Mate Selection Asymmetry Between Men and Women
Mate Selection Asymmetry Between Men and Women
In a Wealthy, Permissive Society, a Large Percentage of Men are Unwanted
One of the greatest possible forces in human life is whose genetic substance, and character, contributes to the generations that follow us. I believe this process is being radically reshaped in ways that are currently invisible to much of social and cultural consciousness.
This entry examines a small set of points in that larger picture. I will do that though the lens of male isolation, of which the key element is understanding the average relative market value of men and women for sex and relationships.
The meat of this entry is data based, but I’m going to bookend that with an introduction and a conclusion to make my wider ranging views clear as a framework for that data.
Introduction:
Biologically speaking, if a man doesn’t have access to a woman as his partner, he has no place in the future. It is a death sentence from the stand point of genetic selection. Among a nation or tribe of related people this is not so dramatic. You could live for your nation, tribe, or church. Your character and contribution could be carried on in your people, relatives and friends. In the atomized modernity of the West this has no purpose. Though many men will effectively choose this path as a latent after-image of the past, it will bear only dysgenic fruit. Many men, even incoherently, sense this and resist, or drop out of the system.
Over time in a civilization, value tips from men toward women. This occurs as the wealth of society increases over time. In tribal societies this balance of value between the sexes is governed by space, as fairer climates and isolated geography make living easier and more gentle. Wealth and easy living depreciate the value of working and fighting men, while at the same time indemnifying womanhood against its natural risks, which are being vulnerable to violence, and bearing children who have to be fed and cared for.
The modern digital environment has enhanced these trends and freed women’s sexuality almost completely from previous natural and social constraints.
Online dating and Instagram-style social media removes the physical limitations of space and time that previously limited the number of men each woman could meet through work, social connections, random chance, etc. Apps also allow private communication, which removes the social stigma from pursuing multiple partners impulsively. It makes it potentially invisible if someone is already surrounded by partners. With these limitations removed, the factors that remain, like physical attraction, have maximized. The statistically observable result of this is that there are, very broadly, four groups of people with very different dating experiences.
1. A large percentage of men who are mostly seen as unattractive.
2. A smaller percentage of physically attractive men that have many casual or serial monogamous relationships.
3. A larger percent of women who are shared, serially or concurrently by these attractive men.
4. A smaller percentage of women who are mostly not seen as attractive and have no choices they would accept.
Physical attractiveness seems to function on a geometric curve. This quote explains the effect: ”In Dataclysm, the most classic book on this kind of stuff, Christian Rudder talks about how certain populations get exponentially more attention by likening attractiveness to earthquakes. He places beauty on the Richter scale: ‘In terms of its effect, there is little noticeable difference between, say, a 1.0 and 2.0–these cause tremors that vary only in degree of imperceptibility. But at the high end, a small difference has a cataclysmic impact. A 9.0 is intense, but a 10.0 can rupture the world. Or launch a thousand ships.’” - https://web.archive.org/web/20180209145512/https://hingeirl.com/hinge-reports/whats-the-biggest-challenge-men-face-on-dating-apps-a-qa-with-aviv-goldgeier-junior-growth-engineer/
In future entries I may talk about the study and quantification of human beauty and attractiveness. For now, the details of beauty go beyond what our current topics will support.
The Data on Male Isolation:
Are young men more isolated socially and romantically than in the past?
This is a link to an article covering the US General Social Survey. Scroll down to the third graph labeled "Young Men Driving Decline in Sex". It measures men and women who have not had sex in the last year. Since roughly 2011 the graph has separated significantly, with men at 28% and women at 18%, as of 2018.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/03/29/share-americans-not-having-sex-has-reached-record-high/
In this case I’m taking sexlessness as a proxy for lack of intimacy and isolation in general. The separation seems to become significant around 2012, when online dating started to become mainstream and Tinder launched. A correlation, but strongly indicative to me.
