Explaining Sex Rate Changes

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2019/03/explaining-sex-rate-changes.html

by sidko • 7 years ago

259 494 7 years ago

overcomingbias.com

ianai3• 7 years ago

The most populous nation on the planet has a misbalance of men:women. That’s all it really takes.

manfredo6• 7 years ago

This study is limited to the United States.

saagarjha7• 7 years ago

This article seems to focus on the United States, where there really isn't an imbalance.

ianai3• 7 years ago

Except that 20s-30s men are competing directly against other, college aged men. And maybe that’s enough.

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

lainga4• 7 years ago

Can we look to other cultures where widespread celibacy (especially extramarital) is already practiced for cues as to how this will affect the US?

saagarjha7• 7 years ago

I'm not aware of any culture that encourages "widespread celibacy"–which ones are you talking about?

lainga4• 7 years ago

I had no concrete examples, I'm not even sure it happens; I was casting around to my fellow readers in case any of them knew of cultures where it does occur.

barry-cotter2• 7 years ago

The only historical culture(s) with widespread non-religious celibacy among substantial portions of the population are Western European but widespread celibacy certainly existed there. It’s also a thing in the Buddhist and Hindu world but that was mostly a life stage rather than life long celibacy.

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.

txcwpalpha• 7 years ago

A quick google search of the terms "japan sex rates" [1] will return pages and pages of results about the high number of Japanese millennials that aren't engaging in sexual or romantic relationships, with some articles citing numbers as high as 40% of all Japanese people aged 18-34 are virgins [2]. It's even got its own name: "celibacy syndrome" [3]. A search for Korean sex rates shows very similar articles as well. [4]

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-...

tachyonbeam3• 7 years ago

There is Japan which has a culture of "herbivore men": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbivore_men

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.

manfredo6• 7 years ago

I think MGTOW are different from herbivore men. I'm not expert on either group buy my understanding is Herbivore men are men that don't or never have sought out relationships with women, while MGTOW is more comprised of men that have had bad relationships with women and decide not to pursue further relationships (especially divorced men).

RandomInteger45• 7 years ago

How do you jump from "men are having disproportionately less sex than women" to "Celibacy is being practiced?"

ilaksh3• 7 years ago

My theory is that it could be related to the economy getting worse. My belief is that women are generally more likely to have sex with someone that they consider to be viable long-term reproductive partners or marriage material. Fewer men have the financial success and stability that many women are looking for in a serious relationship that would make them comfortable with routine sex.

manfredo6• 7 years ago

I don't think the data supports this. The economy has gotten better since 2008 by a significant margin. The unemployment rate has dropped consistently since 2010. But that's when the rise of lack of sex seems to really kick off and it hasn't subsided as the economy improved.

siwatanejo3• 7 years ago

"Economy getting better" arguments fall into the trap of the law of averages.

ilaksh3• 7 years ago

The unemployment rate is misleading. Are there really more men with well paying stable jobs? Or are there just a lot of Uber drivers and delivery people now? In other words, lots of people with contract work that don't have benefits but also don't count as unemployed.

BurningFrog4• 7 years ago

A variation is that women demand a man who makes more money than they do. In this model, increased female wages could be a factor.

robotresearcher• 7 years ago

Do any economic indicators correlate with these data?

zone4113• 7 years ago

I don't think this is the biggest factor. Men's income relative to women's [1] and the lower amount of steady jobs [2][3] could be somewhat more important for long-term relationship though [4]. In the 18-30 age range, women make as much as men.

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...

ilaksh3• 7 years ago

The lower amount of steady jobs is what I am talking about.

manfredo6• 7 years ago

My napkin paper theory is that for nonmarital* sex the internet has made it easier for people to find partners, with the overall effect that the bottom ~1/3 of men cannot find partners. Generally women are more selective than men when it comes to casual sex, and desirable men are usually willing to have sex with multiple partners. I recall studies that found that the top 20% of men on dating platforms account for 80% of the matches. I suspect that the drop in rates of no sex later in life is because that is the age when people start to get married (late 20s, 30s). Unlike the casual sex market, marriage is generally 1:1 so 80:20 dynamic flattens out.

\* 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

dragonwriter6• 7 years ago

“extramarital” sex usually means sex by a married person with someone other than their spouse; I think “nonmarital” is a better term for what you are discussing.

michaelmrose11• 7 years ago

If men in the bottom 20% want sex they can take steps to increase their position including losing weight, hitting the gym, working on getting a better paid job.

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.

MRD854• 7 years ago

I don't know why you're downvoted. When I was young (18-22) I had no luck with women. I think I literally went 3 years straight in that range without a sexual partner. I was on the verge of becoming an angry, resentful man. I discovered some precursor to The Red Pill and I took the self-improvement advice. I realised the fault wasn't with women, I was simply making life choices that made me unattractive. I lost weight, dressed better, etc.

