Honestly think it all comes down to the heightened ability to quantify and measure potential partners and the dating pool at the expense of the actual emotion you feel meeting someone in person that's the source of so many problems right now.
Couples that normally would have formed because the two of them hit it off when they met at a party or at work swiping left on each other because of something unimportant, but easily measured through a dating app.
We've taken the emotion out of finding a partner and are shocked to find it's not working and no one is happy chasing a partner who we think of as a checklist of traits and flags.
Very much agree with this. It feels like the apps have transformed norms so much that it’s much harder (because it’s seen as weirder and because you have the app available) for people to make a move on someone in person. So I am loath to give the advice of “just meet people irl!” because I’m not sure where I’d suggest they do that. I met my boyfriend at a meetup I run, but the numbers of available people at places like that is admittedly tiny.
Yup it's a cultural shift away from something that actually works where your emotions are engaged to one that is statistical and everyone is just a data sheet. I would give the advice of "just meet irl" only because it has to start somewhere, and because actually getting out of the house is infinitely healthier than sitting down to do your swiping homework every night.
I think common (and sensible) advice such as "meet people through hobbies!" hits a snag because it is easily misinterpreted.
Ideally it would be "take a pottery class if you enjoy pottery, and hopefully you meet someone in the process." I think many men take this as "I will take a pottery class with the express and sole intention of meeting chicks."
Which, you know, there's honestly nothing wrong with that. You can go out into the world and do anything with the specific intention of getting laid. But I think that the two approaches have different subtexts which you'd have to be mindful of, otherwise you're not proactively seeking partnership, you're just leering at women in yoga.
agreed. i also think having places you like going by yourself lends itself to easy date ideas. you give someone your number and just invite them to the thing you were gonna do anyway.
I thought you would be going somewhere else with this beginning.
I find the problem is that men and women have such different interests, that following one’s own interests will not lead to meeting anyone of the opposite sex.
But men don’t follow that advice. Anyway, they do what they find interesting, and have no interest in joining groups that do things they don’t like just to meet women.
E.g., there are no men in yoga classes, or cultural activities, like dancing, languages, art, etc.
They are doing sports, or joining groups to discuss technology or video games or finance, etc., which don’t attract women.
So very bad advice unless women are ready to join groups they have no interest in just to meet men, and some do.
Though as a gymrat, I have a bone to pick with #MeToo-era feminists for stigmatizing guys chatting up girls at the gym as creepy/gross/deplorable. I tend to do well enough on the apps that it doesn't really affect me personally, but that's 1 setting where I kind of get the hesitancy among a lot of guys.
Alex Datepsych (who I assume you've come across if you're familiar with Nuance Enjoyer) did a video a few months back about perceived "Chad Harems" monopolizing available young women. Unsurprisingly, he came to the same conclusion.
The vitriol and frustration coming from incel/incel-adjacent communities seems to stem in large part from these men buying into a lifestyle that is being sold to them. As though someone like Dan Bilzerian is actually surrounded by droves of adoring young women throwing themselves at his feet, and not simply paying models to do Instagram posts with him so he can sell you his How to be a Sigma Male PDF or whatever.
Influencers like Bilzerian, Andrew Tate, and other charlatans intentionally riling up their young audiences obviously reflects poorly on them, but I don't know how you convince these people who are obviously motivated by pre-existing grievance.
No different from Twitter trads who think that Coca Cola ads from the 40s are faithful representations of the era.
I wonder if the dating apps just make it more salient to men that many (most?) women don’t find them attractive? And that there really are men with a lot more sexual partners than other men? When people were meeting each other in real life, there would be a lot of clues that a woman was interested in a man, so men could focus their attention on women who showed indications of interest. I bet the success rate of getting a date per approach was a lot higher then, so maybe men felt better because they were focusing their attention on women who they had some reason to think were interested in them, and not focusing on all the women who weren’t.
Good stuff. Tangentially related, since you mentioned women panicking to find a husband: I remember my mom telling me when I was younger about her experience in the 70's and 80's, when many highly educated women like her ended up having trouble finding a husband and having kids after finishing their education and establishing a job. She talked about how more than a few women were surprised and felt quite betrayed when they saw how few eligible bachelors were interested in settling down to start a family with women in their mid-late-30's (obviously most had by that time married younger women).
Seems like each generation we're trying new things as a society (many of which are probably good on balance) but we're having trouble finding relationship norms that are as effective and satisfying as those of our grandparents. Obviously old-fashion dating and sex roles had their problems, but perhaps those traditions have some value that we haven't managed to replicate in other ways.
Also, 1000% agree with you, Caplan, and every other sensible person that there's too much focus on looks at the expense of other more important qualities. Seems like such an obviously self-defeating strategy, especially since having a more attractive mate doesn't necessarily imply that you'll have more frequent or better sex.