Lyman Stone, a fellow at the Institute for Family Studies and a demographics consultant, disagrees with this interpretation of the GSS data, highlighting the decline in marriage as the primary cause of the decline in sexlessness in men. I think this argument is circular reasoning, akin to saying “If men were in more committed relationships then they would have more committed relationships.“
Additionally the data presented in his own article undermines his points. The sex separation between married men and married women is rising as well, though the trend may not be statistically definitive.
https://ifstudies.org/blog/male-sexlessness-is-rising-but-not-for-the-reasons-incels-claim
He presents two other data sets that disagree with the GSS data, but when he corrects them for married vs non-married men, the trend of increased isolation in young men remains in the data as well.
https://ifstudies.org/blog/male-sexlessness-is-rising-but-not-for-the-reasons-incels-claim
The source of the graph below is anonymous, so unverified, but seems correct to me. It shows an average of the data sets.
https://incels.wiki/w/File:Rise_of_sexless_young_men.png
Lyman Stone also stated in his article that the GSS data disproves that a small group of men are attracting most women. Instead of an 80/20 rule, he says the GSS shows an 60/20 rule that is consistent over some unspecified, supposedly long amount of time. He goes on to admit that he included men who paid for sex and male prostitutes in these figures.
“That is, a few of these men whom incels might think are Chads based on the data actually have their high sexual frequency not due to being so desirable, but due to hiring prostitutes, or themselves being male sex workers.“ - https://ifstudies.org/blog/male-sexlessness-is-rising-but-not-for-the-reasons-incels-claim
He is seemingly oblivious to the fact he has completely invalidated the data he using by including these groups in an analysis intended to reveal male sexual market-place value, or concentration of sexual access. Furthermore, he doesn’t show any of his work for these statements, not even a graph, and no explanation of methodology or the actual metrics being tracked in the GSS data. I am examining the GSS data myself to see if I can recreate his findings, but that is an involved process. Until then, I consider these conclusions unsupportable.
The Data for Online Matching:
Is online dating representative of where and how men and women make new relationships currently? This famous graph strongly indicates online dating has become the primary way of meeting romantic partners. The graph is from “Disintermediating Your Friends: How Online Dating in the United States Displaces Other Ways of Meeting“
https://web.stanford.edu/~mrosenfe/Rosenfeld_et_al_Disintermediating_Friends.pdf
I suspect if the data continued after 2020 the “Met Online“ percentage would continue upward dramatically. It is a common anecdote to me that it has become less socially acceptable to approach other people, particularly women, in public to make new social connections or ask someone out. The data generally supports that, although I cannot at this time quantify any developing stigma associated with approaching someone in the real world.
Having established the primacy of online dating, we can be assured that it is significant to ask “how do men and women match online?“
The OKCupid preference data is infamous by this point. This is a picture of the graph that was originally published in the book Dataclism. In simple terms, men rate women's profiles on a bell curve, a normal distribution with 50% being above average, 50% below average. Women rate men around 20% above average, 80% below average. There are complaints about the data quality for this graph, so let's just take it as one data point and keep it in mind as something that might be true. As an aside, there is also messaging data that showed, in a free contact environment, most men will try to contact, or take a shot at, the most attractive segment of women. I don’t dispute that, but I don't think the data support this as limiting who the men will actually engage with.
https://i.imgur.com/2MstAzl.gif
There is a small, independent Tinder data analysis that has also become rather famous. The blue and pink graph below in particular, Figure 1. "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." The sample size was too small to be conclusive, with only 27 women. It was also based on self reporting, which is always highly questionable. Does this study mean anything? Let's keep looking .
An engineer for the dating app Hinge read the Tinder economic study above and wondered what analyzing the whole Hinge database along the same lines would show. He came to strikingly similar conclusions.
"...while about half of all likes sent to women go to about 25 percent of women, half of all likes sent to men go to a much smaller segment – about 15 percent."
"It turns out that, as it pertains to incoming likes, straight females on Hinge show a Gini index of 0.376, and for straight males it’s 0.542. On a list of 149 countries’ Gini indices provided by the CIA World Factbook, this would place the female dating economy as 75th most unequal (average — think Western Europe) and the male dating economy as the 8th most unequal (kleptocracy, apartheid, perpetual civil war — think South Africa)."
Fascinatingly, the Gini coefficient of inequality does decrease when both men and women can see who likes them and the new metric is set on forming a connection/conversation:
"With straight men on Hinge, the Gini index of connections comes down to 0.324, or approximately the UK — a huge improvement."