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).

zone4113• 7 years ago

I think the trend is true but this study did not have a large sample size. It was 31 out of 105 men in this age range saying they did not have sex.

BurningFrog4• 7 years ago

I didn't believe you and checked. The GSS interviews 1500 people for each study, which comes out to about the numbers you mention.

http://gss.norc.org/faq

freyir6• 7 years ago

As the article points out, fewer young men are having sex, but roughly the same number of young women are having sex.

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.

fratlas• 7 years ago

I've noticed this disparity within my friend circles. The objectively attractive men match/sleep with multiple woman a month where almost all of the men with near average looks get approximately zero matches. Interesting indeed. My female friends match with almost every male regardless.

ianai3• 7 years ago

I think you’re both onto something. There’s even a likely network effect where those men who sleep around are even more attractive to potential mates. Not as a rule, of course, but as a contributing factor.

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.

solotronics• 7 years ago

This is the whole reason monogamy was standardized. It is a stabilizing force in society and creates equality instead of a winner take all situation. Without monogamy you end up with a small number of men having the attention of the majority of women. This causes huge problems, with the loosers being the average and below average men and women. Certain things about how society evolved to function are there for a reason.

2muchcoffeeman• 7 years ago

I reactivated my OkCupid profile recently. I’m as undesirable as I always was. There’s nothing to do but to laugh about it.

734129837261• 7 years ago

I've noticed, and apparently the statistics as well, that this trend turns around the age of 32 to 34 for men. Men usually go for women 3 to 4 years younger than themselves. Which is around the age that women need to choose whether to procreate or not.

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.

dragonwriter6• 7 years ago

As the article points out, young men are having sex less often, but young women are still having sex at nearly the same rate.

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.

freyir6• 7 years ago

fewer (proportionately) young men are having sex,

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?

papermill2• 7 years ago

You have to look at it from a statistical point of view. The homosexual population is insignificantly small in a statistical sense. A small percentage increase in homosexuality in either sex isn't going to skew the data much. Also, even if there are more lesbians, it doesn't necessarily mean they are having more sex. "Lesbian bed death" exists for a reason. We know that lesbians don't have as much sex as other sexual groupings. And though more women are willing to try lesbianism than men are willing to be gay, it's also true that more lesbians leave lesbianism and marry men than gay men leave homosexuality and marry women. But in any case, the numbers of gay and lesbians are so small that it really doesn't affect the overall trend we are seeing.

emikulic• 7 years ago

Re: OkCupid: do you mean this? https://web.archive.org/web/20170330131859/https://theblog.o...

abledon10• 7 years ago

Lol that 3rd graph , it’s so sad !

wetpaws3• 7 years ago

I wonder why did okcupid remove this study

hclalpha• 7 years ago

This is the old "paradox of choice" reflecting itself from consumerism now on to dating... I don't see any women complaining, yet, as it's been only around 7 years of this dynamic and young women seem to be getting much higher quality partners through this low upfront cost, mainly appearance based process.

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.

kilroy123• 7 years ago

This is absolutely the case.

Sadly, we can see this kind of winner-takes-all dynamic play out in every part of our society now.

This worries me greatly.

michaelmrose11• 7 years ago

This presumes that normal status/appearance actually can't find mates instead of merely not getting as much casual sex.

codingslave• 7 years ago

This is true, and honestly, has always been true. But its exaggerated by online dating and the relaxation of sex in modern society. I think whats really different, is that lots of young guys are taking note. Many are keenly aware that they are being left out. As I approach my early thirties, its weird to see those same women turn around and marry the men they previously rejected.

raducu11• 7 years ago

Some women do that, but a lot do so bitterly and a lot can't do that at all and end up single in the end.

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.

ck425• 7 years ago

There's plenty of evidence showing woman have different (and in many ways lower) standards for long term mating that short term mating. Which makes sense evolutionally.

pokethetomato2• 7 years ago

The real concern, is why are they marrying those men they used to reject. Feelings and emotions don't go away, and "settling" is very toxic thing to most people. They usually get more resentful about it over time(both the people who settle, and the people who were settled for if they find out).

JamesBarney• 7 years ago

This is what I suspect as well and seems like the most obvious reason.

titanix2• 7 years ago

That’s exactly the theory developed by circles like the red pill. More access to potential partners with less social control lead to a winner take all situation. In addition, and it is addressed in the OP, women try to get partners which are higher on the social scale while men mostly focus on beauty.

ycombinete3• 7 years ago

Which makes total sense, given the different evolutionary drivers that men and women are motivated by. The problem with most narratives is that they moralize what is essentially an amoral phenomenon.

bubblewrap7• 7 years ago

Women would rather be the second wife of George Clooney than the first wife of Joe Average. Simple as that.

treis7• 7 years ago

That’s exactly the theory developed by circles like the red pill.

