[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.