"this movement toward equitability when dealing with connections exists with straight women too, so much so that the Gini index becomes meaningless. The most attractive women on Hinge do not actually form the most connections. In fact, straight women who receive incoming likes at around the 80th percentile have the most connections with men, about 27 percent more than our most-liked women."
This radical decrease in the Gini coefficient for engagement with women after “likes” are revealed pushes back on the OKCupid male messaging data from before. It's a strong indication of compromise from both men and women, but on a very different scale between the two.
The Q and A article with the Hinge engineer has since been removed, for reasons I will leave to your fevered imaginations. Nothing is ever really gone from the internet, so here is a Way Mack Machine log: https://web.archive.org/web/20180209145512/https://hingeirl.com/hinge-reports/whats-the-biggest-challenge-men-face-on-dating-apps-a-qa-with-aviv-goldgeier-junior-growth-engineer
Speed Dating Data as a Real World Analogue:
There will still be those detractors who say "that's just online dating. It's not real life." Let's examine that more deeply. Data about real life is harder to get, and harder to use, because everything isn't being centrally logged (yet). There are still some tools available to us.
In the year 2005 a very useful study was published, titled “HurryDate: Mate preferences in action“: https://www.academia.edu/14946282/HurryDate_Mate_preferences_in_action
The authors made a remarkable deal with a speed dating company called HurryDate, located in the US. The authors received anonymized data about the participants in exchange for passing on helpful insights to the company about how to improve their service.
The data used in the study is high quality and drawn from just over ten thousand men and women, in roughly equal numbers. The data was harvested before the year 2000, long before online dating became a large percentage of the ways couples meet. The people in this study could not have used or been influenced by Tinder or similar swiping apps because they did not yet exist.
The format for the events usually constituted a free mingle and chat to begin, then a timed portion where each participant sits with another for 3 to 4 minutes of conversation, then switches partners until everyone has spoken with everyone else once. As participants switched places, they could mark a score card with a “yes” to note that they want their e-mail contact shared with the other person, allowing HurryDate to put the pair in touch later.
The study is very detailed and I encourage interested parties to read it completely. I will excerpt the findings I consider most relevant to this entry.
“We analyzed the percentage of ‘yeses’ that a person received from members of the opposite sex, a measure of desirability in this context. On average, men were chosen by 34% of women (S.D.=21%), and women were chosen by 49% of men (S.D.=22%)”
Without the raw data I don’t know if a Gini coefficient could be computed for the man to woman market inequality in this study. For the time being I can say there is a 15% absolute gap in the male to female interest. Proportionately this represents 50% more interest from men toward women. This doesn’t completely account for the distribution of “yeses“ between more or less attractive men and women, but I would guess it is in line with engagement data from the Hinge study.
“In the multiple regression, the primary predictors of men’s desirability were higher facial attractiveness, taller stature, younger age, closer to the middle (25) BMI, and interacting with a higher percentage of women of one’s own race. These five predictors accounted for 18.4% of the variance in the frequency with which men were selected. The other individual predictors failed to account for an additional 1% of the variance after these five were entered into the model.“
Facial and body attractiveness are self assessed in this study. They had a high correlation with receiving a “Yes“ and seem highly significant, but I am always skeptical of self report. Self rated personality traits had no significant impact on receiving a “yes.“
“While men at HurryDate events are strongly attracted to women who are thin, young, attractive, and of a similar race, women strongly prefer men who are physically attractive, tall, young, of medium build, and of a similar race. Women’s preferences are not strongly determined by a single trait, but, collectively, their preferences are driven by appearance.“
Measured factors that had no significant impact on attraction in this dating format include: Self-rated personality or congeniality, yearly income, religion, education, smoking preference, drinking preference, and sociosexuality (a self reported questionaire intended to measure openness to various kinds of sexual promiscuity).
As an aside, the HurryDate data also revealed what may be the earliest objective measure of the disadvantage that Asian men experience in the dating market. The combination of identifying as Asian and being a man was the only race-sex combination that conferred a consistent disadvantage. The data for other race-gender combinations conformed to in-group preference.