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.

ycombinete3• 7 years ago

Well as I understand it there are two primary evolutionary modes of sexual pairing/selection, which humans follow.

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...

tomp4• 7 years ago

Indeed, and it would also explain why it happens for young men in particular - as people get older, they start prioritizing monogamy, it being likely the better structure for raising kids (according to current social standards, at least) (technically, marriage doesn't mean monogamy - cheating is common - but I imagine not many men would sign up to raise children in a couple without having sex with their partners).

Cthulhu_7• 7 years ago

I'm confident that it's down to the freedom of choice. That is, people are exposed to a lot more candidates nowadays and rely less on their own social circles for partners.

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.

polote• 7 years ago

To me there are two important factors that explain that:

* 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

PedroBatista2• 7 years ago

I think the only/mostly porn thing has a cost in the long term.

But I suspect they only watch porn because they can't have real sex or don't know how to get there.

raducu11• 7 years ago

Isn't porn be it movies or books also available to women?

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.

maxkwallace8• 7 years ago

"swipe right, swipe left" acts as a filter but it's not how people choose partners.

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.

thefounder• 7 years ago

Chances are that you might get skipped in the first place with no chance to chat or meet in person. It's basically marketing. If the user doesn't click on the link or call the number you get no sale regardless how good your product is.

PedroBatista2• 7 years ago

I understand what you're trying to say, but Tinder disagrees.

Also, in your efforts to combat generalizations "against" women you did the same about men without skipping a beat.

MRD854• 7 years ago

There is literally posts where someone made a profile with a really good looking man as the picture and he can say anything he wants. Take a look at this example: https://forum.bodybuilding.com/showthread.php?t=165905221&pa...

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.

philonoist3• 7 years ago

This is how misandry spreads. When you put too much power at the very first step that is filtering out 99% of potential partners based on looks, then how would you even give the guy a chance to showcase what he truly is? Most women then miss out on the best experiences of "chatting after the swipe and the overall impression/feeling they have when meeting in-person."

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.

stared4• 7 years ago

"[In Tinder,] the bottom 80% of men (in terms of attractiveness) are competing for the bottom 22% of women and the top 78% of women are competing for the top 20% of men" - from https://medium.com/@worstonlinedater/tinder-experiments-ii-g... (2015).

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....

claudiawerner3• 7 years ago

In the article, you write:

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.

msamwald• 7 years ago

It is noteworthy that such statistics are not solely reflecting preferences, they may also reflect effects of the dating app itself! Among the many hidden psychological bugs in Tinder, an especially toxic one is that new users are presented with the most attractive profiles first. So the fact that many men don't get anything while others get a lot might be strongly amplified by a system that simply HIDES AWAY those other people.

etiam2• 7 years ago

Interesting stories both.

Did you ever get around to writing part 3?

irrational• 7 years ago

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, social media, dating apps, and wariness re harassment claims.

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.

gnicholas5• 7 years ago

Bingo. The fact that something is available to everyone doesn't meant it affects all genders/ages the same. Availability does not equal impact.

novia11• 7 years ago

Not to mention that historically video games and pornography both have been marketed towards and produced for men in the age group affected much more than women in the same age group.

scarmig• 7 years ago

All true, but it's important to establish cause and effect. Is a young man being addicted to porn and LoL a cause or an effect of not getting laid? It's probably some kind of complicated feedback loop.

enraged_camel4• 7 years ago

>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.

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...

gnicholas5• 7 years ago

This source indicates that nearly 50% of people who play video games are women, but it does not indicate anything about the time spent gaming. It is quite possible that men are a bare majority of gamers but play a super-majority of the hours spent gaming.

distant_hat4• 7 years ago

Yes, I'd also disagree with this. You can't just make a sweeping assertion like this without data to back it up. Wariness re harassment claims is alone a huge one, women in my office have joked about complaining against a guy just to show what they could get away with. I've never heard of a guy doing the same even though I spend way more time around them.

skohan3• 7 years ago

To some extent there may be reinforcement dynamics at play here. For instance: young men fall back on video games because they can't find sex partners, and then the kind of guys who play a lot of video games are not desirable sex partners..

0x8BADF00D2• 7 years ago

There is no longer an average, middle, median, etc. Hookup culture has consequences; before it was possible for an undesirable male to mate with a female, with the institution of marriage.

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.

tachyonbeam3• 7 years ago

What's playing the status game? Expensive-looking clothes, being perceived as authoritative in some social circles?

0x8BADF00D2• 7 years ago

All of that plus social media presence. A personal brand, if you will.

deathIsNear• 7 years ago

Watch what comes next.