Yes, I think there are of course trade offs, but I'd personally take the more "free market dating" approach myself, despite its downsides. That said, I've recently gotten to know a few Indian couples who are the product of arranged marriages and they seem to have happy, stable and loving relationships - I'm sure that outcome is far from guaranteed but it did make me reflect more seriously on the costs/benefits of making partnership decisions on a purely individualistic basis vs. with the support and input of your family and community.
My suspicion is that free market dating is more likely to work out on average for the wealthy, well-connected, cognitive elite etc, and will work out quite poorly for many others, especially given crumbling social structures in the West today.
This example is what changed my mind. I have known so many happy couples that came together through arranged marriages. It is terrible if you love someone else, but it makes a lot of sense otherwise because everyone is in it for the right reasons. Then again, it is rather easy to get a mate when you live in a relative paradise. I personally think this is the real solution (arranged marriages with foreign nationals). That is the web app of the future.
Yes, agreed. Sure, it's a benefit all else equal, but I actually think the "objective" attractiveness of your partner has a pretty small relation to how enjoyable the sex is. And I think most people in loving relationships grow to find their partner far more attractive subjectively than other people do. Attraction is much more complex than how someone's picture would score on a scale of 1-10 in a random poll.
Yeah I think these folks are crazy. Physical attraction is extremely important and ingrained in our animal biology. I would not have great sex with someone I found unattractive.
I remember seeing Jordan Peterson talking about Big 5 personality traits, and how women tend to score much higher on neuroticism/anxiety than men do on average. My pet theory is that women find anxiety a pretty unattractive trait in men, and that men who can't overcome their anxiety enough to hit on girls basically get weeded out of the gene pool. Fortis fortuna adiuvat...
its more that the differences in averages might drive a strong preference among women for confident (i.e. low-anxiety) men. Guys with too much anxiety basically take themselves out of the game.
Women in today's society won't just "give guys a chance" if he gets his life together. Women want the best-of-the-best-of-the-best-of-the-BE$T.
Agreed, men should better themselves for their own sakes... but if you're not in the top 1%-5% CATEGORY OF MEN: you are literally invisible to women today. Outside of becoming famous or a millionaire or both, no amount of improving yourself is going to fix that.
Dating has become a dumpster-fire because women are making too much money and have too much power and now can only "look up" to a man if he's literally 6'3" and makes $1OOK/year.
Society must collapse. Then the dating market can organically rebuild... perhaps more evenly and conducive to family creation. But it has to fall apart first because, right now, it is not and will not work for most men... NO. MATTER. WHAT.
I find this fascinating. It doesn't line up with my intuitions or anecdotes, so thank you for presenting a different narrative.
I wonder if the differences are more at the edges. If we're categorizing "Chads" at the 90th percentile, we might miss differences seen at the 98/99th percentile, if it's different there. A number of the men that I would think of playing into this "Chad" archetype have partner counts in excess of 100.
Exactly, I don't doubt that the 99th percentile men have a lot more sex than the 90th percentile men, but there doesn't appear to be a trend over time. Unfortunately the NSFG survey caps answers at 50 (i.e. people answer 50+) so the 99th percentile isn't useable (it's always just 50+), and the GSS data has too few observations to make much of the 99th percentile since that's tracking the ~2 top survey respondents in any given year (due to age filtering). But the 95th percentile GSS data doesn't show any trend.
I looked at 99th percentile GSS anyways for 23-35 and it doesn't show a trend, it is very noisy between 100-200. And the average # of partners for men *above* 90th and 95th percentiles also doesn't show a trend, so doesn't seem likely that there's a real increase even at the top 1%. But more importantly, even if there were a trend in # of partners for the most sexually successful men, if it was confined to the 99th percentile it likely wouldn't be very powerful. Think about how many more partners the 99th percentile would have to have to make a meaningful impact on the availability of sex for the average man.
That's valid that the consequences couldn't be so impactful, except in the overarching narrative.
I still would wonder though if the perception of access (if not access itself) to "Chads" through dating apps would skew something in female dating preferences/behavior. I'm not sure how to test that hypothesis though!
Not sure how we'd know if that was always true but certainly could believe that's the result of seeing more attractive men on apps. But... why wouldn't men also find the average woman unattractive? They're also seeing more women even if they don't get to date them. Also, women are much more ok with partnering with a man that they don't think is very *objectively* attractive relative to men so might make up for that?
Part of the explanation of why people THINK the apps have had a bigger polygynous impact than they have might be that there's a gap between what women say their standards are (over 6 feet, rich, etc.) which a lot of men take at face value, but really when push comes to shove, women often hook up with men who don't meet all their dream standards.
They always existed. The internet and social media has allowed for scalability.
Social media has turned the world into one big High School. We are seeing that dynamic play out in real time. "JOCK$" get most of the attention and dating opportunities, NORMiE$ get scraps or very infrequent opportunities of luck.
