[darkengine]

This articulates something that feels quite truthful, but one has to take care not to assume that every sexual phenomenon is biological.

For example in the States, in matching tools like group dating events and dating apps, men typically outnumber women by a sizeable margin. One could ascribe this to biology (with women as the choosing sex, like we see in a lot of primates and other species). I had to reconsider this when I saw some pictures from a group dating event among Chinese international students at my university, in which the women outnumbered the men! I was told by a Chinese person this wasn't uncommon for such events in China. I found out later that group dating events in Japan are similar in terms of gender balance as well.

I would very much like to hear some hypotheses for the reasons for what seems to be a pretty big cultural difference. To me it casts a bit of doubt on the author's narrative of "women have it and men want it" -- in some cultures, it seems like women want it too.

[rrrrrrrrrrrryan]

A small gender imbalance can become greatly magnified. For example, in a hypothetical town of 100 hetero adults comprised of 55 men and 45 women, perhaps 40 women will decide to settle down with the best 40 men into happy committed relationships. The 15 remaining single men will be left to compete for the 5 remaining women. Here, a population-wide gender ratio of 55:45 turns into a dating-pool gender ratio of 3:1.

Blink 182 snuck a lyric into one of their songs that I think describes what's been happening in the American dating scene: "Nobody likes you when you're 23." People in college generally like dating other people in college, but after graduating, women tend to prefer to date someone a few years older than them who has their life a bit more together, an established career, might be a notch more mature, etc.

This leaves a permanent glut of guys in their early-to-mid twenties who nobody really wants to date, so they clog up all the dating apps and throw off the gender ratios. These guys should probably be pairing up with older women (where a similar glut exists), but for whatever reason, I suspect most younger men and older women aren't much interested in each other.

[csa]

> These guys should probably be pairing up with older women (where a similar glut exists),

I was going to say this if you didn’t.

The dynamics can be weird at times, but it works. I think more men in their early 20s should give this a go.

[temp93]

Have you tried this? Obviously, law of small numbers and whatnot, but as an early-20s male who's gone on multiple dates with older women, I repeatedly felt disrespected or ignored in conversation. It's as if I bored them. Some outright told me they prefer to date men older than them.

And maybe I'm boring! But when I date younger women this doesn't happen. So, in my experience, this does not work and I won't be trying again soon.

[csa]

> Have you tried this?

Yes, when I was in my early 20s.

I dated several women between 28 and 35.

As I mentioned before, the dynamics can get weird. Things that someone in their early 20s occupy their thoughts with are often very different than someone in their 30s.

That said, we all figured out how to make the most of our time together, and the sex was really good. I’m not going to pretend like these were deep relationships — that was not what I was looking for, and I don’t think that was their focus either. The focus was mostly companionship and intimacy, and I think that we accomplished our goals on that front.

[willsoon]

Here's another lyrics:

>They only want you when you are seventeen >When you are twenty-one >You are not fun

[moonlighter]

Ladytron, Seventeen ;-)

[vidarh]

> but after graduating, women tend to prefer to date someone a few years older than them who has their life a bit more together, an established career, might be a notch more mature, etc.

This is one those things that's important to keep in mind. If we compared like for like a 20-something and a 40-something man, the 20-something many would probably do very well.

But a 40-something man have had 20 extra years to learn how to interact with women, gain experiences, gain education, advance a career, so it's rarely a like for like comparison.

I mean, I personally can't blame the women who rejected me when I was younger. I know exactly what I was like.

Of course some will have physically decayed, but the spread of womens physical preferences for men is pretty wide, and many men still look more attractive to a large proportion of women in their 40's than their 20's.

> This leaves a permanent glut of guys in their early-to-mid twenties who nobody really wants to date, so they clog up all the dating apps and throw off the gender ratios. These guys should probably be pairing up with older women (where a similar glut exists), but for whatever reason, I suspect most younger men and older women aren't much interested in each other.

This is also massively exacerbated by dating apps that have no interest in redressing the issue, by allowing womens match queues to build up to the point that most of the women you swipe on will never see your profile, and allowing people to keep swiping on huge number of people in one go.

E.g. my ex wife told me at one point that she'd once signed up for Tinder's premium service out of curiosity and found she had several thousand matches outstanding. It's in Tinders interest to keep showing women who keep getting swiped even as their queues grow large enough that they'll never work their way through those queues.