Sytten• 7 years ago

I would be interested in having some stats by education level and profession. From my current personal experience as a CS student, I would say it is easily above 50%.

manfredo6• 7 years ago

Generally speaking, academic performance is inversely correlated with sex. In top universities the majority of students are virgins coming into university and a substantial percent (usually in the 25-50% range) are at graduation. Probably due to more time dedicated to study and career growth than relationships. Anecdotally, I've found that in tech and STEM more broadly rates of sex are lower - probably due to the overall gender imbalance means that the majority of people don't have potential partners in their primary social circles.

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%.

pm902• 7 years ago

STEM is the worst social wise. You're correct that gender imbalances have a lot to do with this. There's also the fact that people who like STEM are generally social outcasts of some sort (nerds bullied in school, rarely the popular/cool kids).

gnicholas5• 7 years ago

In a way, this mirrors how technological advances have created winner-take-all markets in other areas. Thanks to CDs (and then the internet), we can now all listen to the very best musicians in the world — where previously we just had to settle for whoever was the best in our town.

Similarly, technology may be shifting the dating/intimacy market toward a winners-take-most equilibrium, which favors the most attractive young men.

tachyonbeam3• 7 years ago

The internet and dating apps surely play a part. It's also become more acceptable to be non-monogamous. I lived in the bay area for a while and hung out among queer circles in San Francisco. It seemed like nearly everyone was polyamorous and uninterested in being in a monogamous relationship. So much that I felt kind of obligated to try the poly thing myself for a while if I was going to date.

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.

abledon10• 7 years ago

Kids like a stable environment to grow up in too — messes up their psychological development when there is a revolving door for new ‘daddys’ and ‘mommys’ . We are for promiscuity at certain stages of life but.... yes the costs haha

jliptzin2• 7 years ago

You can have both.

arvinsim8• 7 years ago

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.

Pretty much. This is the demographic most susceptible to radicalization.

emptysongglass• 7 years ago

You’ve hit on my fears too. I was in LA for a year among yes, queer circles, and nearly everyone was playing with poly but that’s all it was: play. All relationships were superficial and all fled for the hills as soon as difficulties were encountered. What is a life when you can depend on no one for comfort.

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.

Udik4• 7 years ago

Michel Houellebecq (especially his first "Whatever", original title "Extension du domaine de la lutte", "Extension of the domain of the fight") should be obligatory reading for everybody, as it deals exactly with these issues- from a rather cynical and depressing point of view, of course.

krapp4• 7 years ago

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.

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.

metafex• 7 years ago

There's (in my experience) not a very large overlap between overly promiscuous poly people and other poly people.

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.

everdrive4• 7 years ago

but because having a stable long-term partner seems like it can be beneficial in helping people through hard times

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.)

lifeisstillgood• 7 years ago

Hmm, reading the comments here suggests to me this is an area that is both important and where we perhaps do not even know what "woke" looks like - it feels like a huge complex area - as such I have edited my comment to -

"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"

coldtea• 7 years ago

we can now all listen to the very best musicians in the world — where previously we just had to settle for whoever was the best in our town

Yeah, so billions the world over progressed from their local musicians and folk tradition to Kanye West, Coldplay, Taylor Swift, and Nicky Minaj.

freyir6• 7 years ago

we can now all listen to the very best musicians in the world

anchpop• 7 years ago

Like him or not, but it's hard to deny that Kanye West is a talented rapper. I'm not exactly sure what point you're making here.

meko2• 7 years ago

That also explains why it's become astronomically harder to make it as a content creator, instead of easier, like this whole information revolution promised.

davidgl2• 7 years ago

Exactly, we're all in one massive market / hierarchy (with a network-effect/power-law distribution), not lots of little ones

ronnier2• 7 years ago

Why are articles like these yanked so quickly from the front page of HN?

freyir6• 7 years ago

I see at least two [flagged] comments. Do flagged comments cause the article to get buried?

saagarjha7• 7 years ago

Comments in general cause articles to rank lower.

dang3• 7 years ago

Not currently, no.

novia11• 7 years ago

Because people like me flag them.

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.

anonytrary10• 7 years ago

I don't mean to belittle your decision to flag the article, but the flagging button is not a downvote button, and it is not there to hide things we personally disagree with. Flagging an article because it does not corroborate your personal experiences is somewhat irresponsible, especially for this community. There needs to be a better reason for flagging an article other than "my single data point says otherwise".

taxicabjesus2• 7 years ago

Men and women are wired to go about relationships differently. One problem is that people don't come with clear instruction manuals to help us understand how the relationship game works.

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

michaelmrose11• 7 years ago

I am honestly still trying to figure out how the male 9s and 10s are supposed to be monopolizing all the female 1s-3s when they wont look at them.