I think it always existed and that the asymmetry has increased. However, I don't know how to square this hunch with the data that Regan presents below...
I had this thought as well. I personally know both women and men in that age range who often have 30+ partners per YEAR, forget lifetime count. But maybe they're in the top 1% so it isn't captured.
Also, something in this data doesn't add up. Maybe I need to see what it shows for the bottom 75%, but men say they have way more partners than women and that can't be true unless this includes those hooking up with same sex partners or someone is lying (or both are lying). I think you need to look at only responses of those reporting hetero partners for this to be revealing. Gay men typically have far more partners than straight men, so that alone would skew the stats and it seems very possible that what is shown as the top 10% of men included an overrepresented percentage of gay men.
The sex partner count in the data presented above is limited to opposite sex partners, so gay men would be excluded (you're right that they present anomalous counts.)
But I keep coming back to my original intuitions, in contrast to the data presented. I hope at some point the data elucidates this. I wonder if researchers would actually exclude these "chads & stacies" based on their outlier status (with sex partner count being in excess of a few standard deviations from the norm.)
And parallel to men inflating their numbers, there is often women undercounting, so I wonder if that accounts for the differences therein. The truth is potentially in the middle?
I think you’re both failing to realize that promiscuous people tend to flock together socially and also to sleep with one another. It’s actually not common to have >20 sexual partners. You may also not be thinking about the number of people who have very low numbers due to being in monogamous relationships most of the time. Bottom 20% of males report less partners than bottom 20% of females, otherwise males report more partners - so probably some degree of over/under reporting by men and women respectively- but as expected the least successful men are less successful than the least successful women. Btw I’ve linked the data and results so you can also take a look yourself
I think they both come to different "counts" not because they're necessarily lying but because they legitimately "count" different things. I've asked mixed sex groups questions before about what they think "counts" and you tend to get a gender difference. For example...does it count if he puts it half way in a couple times over the course of a tussle but you keep stopping because you don't have a condom? Or does it count if he puts it in but pulls out 3 seconds later because he immediately comes? Or does it count if kept trying to put it in but didn't have a full erection or didn't keep it sufficient to actually complete the act or do more than kind of smush parts together? Women tend to say that none of those things count, and men to say they do. I think guys have more of a "just past the net and it counts" mentality, whereas women don't count it if it isn't the full experience.
Thanks for the piece. I want to dig into it more, but from what I see, most of it is self-report data. For obvious reasons, I don't think the “chads” in this case are going to be telling on themselves. This speaks to strong monogamy norms of course. However, if you have insider accounts from certain high status subcultures (e.g. pro athletes - maybe the most extreme case), I think you can find a lot of evidence that there are men operating essentially digital harems. Not sure this practice has really changed much over time (because the fundamental preferences are the same) but it is certainly easier and more discrete to do now.
Yes, it's self-report, I'm not sure how else you would get this sort of data? But I don't agree that men with a lot of partners would feel the need to underrepresent that on an anonymous survey, and from what I can tell on Twitter men with high body counts seem happy to share it publicly in many cases. While it could be the case that men at some *extremely* high percentile of sexual success (that we can't reasonably assess from survey data), like pro athletes, have even higher numbers now than they did a couple of decades ago that wouldn't have a meaningful impact on the distribution of sex for the average guy (which is the claim I'm responding to), simply because there are so few of these men.
Yes, so yes I think I agree as a population phenomenon, chads are not really a big thing enabled by apps, but I also don't think "chads" are exactly a common phenomenon either based on EP understandings of how female preference works. It's a bit crude to spell out, but I think willingness/seeking behavior is quite different in women when comparing between normie men and obvious high status men. If you haven't seen this irl, even at smaller scales, it may seem surprising. (There's also structure in the population of women that are happy to participate and some that opt out).
So I think the relevant question culturally is how sexually successful and prolific this power law defined group of obviously high status men. Billionaire aren't common but a lot of people are worried about their wealth. The chads will have an outsized influence on the sexual psychology of everyday men.
So in terms of how to accurately assess what's happening in this high status slice... I don't know. It is likely almost impossible because most these men have good reasons to be discrete (often bc many are publicly partnered).
And I think we have a lot of supportive anecdotal reports here. In some cases this is relying on rumor, which isn't great but it gets at something. Think about the behavior described in many #MeToo cases. If Harvey Weinstein could operate for decades forcing women into undesirable sexual encounters, think of how easy it is for younger, physically attractive men with status who can dangle commitment and resources in front of prospects. Think of the many political sex scandals despite the many incentives against engaging in such behavior. These are slanted peeks at normal conventions of sexual behavior but they speak to something real.
