was more than one year older than the man.

Sure, that’s believable as a casual reason.

> Teenagers? How many teenage women do you know of that are fucking 30+ year old men.

Plenty. Try seekingarrangement.com

> Teenagers? How many teenage women do you know of that are fucking 30+ year old men.

Not many teenage women go for 30+ year old men. But many women do prefer men who are sufficiently older than them that the combined effect for young guys is noticeable.

Anecdotally as someone who is now 46, I feel like the attention from much younger women has kept increasing. Additionally the attention has shifted. If a 20-something woman shows interest in me it's almost always sexual rather than a woman looking for a relationship. My dating life is so much easier today than it was when I was 18-20. Heck, it's still easier to find dates today than it was in my 30's.

Wait until you get a wedding ring. The signal of another women's approval increases interest.

It is really fun when you have a seduction going on and your wife understands her role in that is to provide social proof of your desirability.

It is not the "not getting sex" that is traumatic, it is that that experience equates to "I am not lovable" for many men. It's particularly harmful when you see proof that other people are "lovable" and you're not. You feel like there is this world that you're permanently shut out from. Talk about it with adults and successful kids you get told "not to worry about it", "be yourself". You have a problem shared with many other people but you feel alone because (until recently) this problem hasn't been acknowledged.

These negative emotions persist into your college years, 20s, and even longer and sabotage your success with women and domestic life not to mention work and all areas of your life. Even when something good happens your are inclined not to believe it because of what you have internally and the resulting effect is self-reinforcing.

Sure but that’s still bullshit. Teenagers are not feeling they’re unloveable because all of the local teen girls are being swooped up by 30 year old dudes. They may suffer those crises including being unlucky with love and suffering self confidence issues, but 30 year old dudes specifically are a tiny tiny effect on this.

The median teen is interested in teens.

People always get confused with "different people who are different ages at the same time" with "the same cohort which changes in age at different times". Also my explanation was not the best even if it caught some essential features.

I'm not saying that those boys are in competition with 30 year old men, but that those same boys are going to be in a materially better situation when they are 30 years old -- yet they might not be able to take advantage of it because they will still have that deprived and resentful little boy inside.

It's exactly similar to the scenario in

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reviving_Ophelia

in which young people experience "narcissistic injury" except it is the boy version instead of the girl version.

> I also think it’s hardly traumatic

This sounds to me like people who tell people with clinical depression to "just cheer up, it worked for me!"

The Tinder experiments:

https://medium.com/@worstonlinedater/tinder-experiments-ii-g...

Comparing this to economic inequality is really interesting.

As someone out of the dating pool for almost 40 years, that is utterly depressing (for a man).

It's less depressing if you consider that this happens because Tinder and the like are about the worst you can possibly make things for men, in that women will tend to compromise on looks very easily if you display other qualities but sites like Tinder makes it very hard to project those qualities. In other words, not succeeding on Tinder is a poor indicator of success in arenas where you get to display more personality.

While true to some extent (you can’t really bypass ugly though) - real life is becoming more and more like Tinder. A lot of women I’ve met treat people in real life like it’s Tinder.

People have always sorted by first impression in contexts where that's all they have to go by. That's been a thing in e.g. night clubs etc. long before Tinder.

But for my part at least I've seen no indication that people treat people in real life like it's Tinder once they get to know you first. I'm not even sure what treating people in real life like it's Tinder would look like unless you're basically putting yourself forward before having had any meaningful interactions with them first.

Tinder creates a "mental model" that infects both men and women away from tender.

it feels like only 5–7 years ago this assertion was 100% taboo and you wouldn't hear it anywhere but male sexual advice circles, which naturally meant that there was a certain stigma attached to said assertion. it also feels like this was entirely common knowledge at some point in the recent past, maybe only a few decades ago, yet I was raised to be entirely ignorant of it and I know I'm not alone.

as a young, then-virgin, then-sexually-frustrated man, coming across knowledge like this felt like learning important, key rules to the game you're playing halfway through, while people are screaming that these rules weren't actually in the game anymore, because they never should have been in the game to begin with, and that's why nobody told you.

now it's the top-voted comment on a top story on the front page of a website whose average community views would certainly not be described as "traditional" or "conservative" ...yet here we are.

it's very interesting to observe shifts in acceptable discourse and society in general within the span of my lifetime. who knows where we're headed next?