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.

anonytrary10• 7 years ago

Because they lead to controversial comments which get flagged at a higher rate and either one or both of the following are true:

  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.

dang3• 7 years ago

We don't do #2. We do downweight flamewar threads, i.e. threads in which people aren't following the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

hansflying2• 7 years ago

CENSORSHIP

dang3• 7 years ago

Users flag them, and sometimes flags win the tug-of-war against upvotes; also HN has software that penalizes overheated discussions, which tend to be flamewars. But we also monitor the list and sometimes take penalties off a story when both it and the comments fit the site guidelines.

anonlastname• 7 years ago

probably because a large portion of HN users are basically STEM nerd incels

geewhizzz• 7 years ago

pretty tone deaf tbh

patrickg_zill• 7 years ago

The reality is that about 50% or maybe as high as 80% of men are not attractive as sex partners to women who are able to have many choices. And young women are attractive to men of all ages...

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.

ajkjk3• 7 years ago

Discussions like this drive me crazy. It's not hard to see what it is about society that's making so many people not have sex, and it's not, like, some subtle market effect involving their attractiveness. No matter how much you want find a market effect, it's due to _human stuff_, like people's actual lives and problems, not their behavior in some sex economy. There is nothing even close to an economy around sex. There's just the real world.

(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.

throwaway20148• 7 years ago

You are free to break down your theory on what’s happening rather than mocking OPs methodology...

Macross8299• 7 years ago

No matter how much you want find a market effect, it's due to _human stuff_, like people's actual lives and problems. There is nothing even close to an economy around sex

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!

Mirioron4• 7 years ago

Somebody did actually create a Lorenz curve based on Tinder data: https://medium.com/@worstonlinedater/tinder-experiments-ii-g...

I can't speak to the accuracy of the article though.

insickness2• 7 years ago

There is nothing even close to an economy around sex.

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.

ajkjk3• 7 years ago

I dispute the word "everyone": I think it's a fraction of adults, probably less than a quarter, who fit into that system (I was maybe being extreme by saying "there is no market", but I don't think there's _much_ of one).

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]

arandr0x• 7 years ago

What you're saying isn't rational but it's 100% true. People's relationships aren't part of a market; rather the economy is placing constraints on their relationships. People work further from their homes so they don't have evening hobbies. People don't live close to their parents so single moms and dads are busy with childcare vs meeting each other. That sort of thing.

thatoneuser3• 7 years ago

It's genuinely depressing to think that a large number of guys now has no access to explore intimacy and partnership (or very little). No one's owed sex of course but it's like we're breaking aspects of society. And I think you'd naturally find women are less able to find meaning themselves here so it's not just a men's pity party.

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?

abledon10• 7 years ago

Enforced communal participation in events — similar to having to file your taxes , you just participate in X number of community events in a X km region from your residence — would help people get off the screens and get outside in a context other than work.

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

anonytrary10• 7 years ago

The irony is that if you do this for the purposes of finding a date, then the efficient stay-at-home solution is to essentially just use Tinder, which optimizes the process, so we're full circle.

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.

RandomInteger45• 7 years ago

Sounds like something out of Nazi Germany. I'm all for people engaging with the community, but enforced?

yason2• 7 years ago

What a horrible idea unless you're an extraverted person who'd be likely to join the events anyway.

michaelmrose11• 7 years ago

There is so many things wrong with this statement man where to start.

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.

icebraining• 7 years ago

Sounds like you might enjoy watching https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lobster

wetpaws3• 7 years ago

Why just not cut the fluff and go straight to government mandated divorces? :)

Mirioron4• 7 years ago

While dating apps probably have a role to play, I doubt that the problem is limited to them. I think this is a lot of small things adding up over time.

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.

watwut9• 7 years ago

As for 5: men get richer after divorce on average, women poorer. However, women report higher happiness after divorce while men lower. Then again, men are more likely to find new partner faster. Not surprisingly, women who have jobs are more likely to ask for divorce and women who depend on husbands salary less so.

For all the stories about large alimony, such situation not the norm.

Udo• 7 years ago

A data point: speaking as someone who would require major surgery to even be considered "average", I think it's indeed an effect that comes from many different factors all pointing one into the same direction (I would also assume there exist women with similar experiences, although not as many as men).

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.

commandlinefan• 7 years ago

Some men add these together and then ask themselves "why bother?"

And, honestly, it doesn't seem like women are terribly upset about this. This seems to be the world (almost) everybody wants.

chrischen• 7 years ago

Dating apps, much like social networking apps like Facebook, reduce our interactions to the shallowest form possible. So it is much better for people to not use these forms and resort to more laborious methods of interaction because these also allow a deeper more honest connection between people. Deeper and more honest connections lead to better understanding and appreciation of each other, which is good for society. Unfortunately we haven't even figured out how to ween people off easy "social interaction" yet, much less dating apps.

Balgair2• 7 years ago

but it's like we're breaking aspects of society.

