[qwerty9876]

They do want to date alright. When you interview a random person on the street they're lying both to the interviewer and themselves.

The problem for men is that the women generally don't think the average man is good enough.

The problem for women is that they're mostly lusting after and eventually, in the long run, sharing the same top 20% men.

If you're a man, it's a winner takes all market. Either almost all women desire you, or not a single one does.

Arranged marriage used to solve this.

[dang]

Please don't take HN threads into this gender flamewar internet talking point stuff. It's bloody tedious, and we've all heard it all enough times already.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[awaythrowwwww]

I see the "women go after 20% of men" line repeated over and over again as if it's some sort of self-evident truth. Aside from the fact that people who spew this line generally go on to justify why women's agency should be reduced ("enforced monogamy" or whatever that means), I have never seen any evidence for this stat. And no, how people behave on dating sites is not an accurate representation of social dynamics at large. It takes a certain kind of personality to go on dating sites and American men and women on Okcupid don't represent all men and women in the world. Dating apps also highly bias the way you engage people with undisclosed algorithms and shady practices aiming at maximizing your time on their apps. They don't have people's best interests at heart and influence them as part of their business model.

But seriously, think about the implications of these numbers: do 8 women just patiently wait in line for 2 men, doing literally nothing in the meantime while the remaining 8 men just stare at their feet or something? Is it something that people think actually happens in real life?

[FabHK]

It is well established, from what I gather, that in many species, most (=more than half of the) ancestors (of the extant population) are female. For most of human history, most women had children, while most men did not have children. So, that is something that happened in real life.

[awaythrowwwww]

Are you implying that our ancestors have had only as many sexual relations as they had children?

[FabHK]

No. Are you implying that there is a systematic difference between men and women in the ratio of sexual relations and children?

[awaythrowwwww]

I don't understand what you said. I also don't understand what children have to do with this and how they relate in any way to the amount of sex one may have beyond "once or twice".

If anything, our evolutionary history indicates a promiscuous lifestyle with everyone having sex with everyone else and post-spermatic competition.

[scarmig]

I mean, the 80/20 rule is seen in all kinds of places. Probably the top 20% [0] of men are involved in the 80% of heterosexual sexual couplings, with the remaining 80% of men being involved in the other 80%.

Where the stat kind of fails flat is that the same is true of the top 20% of women.

That said, the model (with no statement being made of how much that model reflects reality) being described is sequential monogamy. One of the top 20% men will continuously have one or two partners, switching them out for new ones; the rest of the men will only rarely get a partner; and women will fall between those two. Matching them percentile-to-percentile, the average number of new partners in some timespan for a given percentile for women will be larger for women than for men, up until some crossover percentile X% at which point men will have more partners.

I do think that if a person's primary mode of dating is through online apps, they end up with a skewed mental model of what dating is like. They are, however, already the main mode of new relationships being formed, and perhaps are still increasing in importance.

[0] "Top 20%" being defined as the 20% of men who have the most sexual partners

[awaythrowwwww]

"I mean, the 80/20 rule is seen in all kinds of places"

Sorry, repeating the same point won't make it any more true. Still haven't seen any evidence for this stat, only American stereotypes.

It's hard to track people's sex lives for obvious logistical/ethical reasons, but the most accurate study I've read on that was about teenagers in a high-school in a small rural town, so a closed environment that's easy to control. Forgot the link, will track it down if you're interested. But basically the "sex encounter" graph was fairly evenly spread and evenly balanced between men and women. Sure enough there were "clusters" but they were engaged with each other, not monopolizing 80% of everyone.

As it turns out, if your social circle is made up of sociosexually unrestricted people, everyone involved is going to have lots of sex. If it's made up of restricted people, few people are going to have encounters. But one person or two keeping all women in a sort of "serial monogamous schedule" while they do liteally nothing else? That doesn't make sense and I've never seen it happen, nor have I read any actual scientific study about this.

[qwerty9876]

Dating in real life within a small(ish) social circle and modern online dating where the available pool is literally millions of people is completely different

[awaythrowwwww]

Online dating is a tiny, tiny blip in the world of dating. Dating itself is a uniquely American practice and a tiny, tiny blip in the world of sociosexual dynamics. People meet, hook up with and bond with each other in all sorts of creative ways that goes way beyond Tinder, Bumble and Okcupid. If your only outlook on this stuff is through the lens of apps owned by shady companies optimizing for user engagement, you're going to have a skewed and miserable worldview.

[qwerty9876]

Online dating is the only dating for many young people nowadays. Alcohol used to be a major factor in finding a partner but young people are drinking less and less by the year.

The social skills of the youth are also getting worse due to smartphones, leading to less interaction in schools at workplaces etc

[FabHK]

Two objections:

1. The 80/20 rule is a rule of thumb that happens to apply in many fields, but you can't take it as a general law and stipulate that "Probably the top 20% [0] of men are involved in the 80% of heterosexual sexual couplings". It's an empirical question.