Yes of course there are some men having much higher numbers of sexual partners than I’m showing here. But I don’t think comparing this to wealth quite works. Someone like Bezos is 100,000x wealthier than the average person and while men can have a lot of sex they’re still limited by having to physically be there, it doesn’t scale with the same extremity. Also the women these guys have sex with are still mostly on the market and go on to have sex with other men! From my perspective what should matter to regular men is how often they are able to have sex rather than the number of unique women or how many women the top 0.001% sleep with in their lives. If Bezos was married to a 100,000 women that would be a more comparable situation to his wealth.
I agree that these women are still on the market and that high status monopolization of wealth is substantially different than that of sex.
However, I think this misses something about how the psychology of the normal man works in this context. Say a normal man - one who is typically guided by a strong desire for a physically attractive mate - has somehow won himself a "hot" woman. He lives in fear that this woman would immediately dispense with him in favor of a higher status option, thus he persists in a state of agitation and resentment. I would guess the intensity of this insecurity is higher the further you go the status ladder and the higher the physical attractiveness/allure of the woman is.
Even if this is not a real or common situation (the people who stably partner don't seem to do so on the basis of physical attractiveness - though stable partnerships are increasing enriched among higher status people), this is the imagined situation that motivates many young men, who are the type who can be responsible for an outsized share of social instability.
Relatedly, pointing to the statistical realities overlooks the strong desire of men to monopolize sexual access to partners for obvious evolutionary reasons. As stable partnerships go down and out of wedlock birth have gone up, these anxieties are piqued more.
I find your rebuttal of the Chad harem very persuasive. But is your data still congruent with a more moderate (and rather sexless) version of point 6? Something like:
"Many of the women swiping right on attractive men are left confused about why they’re meeting so few men, not realising that it's because they’re almost exclusively swiping right on a scarce few men who are out of their league. They really hope to meet someone in real life instead, but real life approaches are quite widely stigmatised and younger men are losing the habit. Many men are left alone too because they're not approaching much, get few matches and even fewer of the matches lead to a date. As a result, the number of men and women alike in relationships and actually having sex is really declining."
Where is this 90th and 75th percentile rating coming from? Is every survey respondent being rated by the opposite sex on a scale of 1-10 and with their responses averaged? Clearly not. What's going on here?
This is not the 90th percentile "most attractive" guys but the 90th percentile most sexually successful guys. That means that the # of partners reported here as 90th percentile will by definition be higher than what you'd get if you ranked men on attractiveness and then looked at # of sexual partners for men who were in the 90th percentile of that ranking
Not necessarily; sexually successful does not mean high status or Chad. You can be sexually successful by just having sex with lower-status women. African American men have more sex than White men, even though they are less desired on dating apps, because they don't mind having sex with women who are not physically fit.
No ones happy, even chads are bowing out because when it comes to finding quality women, they simply no longer exist - or, in the off chance you meet one off line, they are hard to nail down because of so many options online. We're not competing with other men, we're competing with everything else competing for women's attention (namely social media). I see this where I live, a college town, where there's very little night life any more. People don't go out. Whole dorms and apartment complexes that used to be roaring in the early 2000s are now dead quiet on Friday and saturday nights.
Also it's laughable to think anyone's telling the truth when it comes to sexual partners.
"But while I don’t doubt that dating apps have changed the incentive structures at play"
Why you don't doubt it when the same person, Nuancepill, have written a piece on how dating apps aren't doing much on people's dating lifes? If so, dating apps seem to increase assortative mating among het couples and most people is not meeting through dating apps.
I’m not satisfied with the quality of our information. I don’t know how to get better information. I also don’t know what good we can do without hard numbers. We know marriage rates and birth rates are down.
Your math is bad. You are looking too far down the chart. The break point in attractiveness for women is probably more like the 1% to 3%, and I strongly suspect more like 1%. Women have always had high standards for men, but now they are probably higher. I have looked through data sets, and I have never, ever seen women claim that 10% of males were attractive. I mean not even close. For young women I think you would have been better off using the 3% for males. Now, even if you go there, many men may have financial constraints, that prevent them from going out as much, or other reasons, but looking at the top ten percent is not going to yield useful conclusions.
Honestly think it all comes down to the heightened ability to quantify and measure potential partners and the dating pool at the expense of the actual emotion you feel meeting someone in person that's the source of so many problems right now.
Couples that normally would have formed because the two of them hit it off when they met at a party or at work swiping left on each other because of something unimportant, but easily measured through a dating app.
We've taken the emotion out of finding a partner and are shocked to find it's not working and no one is happy chasing a partner who we think of as a checklist of traits and flags.
Very much agree with this. It feels like the apps have transformed norms so much that it’s much harder (because it’s seen as weirder and because you have the app available) for people to make a move on someone in person. So I am loath to give the advice of “just meet people irl!” because I’m not sure where I’d suggest they do that. I met my boyfriend at a meetup I run, but the numbers of available people at places like that is admittedly tiny.
Yup it's a cultural shift away from something that actually works where your emotions are engaged to one that is statistical and everyone is just a data sheet. I would give the advice of "just meet irl" only because it has to start somewhere, and because actually getting out of the house is infinitely healthier than sitting down to do your swiping homework every night.