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

pokethetomato2• 7 years ago

Historical Norms for humanity also involve a lot death and misery. So I'm not sure a discussion about historical norms is needed.

What is concerning is that our current society is breaking apart.

auiya• 7 years ago

I think if anything dating apps are providing us visibility into changes which are more likely rooted in cyclical economic conditions. I'd be willing to bet you'd see these same changes occur regularly over many centuries.

jliptzin2• 7 years ago

I’d guess HD porn + addictive video games + ubereats plays a nontrivial role in keeping young men from leaving the house, and also keeping them out of shape, making it more difficult to find a partner even if they wanted to.

skocznymroczny3• 7 years ago

What does leaving the house accomplish? It's not like you suddenly will interact with people. Most people organize through internet nowadays and stick to their cliques. Talk to someone on the public transport, you'd say. That also doesn't work, because most of these people are reading a book and have headphones on, which is a "don't touch me" signal to everyone around.

dragonwriter6• 7 years ago

It's not like you suddenly will interact with people

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.

michaelt2• 7 years ago

  What does leaving the house accomplish? It's not
  like you suddenly will interact with people.

Not all things that involve leaving the house involve meeting new people in person - but almost all the things that involve meeting new people in person involve leaving the house.

hansflying2• 7 years ago

Artificial AI-driven-wife (for example "Geminoid F") with artificial womb would solve the problem.

bm13622• 7 years ago

I’m genuinely concerned that people seriously think this is a _solution_.

Beyond sex, relationships with romantic partners are a complex, rewarding part of the human experience. How did that get lost to some?

nyxxie• 7 years ago

For some it’s not easily achieved, so I’d suppose it’s less about dudes thinking “meh, this is more convenient” than dudes thinking “meh, I’m not getting laid anyways”

Cthulhu_7• 7 years ago

You say rewarding, but for a lot of people it's an incomprehensible minefield. I mean where do you even start?

imtringued• 7 years ago

Don't you think this would make the problem worse?

jamescostian12• 7 years ago

Ask a heterosexual woman in that age range about how many awful conversations she's had with men in that age range via dating apps. She won't say "a few", she'll say "A LOT", and be able to show that the vast majority of messages she gets are either very dry or insanely forward (sexually).

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.

skocznymroczny3• 7 years ago

On the other hand, there are multiple experiments with people creating a male profile with a photo of an attractive guy and sending explicitly sexual and vulgar messages as an introduction and still getting a lot of replies and phone numbers. At some point of attractiveness a guy can start the conversation with "I'd love to slide it in you" and the girl will reply with "hihi ok :) 123-456-789" rather than "leave me alone perv".

namarie2• 7 years ago

Got any source for that?

jamescostian12• 7 years ago

It sounds like we agree. I said this:

> 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

bylfdsa• 7 years ago

As someone who has been on the sending the awful messages (as in what were you thinking, not too forwards) side, I would like to postulate that having (and starting) conversations on a dating app is very different than in person. I can usually start in person conversations and keep them going for much longer than on a dating app (some go better than others, but on the whole I do better in person).

fxbl0i3• 7 years ago

It's much harder to keep a conversation in a dating app when you know you're 1 of 50 men sending that girl messages, and knowing that many of those other 49 men are more attractive than you are, so you're practically losing your time.

UweSchmidt2• 7 years ago

This is another trouble with dating apps. How can you possibly make a meaningful connection with another person through an app? There's nothing but a profile pic and some generic text.

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.

skohan3• 7 years ago

Thankfully I'm currently off the market, but I've spent some time in the Tinder subreddit out of morbid curiosity. The Tinder "mating dance" so far as it's celebrated in that community seems to consist of some combination of the following:

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.

jamescostian12• 7 years ago

If they would be fine in an informal, real-world situation, why can't they do the same via an app? All the things you would say in real life can be said via dating apps. You miss body language, but GIFs, emojis, and memes can help clarify.

telesilla• 7 years ago

Speaking as a heterosexual woman who has enjoyed meeting up via dating apps, it's ALWAYS about the conversation that results in an actual date. A less attractive guy can make himself get a foot in the door by using really interesting photos. All you need is the swipe-right then use your confidence and humour to get a date. It works for many of us (women).

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.

blockmarker4• 7 years ago

That is helpful. But what does less attractive mean? Because by OkCupid's own stats, women find most men to be under-average(https://web.archive.org/web/20170330131859/https://theblog.o...)

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.

treis7• 7 years ago

A less attractive guy can make himself get a foot in the door by using really interesting photos.

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.

magicalhippo• 7 years ago

or insanely forward (sexually)

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.

namarie2• 7 years ago

But you have to admit it's a lot more risky. Also, plenty of people are looking forward to a good laid but are turned off if you just spam innuendo or are too forward.