2. "the same is true of the top 20% of women". No, probably not. The statistics for men and women look quite different (which goes to show that you can't just apply the 80/20 "rule" willy-nilly).

[scarmig]

Yes, empirical data is necessary for both, and it exists for both (I'm sure people will be posting that data, and I'm too lazy to look it up myself), but I'd bet an arbitrary amount of money that the top 20% of men get closer to 80% of the couplings than 20% of the couplings. It's an almost equally good bet that the top 20% of women get closer to 80% of the couplings than 20% of the couplings.

[kerng]

That 80/20 comes from Tinder sharing stats a couple of years back. Same was done by other dating sites with similar outcome. But that is probably not the only source for it.

[partisan]

I suspect the same is happening here in the US as well. There’s a growing “incel” population who are shunned because they don’t meet standard definitions of beauty or social fitness. The problem compounds as men become less and less confident about their prospects which leads to behavior like the one described in the article.

[qwerty9876]

It has a lot to do with smartphones and socialization moving online.

Firstly, the way you interact with and judge strangers is completely different to the way you behave with your friends who you've known for 10 years. The us vs them tribal mentality is built into our brains. Random people are considered as disposable as you don't have any attachment to them and can effectively never see them again in your life if you choose so. Smartphones allow us to instantly tap into an infinite pool of strangers.

Secondly, social media lets us see the lives of the top 0.1% every day. Beforehand you lived in your small filter bubble and didn't know any better. Most people don't look like or hang around with fitness stars or male models in real life. But when you follow a ton of them on Instagram and see their photos daily, your mindset and standards start to change.

Third, the amount of choices online is effectively limitless and a "candy store" effect happens. Why would you pick an "ok" candy when there's 100 brands to pick from that taste like heaven in your mouth?

[voltagex_]

The "incel" population also manage to be a self fulfilling prophecy.

It's a little dramatic, but https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fD2briZ6fB0 explains it well.

[naveen99]

Are you sure ? There are multiple dimensions for competition between men. Money, power, intelligence, artistic talent can transcend looks to some degree for example.

[luckylion]

I believe the stats mentioned are from Tinder data where everything but looks has little to no influence. Given that most people aren't outliers regarding money, power, intelligence or artistic talent, that probably don't play as large a role in the general population either.

[freddie_mercury]

No data, no citations, implying other people are lying, and mostly just a vaguely misogynistic incel rant. HackerNews deserves better quality comments.

[_Microft]

Where are these guys who have five women?

Certainly not in the environments that I frequent and not in my circle of friends either. Lots of normal couples, though.

[qwerty9876]

It's called a filter bubble. Imagine a retail worker going "where are these people who are millionaires? Certainly not in the environments that I frequent and not in my circle of friends either. Lots of normal working class people, though"

If you want to find these people, they will be at the night club. In the gym locker room. In the suggestion list of your Instagram feed.

[voltagex_]

Careful there - that's some of the same lines that the redpillers use.

And really, arranged marriage as a "solution"? Really?

[roenxi]

> And really, arranged marriage as a "solution"? Really?

I'm not sure that gp would be the person to implement it, but if the problem is a literal read of the headline then arranged marriages are a reasonable solution. I might be about to learn some, but I'm not aware of any compelling argument that arranged marriage + liberal approach to divorce wouldn't work well vs the western-style dating system.

Something like half of marriages (major Anglosphere countries) end in divorce,and there are some extremely well grounded stereotypes suggesting that people under the age of 30 don't make great long-term decisions. Self-assessing your prospects as a young person is also difficult; there isn't a lot of life experience to fall back on.

In principle it is better for people to organise themselves personally. But if that isn't working out, then a more communal effort is a reasonable fallback. It probably wouldn't lead to worse outcomes.

[iguy]

In the West the previous system was not arranged marriages, it was just monogamy.

If the "top 20%" (in the example above) married the opposite "top 20%" and this permanently removed them from the pool of available young people, then the matching could proceed on the rest. But if instead they form temporary bonds, then the system is more complicated, and you can have a state where (perhaps) the top 50% of one side take turns with the top 20% of the other. By "take turns" (apologies if it's a strange phrase) I mean both medium term dating and marriage with divorce, both common patterns now (e.g. some people are coupled most years of their 20s, some just a few).

[dqybh]

"Red pillers say X, hence X is false" doesn't sound like an argument. There are also statistics that support this point of view, namely https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19601600 which was discussed a month ago.

I always feel like this is swept under the carpet because 1) victims are male, and who cares about males, and 2) there is no easy solution to it.

[voltagex_]

Did not say anything about the post being false, just that the claims need to be investigated further as /r/incel is not a healthy place.

[stonogo]

"victims" of what?