I think common (and sensible) advice such as "meet people through hobbies!" hits a snag because it is easily misinterpreted.
Ideally it would be "take a pottery class if you enjoy pottery, and hopefully you meet someone in the process." I think many men take this as "I will take a pottery class with the express and sole intention of meeting chicks."
Which, you know, there's honestly nothing wrong with that. You can go out into the world and do anything with the specific intention of getting laid. But I think that the two approaches have different subtexts which you'd have to be mindful of, otherwise you're not proactively seeking partnership, you're just leering at women in yoga.
agreed. i also think having places you like going by yourself lends itself to easy date ideas. you give someone your number and just invite them to the thing you were gonna do anyway.
I thought you would be going somewhere else with this beginning.
I find the problem is that men and women have such different interests, that following one’s own interests will not lead to meeting anyone of the opposite sex.
But men don’t follow that advice. Anyway, they do what they find interesting, and have no interest in joining groups that do things they don’t like just to meet women.
E.g., there are no men in yoga classes, or cultural activities, like dancing, languages, art, etc.
They are doing sports, or joining groups to discuss technology or video games or finance, etc., which don’t attract women.
So very bad advice unless women are ready to join groups they have no interest in just to meet men, and some do.
Big for wordcels if true
Hey, some men do languages and art!
In which case the advice should be worded "do shit you enjoy doing and have some fun"
Wisdom
Though as a gymrat, I have a bone to pick with #MeToo-era feminists for stigmatizing guys chatting up girls at the gym as creepy/gross/deplorable. I tend to do well enough on the apps that it doesn't really affect me personally, but that's 1 setting where I kind of get the hesitancy among a lot of guys.
Alex Datepsych (who I assume you've come across if you're familiar with Nuance Enjoyer) did a video a few months back about perceived "Chad Harems" monopolizing available young women. Unsurprisingly, he came to the same conclusion.
The vitriol and frustration coming from incel/incel-adjacent communities seems to stem in large part from these men buying into a lifestyle that is being sold to them. As though someone like Dan Bilzerian is actually surrounded by droves of adoring young women throwing themselves at his feet, and not simply paying models to do Instagram posts with him so he can sell you his How to be a Sigma Male PDF or whatever.
Influencers like Bilzerian, Andrew Tate, and other charlatans intentionally riling up their young audiences obviously reflects poorly on them, but I don't know how you convince these people who are obviously motivated by pre-existing grievance.
No different from Twitter trads who think that Coca Cola ads from the 40s are faithful representations of the era.
Thanks Pierce, yes I did come across Datepsych on Alex Kaschutas pod - it was a good episode
I wonder if the dating apps just make it more salient to men that many (most?) women don’t find them attractive? And that there really are men with a lot more sexual partners than other men? When people were meeting each other in real life, there would be a lot of clues that a woman was interested in a man, so men could focus their attention on women who showed indications of interest. I bet the success rate of getting a date per approach was a lot higher then, so maybe men felt better because they were focusing their attention on women who they had some reason to think were interested in them, and not focusing on all the women who weren’t.
Good stuff. Tangentially related, since you mentioned women panicking to find a husband: I remember my mom telling me when I was younger about her experience in the 70's and 80's, when many highly educated women like her ended up having trouble finding a husband and having kids after finishing their education and establishing a job. She talked about how more than a few women were surprised and felt quite betrayed when they saw how few eligible bachelors were interested in settling down to start a family with women in their mid-late-30's (obviously most had by that time married younger women).
Seems like each generation we're trying new things as a society (many of which are probably good on balance) but we're having trouble finding relationship norms that are as effective and satisfying as those of our grandparents. Obviously old-fashion dating and sex roles had their problems, but perhaps those traditions have some value that we haven't managed to replicate in other ways.
Also, 1000% agree with you, Caplan, and every other sensible person that there's too much focus on looks at the expense of other more important qualities. Seems like such an obviously self-defeating strategy, especially since having a more attractive mate doesn't necessarily imply that you'll have more frequent or better sex.
Yes, I think there are of course trade offs, but I'd personally take the more "free market dating" approach myself, despite its downsides. That said, I've recently gotten to know a few Indian couples who are the product of arranged marriages and they seem to have happy, stable and loving relationships - I'm sure that outcome is far from guaranteed but it did make me reflect more seriously on the costs/benefits of making partnership decisions on a purely individualistic basis vs. with the support and input of your family and community.
My suspicion is that free market dating is more likely to work out on average for the wealthy, well-connected, cognitive elite etc, and will work out quite poorly for many others, especially given crumbling social structures in the West today.
Sexual communism is the only sustainable answer.