At the same time this number is massively artificially inflated also because those most struggling to get a match are incentivised to keep trying to match with a huge number of people.

If these apps cared about their users and only showed profiles to other users that didn't have a huge queue of outstanding matches, and also put caps on the number of outstanding/unseen swipes, it wouldn't improve the number of matches much, but it would likely increase the proportion of swipes that leads to matches by drastically reducing the number of swipes.It would also show users who are actually realistically available. Maybe it'd make more people widen their search criteria.

Of course the problem with this is that it runs completely counter to the interests of dating apps, which are best served by encouraging desperation to get people to pay for premium services.

[mleonhard]

I am building a dating app that prioritizes UX over short-term profitability. The roadmap includes this feature, matching users with people who are likely to respond and preventing users from getting too many or too few connections.

[vidarh]

Good luck to you with that. I hope you succeed, but I also fear that it's a really tough one because the lifetime value of a dating app user is pretty low to start with (most people are only active for a few months, and many never come back - you can see this in the pricing structures for these apps where the per-month fees for premium services drop off drastically with longer periods, and where some offer lifetime memberships that cost only a few months worth of individual upgrades). On the upside, if you manage the PR well, pushing the angle that it's quality and connections that matters and that your competition are all borderline scams in how they pretend you have a chance with far more people than will ever see your profile might well get you enough attention to keep user acquisition costs low.

Just don't sell out to Match like everyone else seems to be doing...

[AnimalMuppet]

Well, but that clears up for that cohort of guys, doesn't it? They get older (and hopefully get their act somewhat more together), and then the younger women are interested in them.

[rrrrrrrrrrrryan]

Yes, exactly - it's just an explanation for why it seems like there is a big pool of not-yet-married men chasing a small pool of not-yet-married women on dating apps. It's literally what's happening: as long as older men prefer to date women younger than themselves, and younger women prefer to date men a bit older than themselves, and there is a hard divide between the college and post-college dating worlds, single men will outnumber single women, and the dating app experience will be vastly different between genders.

[Aella]

Article author here (also I wrote that article a while ago and I don't remember if it's good or not)

In the China example, I'd guess there's other factors. Women do tend to compete and men tend to be choosers in some circumstances; the 'women as selectors' thing is a result of certain conditions that are super common, but not absolutely true always.

My dominant hypothesis here is maybe that "dating" in asian cultures is a prerequisite to something that benefits the woman over the man (e.g., more likely to end in marriage than sex). It's common to see this in very conservative cultures where sex before marriage is strictly forbidden; what a guy can look forward to going on a date is finding a woman to settle down with, which is less advantageous to him than in western cultures where he can have sex without commitment.

[csa]

> It's common to see this in very conservative cultures where sex before marriage is strictly forbidden; what a guy can look forward to going on a date is finding a woman to settle down with, which is less advantageous to him than in western cultures where he can have sex without commitment.

Hmmm… interesting hypothesis, possibly directionally correct, but the details are off by quite a bit imho.

1. Neither China nor Japan are particularly conservative about sex, specifically in terms of sex before marriage.

2. The issue about what the hoped for outcome with dating is closer to accurate, but with caveats. If people, especially relatives, know about the date, then there will be non-stop pressure about marriage. Sometimes that pressure is hopeful and positive, and sometimes it is critical and negative. If it’s more of an anonymous date (in that family are in the dark), very common in the larger cities like Tokyo or Osaka, then there is much less pressure from family and (sometimes) friends.

3. Sex without commitment is trivially easy in both Japan and China, especially in cities. One has to pass the relatively low threshold of the woman’s anti-slut defense (hate to use this “red pill” term, but this is exactly what it is), which is usually as simple as treating the woman with at least a modicum of respect.

4. A lot of single women in Japan and China have two goals in dating. The first is the potential to meet someone who will provide them with equal or greater status than they currently have. Often time this is a very high barrier, since being an office worker or business owner while having minimal living expenses while living at home can be a pretty posh life. Second, when they realize that the pool of well-off, nice, fun men is relatively small, they start seeking sex dates more aggressively (and sometimes surreptitiously due to family).