Women have gotten dramatically more powerful within the US culture in the past 30-40 years. Versus men they're more highly educated, they have higher literacy rates, they drop out of school at lower rates, they live longer, and under the age of roughly 40 they now out-earn men while working fewer hours (and that will continue to spread upwards into the older age bracket; aging-out older male corporate management types and other white collar professionals (eg doctors, dentists) are the only thing holding that in place for now).

I'd expect the present trend to continue for at least another 10-20 years, with a large gap being created between the well-being of the median & average man and woman in the US (in the favor of women). The potent education, employment and income trends alone practically guarantee that outcome. Not much is being done to correct the growing imbalance, so by the time there is enough widespread cultural give-a-shit at a large scale, the gap will be substantial and it'll take a long time to correct (if it can be corrected for given the labor automation employment dynamics that are inbound).

The trend will make competent men that have something going for them, that much more valuable. As more men fall behind, men that don't gain value by scarcity.

Someone writing advice in a major Norwegian newspaper got into "trouble" for making this argument in their advice column a while back. Part of the problem is that it's hard to express this in a way that doesn't feel like an attack on women and avoiding coming across as an entitled attitude when expressed by men. But it's also getting really hard to ignore that there's a disconnect - for both many men and women - between what they believe their "value" is and what their value is in the eyes of prospective partners.

>let's say 18

Your claim here should be called in to question.

Comment specifically said "let's say", indicating an assumption. Turns out it was 3 years off.

> A woman’s desirability peaks at 21

https:///@okcupid/the-case-for-an-older-woman-99d8cabacdf5

Trying to nail down a specific number seems like a fools errand that will output a number just below whatever age before people start picking up weight and qualifiers that make them less desirable (like "single mother"). Sure you get a number but that number isn't going to be very useful for applying to anything.

The important point is that men usually have it worse (than women) at a young age and potentially have it better at an older age.

Somehow we have to compress that into something short enough to share.

"Value."

That's the whole problem, right?

I just want everybody everywhere to occasionally step back and consider how that is the "why" of all of this; our society is set up, or has evolved (devolved?) into this place where people must consistently ensure a steady supply or source of money for mere survival, and from that is where the generally natural thing of sex and how it works among the genders et al creates these imbalances which can be converted into money. It's hard to understate how deep this goes; e.g. marriage et al.

I mean, there are some people you'd prefer to befriend/date/marry over others, right?. your criteria is probably not just money; you might care about physical characteristics, intelligence, character, etc. to the extent your criteria overlaps with others', something like a market emerges, though the prices are not denominated in dollars. "value" is kind of a crude word to use, but it's a useful abstraction to answer the question of why some people have very many options in friends/partners and some have very few.

I'm going HUGE picture here, like "history of the human race."

As in, how you still described it as a "market." Point proven, I think.

"The sexual invisibility many men feel as teenagers is a trauma that will live with them for the rest of their lives."

... meanwhile according to this logic women are only valuable when they're just out of puberty and then they spend the next 70 something years invisible but yes let's talk about male trauma

It's not a contest.

The OP literally makes it into one. The post is literally called "power imbalances." How is this not a conversation about competitions?

Two things.

First, it’s natural to expect children to be more traumatized by an event than adults.

Secondly, the period before and after a peak is a slope, not a sudden drop into nothingness. This means that a thirty year old woman is not “sexually invisible”. Similarly 40 year old men aren’t invisible either even though they supposedly peaked at 30.

Those two problems are linked like two halves of a circle.

Want to know why some older man is a jerk and treats you wrong and it might be the reason why: he is still that younger man inside.

I don't think he's dismissing that it's probably terrible for the women it happens to, too, but it's worth noting that when it happens to teenage boys, it happens while they're still developing, trying to deal with everything else that goes along with being a teenager. Presumedly by the time it happens to adult women, they're a bit more mature than the average teenager, and somewhat more equipped to process it.

Sigh, what's up with the online insurgence of angry men that blame their inner misery on lack of sex they deserve?

I didn't even try to have sex as a teenager, and I'm happily married now, no psychic problems. Honestly, I got more PTSD from playing basketball at PE classes.

It's easy to mistake the vocal minority for the silent majority. If someone isn't outraged then they are not going to rant on social media.

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