This example is what changed my mind. I have known so many happy couples that came together through arranged marriages. It is terrible if you love someone else, but it makes a lot of sense otherwise because everyone is in it for the right reasons. Then again, it is rather easy to get a mate when you live in a relative paradise. I personally think this is the real solution (arranged marriages with foreign nationals). That is the web app of the future.
Well having sex with someone you find more attractive is better by definition on that metric.
The point is that physical attractiveness is not even close to being the most important factor when considering whether sex will be good.
Yes, agreed. Sure, it's a benefit all else equal, but I actually think the "objective" attractiveness of your partner has a pretty small relation to how enjoyable the sex is. And I think most people in loving relationships grow to find their partner far more attractive subjectively than other people do. Attraction is much more complex than how someone's picture would score on a scale of 1-10 in a random poll.
Totally. Marriage is a starting point, not the finish line. Many people don't seem to realize that?
This is only true in a pre-social media world.
Post-social media: the game has ¢HANGED.
Yeah I think these folks are crazy. Physical attraction is extremely important and ingrained in our animal biology. I would not have great sex with someone I found unattractive.
A lot of guys need to get off their asses, put their phones down, quit video games, and get in the game, https://theredquest.substack.com/p/cold-approach-the-sex-and-dating
The guys not getting laid are overwhelming the ones not trying, https://thezvi.substack.com/p/dating-roundup-1-this-is-why-youre
Chicks won't really approach, set up dates, do logistics, etc., so guys have to do those things, or nothing happens.
I remember seeing Jordan Peterson talking about Big 5 personality traits, and how women tend to score much higher on neuroticism/anxiety than men do on average. My pet theory is that women find anxiety a pretty unattractive trait in men, and that men who can't overcome their anxiety enough to hit on girls basically get weeded out of the gene pool. Fortis fortuna adiuvat...
its more that the differences in averages might drive a strong preference among women for confident (i.e. low-anxiety) men. Guys with too much anxiety basically take themselves out of the game.
Though presumably to get into those relationships, they had to overcome their anxiety enough to ask a girl out at some point.
Here's why you're an idiot:
Women in today's society won't just "give guys a chance" if he gets his life together. Women want the best-of-the-best-of-the-best-of-the-BE$T.
Agreed, men should better themselves for their own sakes... but if you're not in the top 1%-5% CATEGORY OF MEN: you are literally invisible to women today. Outside of becoming famous or a millionaire or both, no amount of improving yourself is going to fix that.
Dating has become a dumpster-fire because women are making too much money and have too much power and now can only "look up" to a man if he's literally 6'3" and makes $1OOK/year.
Society must collapse. Then the dating market can organically rebuild... perhaps more evenly and conducive to family creation. But it has to fall apart first because, right now, it is not and will not work for most men... NO. MATTER. WHAT.
I find this fascinating. It doesn't line up with my intuitions or anecdotes, so thank you for presenting a different narrative.
I wonder if the differences are more at the edges. If we're categorizing "Chads" at the 90th percentile, we might miss differences seen at the 98/99th percentile, if it's different there. A number of the men that I would think of playing into this "Chad" archetype have partner counts in excess of 100.
But don’t you think they always existed?
Exactly, I don't doubt that the 99th percentile men have a lot more sex than the 90th percentile men, but there doesn't appear to be a trend over time. Unfortunately the NSFG survey caps answers at 50 (i.e. people answer 50+) so the 99th percentile isn't useable (it's always just 50+), and the GSS data has too few observations to make much of the 99th percentile since that's tracking the ~2 top survey respondents in any given year (due to age filtering). But the 95th percentile GSS data doesn't show any trend.
See thread on this here: https://twitter.com/arntzgray1/status/1765695454358950096
I looked at 99th percentile GSS anyways for 23-35 and it doesn't show a trend, it is very noisy between 100-200. And the average # of partners for men *above* 90th and 95th percentiles also doesn't show a trend, so doesn't seem likely that there's a real increase even at the top 1%. But more importantly, even if there were a trend in # of partners for the most sexually successful men, if it was confined to the 99th percentile it likely wouldn't be very powerful. Think about how many more partners the 99th percentile would have to have to make a meaningful impact on the availability of sex for the average man.
That's valid that the consequences couldn't be so impactful, except in the overarching narrative.
I still would wonder though if the perception of access (if not access itself) to "Chads" through dating apps would skew something in female dating preferences/behavior. I'm not sure how to test that hypothesis though!
This post has data showing that women rate the median man as unattractive, I think you've mentioned similar findings before...
https://dkras.substack.com/p/sex-differences-attractiveness-and
Not sure how we'd know if that was always true but certainly could believe that's the result of seeing more attractive men on apps. But... why wouldn't men also find the average woman unattractive? They're also seeing more women even if they don't get to date them. Also, women are much more ok with partnering with a man that they don't think is very *objectively* attractive relative to men so might make up for that?