JetSpiegel• 7 years ago

If you're not after a relationship but to get laid, then that might be a good strategy.

Why not replace your headshot with a dick pic, in that case?

jamescostian12• 7 years ago

I suppose if you want to get laid infrequently (or you're attractive enough for bad messages to work) then this is the best solution.

AnIdiotOnTheNet8• 7 years ago

Having spent a fair amount of time doing the online dating thing at one point in my life, and having taken the time and effort on writing good messages, I don't feel like this is true at all. That's why you see men writing a bunch of generic low effort messages to women: because it is ultimately a more successful strategy.

jamescostian12• 7 years ago

I'm interested in your counter-point, and have a couple of questions:

- 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"

cousin_it2• 7 years ago

Clearly caused by the same (unknown) thing that's been causing the double-digit decline in testosterone levels of Western men for the last few decades, regardless of job market or dating apps or whatever. So I'm leaning toward physiological explanation, not social.

anonytrary10• 7 years ago

I don't know either, but I would not make this guess, because cultural evolution tends to happen at a much faster pace than physiological (biological?) evolution. Physiology will not change much in 20 years, but culture could change drastically in the same timeframe.

Mirioron4• 7 years ago

There has been a significant population level decrease in testosterone in men. It's at around 1.2% per year when adjusted by age.[0] Similar effects have been found in other countries too.

I think this is what he means when he says physiological.

[0] https://academic.oup.com/jcem/article/92/1/196/2598434

cousin_it2• 7 years ago

Wasn't talking about evolution, was talking about stuff in the environment (food, plastics, etc) that affects physiology.

nukeop• 7 years ago

BPA plastics? Bad diets? Roundup? Chemicals in the water that make the freaking frogs gay? It's funny until it happens to you.

keiferski2• 7 years ago

This is not news to anyone who has been following the changes in gender dynamics in the past ~15 years.

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.

Cthulhu_7• 7 years ago

I think Japan is leading in this trend, or, that's what I'm hearing about; a lot of people who prefer to be stuck indoors, or work for most of the day. Actually I don't think they prefer it, but what is the alternative?

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.

tvh2• 7 years ago

Jordan Peterson, is that you? :D

keiferski2• 7 years ago

Hah, no. I think Dr. Peterson certainly makes some interesting points regarding these topics, but his solution seems to be a return to a pre-21st century model of societal values. I don't believe that this is tenable - the cat is already out of the bag and the Pandora's box of technology can't be closed.

watwut9• 7 years ago

The risk teenage pregnancy would make more guys to have sex? That is odd.

dragonwriter6• 7 years ago

Historically the solution to this particular problem has been enforced monogamy + the risk of pregnancy

Er, no, it hasn't. Risk of pregnancy predated the problem, it was not a part of a solution to it.

maxkwallace8• 7 years ago

Enforced monogamy + the risk of pregnancy is not a "solution".

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.

fxbl0i3• 7 years ago

If the solution to "inequality" is creating another inequality which harms far more people, then it might not be a solution at all.

freshm0872• 7 years ago

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

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.

Fjolsvith2• 7 years ago

The risk of pregnancy is a biological fact with far more severe penalties for women.

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.

toasterlovin7• 7 years ago

which also unfairly disadvantaged women

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).

bluepenguin• 7 years ago

I’d like to see the same data collected where sex work is legal.

throwawayjava5• 7 years ago

I'm still highly suspicious of the narrative all of this is premised on.

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.

pimlottc• 7 years ago

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...

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...

samhain• 7 years ago

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.

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.

apexalpha2• 7 years ago

Perhaps off-topic, but if someone here on HN is from Saudi-Arabia or a similar country:

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...

MattLeBlanc001• 7 years ago

I'm a muslim/arab.

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.

TicklishTiger• 7 years ago

I'm often surprised that there is not more discussion about hacking the sexual market place on Hacker News.

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.

Cthulhu_7• 7 years ago

Tinder is mentioned a lot; I'm not sure what else you have in mind. Not every problem is solved by throwing technology and/or money at it.

distant_hat4• 7 years ago

Its something not done in polite circles. The whole of PUA culture is about hacking the sexual market. A bunch of it delves into things that are thought of as distasteful.

maxkwallace8• 7 years ago

Reading through the comments, there's a shared narrative that emerges:

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.

throwawayjava5• 7 years ago

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.

arvinsim8• 7 years ago

It's true that people would like to think that personality and emotional connection matter more than physical appearance. And I am glad that some of it is the case. Heck, I would like to believe that is the majority of cases.

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?

skocznymroczny3• 7 years ago

That's easy to say, but physical appearance is the gateway to personality based relationships. You can have the greatest personality in the world, but be unlucky in the dating world because you don't fit the physical expectations. The choice given by dating websites amplifies that too. 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)?

distant_hat4• 7 years ago

- 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

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.

maxkwallace8• 7 years ago

For sure it's debatable but this is simply not true:

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.

solatic• 7 years ago

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.