5. From the guy’s side, dating can be tricky. Dating that leads to a path of marriage can get very expensive very quickly (courting, weddings, marriage, and kids can all be very expensive). Dating for sex/companionship is doable for the guys who are good at it, but there is that small issue of where. Again, casual dating can get expensive quickly. People get creative, and if you’ve lived in Japan or China you probably know what I’m talking about, but there’s nothing easy about it. Rarely as easy as bringing a woman back to your place, which is very common in the US.

[darkengine]

I definitely think you are on to something. However, while I don't know about China, in Japan I do know that premarital sex is not stigmatized and even first-date sex is not unheard of. It's true that marriage is seen as a benefit to women in Japanese society (women face severe career barriers in Japan), however I am hesitant to paint it in terms of "women date/provide sex just so they can get married," given not only their attendance at matching events, but also the prevalence of host clubs, yumejoshi, and other symbols of female sexuality that don't seem to be as common in the West. Women don't get anything out of that type of thing other than fun.

[lhorie]

Just looking at number of people from each sex in a group date scenario most certainly doesn't tell you much about the big picture in a culture.

In east asian cultures, there's a very strong pressure for females to get married and have children. In China, there's also cultural desire to have male children - to the point people will abort girls enough to make a lopsided distribution of 51.3% males vs 48.7% females (by comparison, US has 49.2% males vs 50.8% females). Coupled with increased female participation in the work force over the past few decades, this leads to many females having unrealistically high expectations for romantic partners, or rebelling against the notion of being involved in a romantic relationship at all. Another thing worth mentioning is that in east asian cultures, femininity is also greatly associated with homemaking skills like cooking. See for example the concept of Yamato Nadeshiko in Japan.

So for females there, there's a really complex dynamic of parents pressuring young women to marry (either because of old fashioned marital values or because they selfishly want grandchildren, or both), ideologies that men are the head of the household and/or the carriers of family legacy and conversely the idea that ideal women are good homemakers, contrasted with an unprecedented level of financial freedom and choice of partners for females.

If anything, I think looking at east easian cultures only reinforces the OP's argument that there is inherent lopsidedness in cultural values and that men and women behave in a myriad of ways that can be explained well by cultural perception of gender roles.

[bradlys]

I’d compare birth rates of men to women. Comparing number of men and women existing isn’t super great. The number of women grows with age because men die younger for various reasons. In the USA, men outnumber women until age 40. Guess what ages men and women tend to look for relationships? Below 40.

Men are birthed more than women just naturally and exist in greater numbers in the world until about age 40. (Many men dying due to suicide and suicide related incidents which don’t get labeled as suicide)

[lhorie]

You can look up the age breakdown[0]. For ages 20-30, there's over 110 males for every 100 females in China. That's 1 in 10 males that cannot physically get a female partner of similar age (and recall, we're talking about one of the most populous countries in the world). Point being: anecdata about group date events is dwarfed by population statistics.

[0] https://statisticstimes.com/demographics/country/china-sex-r...

[bradlys]

Yeah, that's also a fair way to go. I suggested birth rates because it's easier to go with for people rather than qualifying everything but a bunch of adjectives.

Stats for USA are not as depressing but are still not great for men under 40. https://statisticstimes.com/demographics/country/us-sex-rati...

It can be worse for individual cities as well - such as San Francisco - where the ratio is supposedly closer to 115-130:100 depending on how you slice the population. (e.g. if you select only for single people between 18-35 rather than including married couples in the stats)

[darkengine]

If women in east Asia actively seek out partners because they feel pressured to get married, could it also be said that men in the West actively seek out partners because being a single man is seen as loserish or otherwise low-status? I'd buy this being a part of it. I also don't want to discount more intrinsic motivations too. Most people have a sex drive regardless of any obligations felt from society -- that is an undoubtedly biological component.

[csa]

As someone who has lived in Japan and China, I can say that I have seen this happen.

I have also seen a similar phenomenon at Ivies (at the undergrad level) if you exclude the athletes, so it’s not even a race or national culture thing.

Imho, the short answer is that it is the way a large portion of that sub-population is raised - lots of study, very limited socialization (esp. wrt the males), very few positive male role models who are like them in home life or in popular culture.

[fivefifty]

Men do outnumber women on apps but I think you'll find it's actually very difficult these days to get men to attend dating events like speed dating even in western countries.

Why are men afraid of dating events - https://www.originaldating.com/blog/2015/6/18/why-are-men-af...