Part of the explanation of why people THINK the apps have had a bigger polygynous impact than they have might be that there's a gap between what women say their standards are (over 6 feet, rich, etc.) which a lot of men take at face value, but really when push comes to shove, women often hook up with men who don't meet all their dream standards.
See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LP-0O3poC0g
Is that last point true when height is included among the elements of attraction?
They always existed. The internet and social media has allowed for scalability.
Social media has turned the world into one big High School. We are seeing that dynamic play out in real time. "JOCK$" get most of the attention and dating opportunities, NORMiE$ get scraps or very infrequent opportunities of luck.
This is our lives now.
I think it always existed and that the asymmetry has increased. However, I don't know how to square this hunch with the data that Regan presents below...
I had this thought as well. I personally know both women and men in that age range who often have 30+ partners per YEAR, forget lifetime count. But maybe they're in the top 1% so it isn't captured.
Also, something in this data doesn't add up. Maybe I need to see what it shows for the bottom 75%, but men say they have way more partners than women and that can't be true unless this includes those hooking up with same sex partners or someone is lying (or both are lying). I think you need to look at only responses of those reporting hetero partners for this to be revealing. Gay men typically have far more partners than straight men, so that alone would skew the stats and it seems very possible that what is shown as the top 10% of men included an overrepresented percentage of gay men.
The sex partner count in the data presented above is limited to opposite sex partners, so gay men would be excluded (you're right that they present anomalous counts.)
But I keep coming back to my original intuitions, in contrast to the data presented. I hope at some point the data elucidates this. I wonder if researchers would actually exclude these "chads & stacies" based on their outlier status (with sex partner count being in excess of a few standard deviations from the norm.)
And parallel to men inflating their numbers, there is often women undercounting, so I wonder if that accounts for the differences therein. The truth is potentially in the middle?
I think you’re both failing to realize that promiscuous people tend to flock together socially and also to sleep with one another. It’s actually not common to have >20 sexual partners. You may also not be thinking about the number of people who have very low numbers due to being in monogamous relationships most of the time. Bottom 20% of males report less partners than bottom 20% of females, otherwise males report more partners - so probably some degree of over/under reporting by men and women respectively- but as expected the least successful men are less successful than the least successful women. Btw I’ve linked the data and results so you can also take a look yourself
I think they both come to different "counts" not because they're necessarily lying but because they legitimately "count" different things. I've asked mixed sex groups questions before about what they think "counts" and you tend to get a gender difference. For example...does it count if he puts it half way in a couple times over the course of a tussle but you keep stopping because you don't have a condom? Or does it count if he puts it in but pulls out 3 seconds later because he immediately comes? Or does it count if kept trying to put it in but didn't have a full erection or didn't keep it sufficient to actually complete the act or do more than kind of smush parts together? Women tend to say that none of those things count, and men to say they do. I think guys have more of a "just past the net and it counts" mentality, whereas women don't count it if it isn't the full experience.
Thanks for the piece. I want to dig into it more, but from what I see, most of it is self-report data. For obvious reasons, I don't think the “chads” in this case are going to be telling on themselves. This speaks to strong monogamy norms of course. However, if you have insider accounts from certain high status subcultures (e.g. pro athletes - maybe the most extreme case), I think you can find a lot of evidence that there are men operating essentially digital harems. Not sure this practice has really changed much over time (because the fundamental preferences are the same) but it is certainly easier and more discrete to do now.
Yes, it's self-report, I'm not sure how else you would get this sort of data? But I don't agree that men with a lot of partners would feel the need to underrepresent that on an anonymous survey, and from what I can tell on Twitter men with high body counts seem happy to share it publicly in many cases. While it could be the case that men at some *extremely* high percentile of sexual success (that we can't reasonably assess from survey data), like pro athletes, have even higher numbers now than they did a couple of decades ago that wouldn't have a meaningful impact on the distribution of sex for the average guy (which is the claim I'm responding to), simply because there are so few of these men.
Yes, so yes I think I agree as a population phenomenon, chads are not really a big thing enabled by apps, but I also don't think "chads" are exactly a common phenomenon either based on EP understandings of how female preference works. It's a bit crude to spell out, but I think willingness/seeking behavior is quite different in women when comparing between normie men and obvious high status men. If you haven't seen this irl, even at smaller scales, it may seem surprising. (There's also structure in the population of women that are happy to participate and some that opt out).
So I think the relevant question culturally is how sexually successful and prolific this power law defined group of obviously high status men. Billionaire aren't common but a lot of people are worried about their wealth. The chads will have an outsized influence on the sexual psychology of everyday men.
So in terms of how to accurately assess what's happening in this high status slice... I don't know. It is likely almost impossible because most these men have good reasons to be discrete (often bc many are publicly partnered).