Two Modes of Mate Searching:
One of the authors of “HurryDate: Mate preferences in action“ previously published a paper in the year 2000 on the same data. It was titled “Stated Versus Revealed Mate Preferences“
One of the key messages of that paper is that there was a conflict in the behavior of people attending HurryDate events. They would choose specialty meetings for age ranges, ethnicity, and religion that fit with their stated preferences, but within the event, their partner matching was almost totally motivated by objective and consistent metrics of physical attractiveness. The author speculated there is a shift between a “long term mate psychology“ and a “short term mate psychology.” Something about the meeting environment shifted the participants into the short term psychology where physical attraction is the defining metric. The authors were reluctant to speculate widely on what caused the shift. Given the data I have from online dating, I am more willing to put forward a hypothesis.
I propose there are two psychological systems for mate searching. 1st, an abstract system, what the author called the “long term mate psychology.” 2nd a sensory system, what the author called “short term mate psychology.” The abstract system is like a mental map in space, time and socio-cultural connection. It helps a person find the right group in which to look for a partner. In the absence of physical stimuli, the abstract system is primary to some degree. Once a person can see a group they consider to be viable mates, the sensory system activates and displaces the abstract. The sensory system seems to govern physical attraction to individuals, supplanting the restrictions of the abstract system. I suspect there is a consciousness gap between the two systems. People understand their abstract system to a high degree, but have difficulty understanding the sensory system, rather than just responding to it.
The keys to activating the sensory mate selection system seem to be visually exposing people to a large selection pool of possible partners they have no previous hierarchical or social connections with, and allowing private communications between them. Hiding first move signs of attraction until both parties initiate will radically increases the already existing market inequality. In many ways HurryDate replicated the format that later became culturally dominant in the form of Tinder and other swipe based apps.
Conclusion:
What should be made of all this information? My central thesis is that the modern dating market has become globalized, privatized, and short term/sensory activated. This increases loneliness and isolation for both sexes on average, but the degree of isolation men experience is radically higher and their social value in this environment is substantially depreciated for innate economic and biological reasons.
My personal hope is not sympathy for men, or even for the imbalance of desire to be “fixed,“ but simply for truth itself. To acknowledge the reality. On the most basic grounds of physical attraction and affection, a large percentage of men are only made lovable, or at least tolerable to most women, through economic or practical necessity. Understanding reality gives both men and women the option to make reasoned choices.
I believe that our regression to a polygynous mating structure has other far ranging effects, but those are topics for future entries.
I’ll close with two quotes from articles I found helpful in writing this piece.
Robin Hanson: “My tentative best explanation for our different treatment of sex and income inequality is my favored explanation for most trends in values and attitudes over the last few centuries: increasing wealth has weakened the social pressures that turned foragers into farmers, and so we’ve been drifting back toward forager attitudes, at least outside work. Our distant forager ancestors did far more to redistribute material resources such as food than to redistribute sex. This made evolutionary sense: food variance killed, but sex variance apparently helped. By comparison with foragers, our recent farmer ancestors did less to redistribute material resources, and more to redistribute sex via promoting monogamous marriage.” https://www.overcomingbias.com/2018/06/comparing-income-sex-redistribution.html
Bradford Tuckfield: “As Western civilization declines or at least frays at the edges, the ways our culture has developed to deal with the gap in the attractiveness distribution are receding and dying. Young people enter the equality-inducing institution of monogamy later and later or not at all, spending more time in a chaotically unequal polygynous dating world. Monogamy itself is weaker, as divorce becomes easier and even married people often report encountering ‘dead bedrooms’ in which one or both spouses feel no obligation to give a partner who they do not regard as sufficiently attractive access to sexual experiences. Religious belief is in constant decline, and with it declines the belief in the dignity of celibacy or the importance of anything other than hedonism (sexual or otherwise)…
The result of these cultural changes is that the highly unequal social structures of the prehistoric savanna homo sapiens are reasserting themselves, and with them the dissatisfactions of the unattractive ‘sexually underprivileged’ majority are coming back. It is ironic that the progressives who cheer on the decline of religion and the weakening of ‘outdated’ institutions like monogamy are actually acting as the ultimate reactionaries, returning us to the oldest and most barbaric, unequal animal social structures that have ever existed. In this case it is the conservatives who are cheering for the progressive ideal of ‘sexual income redistribution’ through a novel invention: monogamy.” https://quillette.com/2019/03/12/attraction-inequality-and-the-dating-economy/