Speed-dating event in Membertou cancelled due to lack of men - https://www.saltwire.com/nova-scotia/lifestyles/speed-dating...

Art museum hosts a speed-dating night and only women show up - https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/la-ca-cm-speed-da...

The death of speed dating - https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/charly-lester/the-death-of-...

[vidarh]

> Why are men afraid of dating events - https://www.originaldating.com/blog/2015/6/18/why-are-men-af...

This article answers its own question in the rather insulting tone it takes. Why would men go to these events if the women who go there are dismissing most men as not "eligible"? Maybe it's true, but when that is the impression, it helps cement the stigma she describes.

It also, I think gets to the point that where women as described in the article often see thing like speed dating as a "girls' night out", to quote the article, to most men these kinds of events are purely functional. I would have considered going to speed dating events if I didn't find dates in other ways. But it's far down my list of things I'd consider, because it constrains the number of people I can interact with to a set of people where only a small number is likely to interest me from the outset. If your goal is to have a "night out" it might well be productive. If your goal is to meet someone to date, it's only productive if you struggle to introduce yourself and need a crutch to do so. And so you get the guys the article writer describes who have done this because introducing themselves is far out of their comfort zone.

[mdorazio]

I have no data to back this up beyond the anecdotal (ex. "Christmas cake" women stigma in Japan), but a possible explanation is ageism differences between the cultures. E.g. American men may be less age-selective than their Chinese or Japanese counterparts, which would naturally lead to gender composition changes in dating events that target people in demographics older than early 20s.

[the_only_law]

> which would naturally lead to gender composition changes in dating events that target people in demographics older than early 20s.

Do dating events in America target 20 something’s? Every one I’ve ever seen is nearly exclusively middle aged or retired divorcees

[svachalek]

No, but I think what they're getting at is that since these events are usually over 30 anywhere, you will see a lot more women show up in cultures that consider that age "undateable".

[darkengine]

The student dating event I described was among university students, so 18-22 age range. Japanese goukon are usually among the working crowd, but they're not exclusively for >30.

[AtlasBarfed]

The Theory of the Disposable Male is central to any discussion on gender politics, the sex/reproduction marketplace, and practical feminism/tolerance in society. It almost never is considered because it is somewhat sympathetic to the male gender.

The theory is most applicable to animal populations, but researchers in this field do think the human race was subjected to the same phenomenon so our instinctive social behavior is still subject to it, and of course the biological economy/energy of male sperm and female eggs/wombs is the same as most mammals.

Online dating matches the tenets/predictions. My only complaint with it is that it doesn't really address societal structure in humans once they are raising children. It's mostly a theory that explains "single culture" and animals with shorter lifespans or less shared rearing of offspring.

So for this group meetup, let's look at whether men or women decide it's worth it to go to it.

In this group meetup situation, men and women will immediately "rank" their opposing peer group. Everyone does this.

Of course certain members of the opposite sex will often quickly be apparent at the tops of the rankings, the (yes, tiresome) "alphas". The difference comes down to how men and women act on those rankings.

The women know they can find a man if they settle. Disposable Male theory states that basically 70-80% of women successfully procreate. But they will "hold out" for a higher value male since they can always walk down their ranking and find someone to fertilize them.

The ratio of successful male procreation per the Disposable Male is in the 20-30% range. So 70-80% of males in biological times were "dead ends".

Women operate with a 50% "desperation differential". And the only way the numbers line up, is that the high value men are procreating multiple times. Thus lower value women will have the opportunity to procreate with "higher value" men, or can walk down their choice list until they find someone.

In a group dating situation, this will probably lend to 30-60% of men realizing quickly that none of the women are interested in them. At all. They'll all wait out for a higher value, or go somewhere else to try to find another high value.

The lower value men know that less numbers / options / context / immediate ranking will benefit their chances. So don't show up to group events where you'll be stack ranked immediately, or there's no point in investing the time.

Now, modern (mostly) monogamy really messes with the instinctual behavior. Men likely have a much better shot at procreating, and women need to compromise a bit more to find a mate.

But man, when it comes to Tinder and the like, it is full one alpha males attracting most of the interest from women, and women ignoring men at their level. The old okcupid pre-match data seems to corroborate this quite well.

[eternalban]

hypothesis: Women in Asia are searching for husbands in Asia when dating.