And I think we have a lot of supportive anecdotal reports here. In some cases this is relying on rumor, which isn't great but it gets at something. Think about the behavior described in many #MeToo cases. If Harvey Weinstein could operate for decades forcing women into undesirable sexual encounters, think of how easy it is for younger, physically attractive men with status who can dangle commitment and resources in front of prospects. Think of the many political sex scandals despite the many incentives against engaging in such behavior. These are slanted peeks at normal conventions of sexual behavior but they speak to something real.
Yes of course there are some men having much higher numbers of sexual partners than I’m showing here. But I don’t think comparing this to wealth quite works. Someone like Bezos is 100,000x wealthier than the average person and while men can have a lot of sex they’re still limited by having to physically be there, it doesn’t scale with the same extremity. Also the women these guys have sex with are still mostly on the market and go on to have sex with other men! From my perspective what should matter to regular men is how often they are able to have sex rather than the number of unique women or how many women the top 0.001% sleep with in their lives. If Bezos was married to a 100,000 women that would be a more comparable situation to his wealth.
I agree that these women are still on the market and that high status monopolization of wealth is substantially different than that of sex.
However, I think this misses something about how the psychology of the normal man works in this context. Say a normal man - one who is typically guided by a strong desire for a physically attractive mate - has somehow won himself a "hot" woman. He lives in fear that this woman would immediately dispense with him in favor of a higher status option, thus he persists in a state of agitation and resentment. I would guess the intensity of this insecurity is higher the further you go the status ladder and the higher the physical attractiveness/allure of the woman is.
Even if this is not a real or common situation (the people who stably partner don't seem to do so on the basis of physical attractiveness - though stable partnerships are increasing enriched among higher status people), this is the imagined situation that motivates many young men, who are the type who can be responsible for an outsized share of social instability.
Relatedly, pointing to the statistical realities overlooks the strong desire of men to monopolize sexual access to partners for obvious evolutionary reasons. As stable partnerships go down and out of wedlock birth have gone up, these anxieties are piqued more.
I find your rebuttal of the Chad harem very persuasive. But is your data still congruent with a more moderate (and rather sexless) version of point 6? Something like:
"Many of the women swiping right on attractive men are left confused about why they’re meeting so few men, not realising that it's because they’re almost exclusively swiping right on a scarce few men who are out of their league. They really hope to meet someone in real life instead, but real life approaches are quite widely stigmatised and younger men are losing the habit. Many men are left alone too because they're not approaching much, get few matches and even fewer of the matches lead to a date. As a result, the number of men and women alike in relationships and actually having sex is really declining."
Thanks, Tom! I think this narrative is very plausible and is consistent with the higher % of both sexes reporting 0 sex in the past year
Super good post, providing basic descriptive statistics is very useful.
Thought provoking!
coming down to learn about us hairless monkey, eh?
I $EE you there...
1989 isn't far back enough. The big change was the sexual revolution, not dating apps.
There can be more than one big change, even within living memory.
Where is this 90th and 75th percentile rating coming from? Is every survey respondent being rated by the opposite sex on a scale of 1-10 and with their responses averaged? Clearly not. What's going on here?
This is not the 90th percentile "most attractive" guys but the 90th percentile most sexually successful guys. That means that the # of partners reported here as 90th percentile will by definition be higher than what you'd get if you ranked men on attractiveness and then looked at # of sexual partners for men who were in the 90th percentile of that ranking
Not necessarily; sexually successful does not mean high status or Chad. You can be sexually successful by just having sex with lower-status women. African American men have more sex than White men, even though they are less desired on dating apps, because they don't mind having sex with women who are not physically fit.
No ones happy, even chads are bowing out because when it comes to finding quality women, they simply no longer exist - or, in the off chance you meet one off line, they are hard to nail down because of so many options online. We're not competing with other men, we're competing with everything else competing for women's attention (namely social media). I see this where I live, a college town, where there's very little night life any more. People don't go out. Whole dorms and apartment complexes that used to be roaring in the early 2000s are now dead quiet on Friday and saturday nights.
Also it's laughable to think anyone's telling the truth when it comes to sexual partners.
"But while I don’t doubt that dating apps have changed the incentive structures at play"
Why you don't doubt it when the same person, Nuancepill, have written a piece on how dating apps aren't doing much on people's dating lifes? If so, dating apps seem to increase assortative mating among het couples and most people is not meeting through dating apps.
This popped up in my feed again.
I’m not satisfied with the quality of our information. I don’t know how to get better information. I also don’t know what good we can do without hard numbers. We know marriage rates and birth rates are down.
Your math is bad. You are looking too far down the chart. The break point in attractiveness for women is probably more like the 1% to 3%, and I strongly suspect more like 1%. Women have always had high standards for men, but now they are probably higher. I have looked through data sets, and I have never, ever seen women claim that 10% of males were attractive. I mean not even close. For young women I think you would have been better off using the 3% for males. Now, even if you go there, many men may have financial constraints, that prevent them from going out as much, or other reasons, but looking at the top ten percent is not going to yield useful conclusions.