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.

danlugo925• 7 years ago

- - 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

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.

dosy• 7 years ago

First, I think it's interesting to put some error bars on the actual numbers. One, it's from the Post, so their pro "feminist" bias could skew toward narratives (Young men driving the decline in sex) that emphasize declining male potency. Two, this is "US people" so it's limited to one culture.

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.

prittgluestick• 7 years ago

I struggled with sexlessness as a young man, even before the rise of popular dating apps. I've a history of self esteem issues directly related to my own attractiveness. Most of this was from my religious upbringing, being sheltered from people my own age and knowledge of sex, and being punished for girls being attracted to me.

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.

blockmarker4• 7 years ago

I'm glad that you achieved a better life. I agree, one should love their life regardless of whether they have a girlfriend or not.

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.

ptah• 7 years ago

or maybe respondents are just more honest nowadays

x0re4x2• 7 years ago

Explaining Sex Rate Changes

"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

x0re4x2• 7 years ago

Briffault's Law:

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...

zimablue3• 7 years ago

If you accept the premises: free information leads to higher female promiscuity aimed at top % males

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.

fre3k• 7 years ago

That last sentiment is very prominent in the incel/red pill "communities". They have some inside-baseball names for it, but essentially they do express their extreme disdain for women who have sex with lots of men then decide to "settle down" with a provider.

zimablue3• 7 years ago

Yeah it's absolutely an incel meme but do no means do I think that they invented it or that it's unique to them. I think almost all men have this feeling to some extent, I think it's a rare guy who is happy to know that every good looking guy in his office slept with his girlfriend casually. Proximity (time, location, social circle) is definitely an aggravating factor but it's all just a sliding scale. I like to think that I mostly don't care about a girl's past but it's definitely annoying on some level of the sliding scale.

gfiorav2• 7 years ago

In my case, I’ve always found partners (including my wife with whom I’ve been in a strong relationship for 8 years) in gatherings with friends and friends of friends.

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.

monetus2• 7 years ago

How many times have your circles imploded?

gfiorav2• 7 years ago

Not really imploded, but people change and stuff gets re-arranged. It's ok. Like forgetting peeps. Also ok. No need to keep friends around forever like Facebook and social media imply. I maybe have 5 friends that I've known for more than 15 years... those remain. The rest can flow.

burneraccount12• 7 years ago

Burner account to describe my experience.

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.

sridca13• 7 years ago

Sex is not the be all and end all of living an awesome life. Just because blind nature created you rife with the instinctual passion of desire does not mean you have to live as a slave to it.

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/

papermill2• 7 years ago

Sex, food and shelter are necessary conditions for an "awesome life" for most people. You could argue they aren't sufficient and you need more ( like spirituality, community, etc ), but it's disingenuous to dismiss it as an unnecessary condition that you could distract yourself with hobbies.

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.

sridca13• 7 years ago

Do you know the difference between need and desire? Can you comprehend how desiring sex is different to needing food and shelter?

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.

rofo1• 7 years ago

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.

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.

tomp4• 7 years ago

Having money isn't everything. Not having money, is.

Same with food and sex.

sridca13• 7 years ago

Having money isn't everything. Not having money, is.

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...

enraged_camel4• 7 years ago

Sexual intimacy is one of the "pillars" on Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs.

sridca13• 7 years ago

And? Is everything Mr. Maslow said to be taken as incontrovertible fact?

ufo• 7 years ago

The ammount of borderline incel rethoric in this discussion thread is concerning.

tomohawk2• 7 years ago

1) Internet porn is training young men to have sex with fantasy images, making sex with a real partner an alien concept.

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.

louisswiss• 7 years ago

Can you expand the third point a bit?

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?

tomohawk2• 7 years ago

You can see this where it is acceptible to have all female organizations or institutions, but unacceptable to have similar organizations or institutions for males. Similarly, there are many programs specifically targeting women for certain careers, such as STEM. The result is that increasingly there is a "gender gap" favoring women at university.

https://www.theguardian.com/education/datablog/2013/jan/29/h...

tomjakubowski• 7 years ago

Masculinity is labeled 'toxic'

Not true and a willful misinterpretation of the phrase "toxic masculinity".

alexandercrohde• 7 years ago

Why is nobody mentioning the potential biological basis for this?

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...

whateveracct• 7 years ago

Soy boy theory!

sticky_thrrwwwy• 7 years ago

Anecdote: Take it with a grain of salt as a mid 20's male in the dating scene

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)

fao_• 7 years ago

I ask some right-wing young men and they'll tell me, they believe in survival of the fittest and darwinian society.

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.

Explaining Sex Rate Changes

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