I think this is exactly right. Apps like Tinder that normalized online "dating" (before the apps it was much less common among younger people) have allowed the "apex predator" men with good jobs/looks/personalities to have sex on demand with virtually unlimited numbers of women. This has also been made possible because a lot more women are now willing to be in non-exclusive sexual relationships at the beginning when they are first getting to know someone.
The data from old OK-Cupid studies clearly show that most women are only immediately attracted to a very small subset of men. It is these men who are having all the sex. Seems like a powder keg over time as the excluded men become bitter and forced to postpone getting married and starting a family. I believe many of these men will eventually find someone once enough of the women who are now rejecting them face biological realities and are forced to settle if they want to have children.
> It is these men who are having all the sex. Seems like a powder keg over time as the excluded men become bitter and forced to postpone getting married and starting a family. I believe many of these men will eventually find someone once enough of the women who are now rejecting them face biological realities and are forced to settle if they want to have children.
Yep. The problems will be generational. On one hand you have the possibility that the men are very aware of this problem, and any relationship they find will be tainted by knowing they weren't good enough to party with but good enough to marry.
But more important than that is the time a couple spends actually getting to know each other is greatly cut down. Which then impacts how the children are raised.
I wouldn't be surprised if we see an increase in divorce and/or single family rates over time.
> any relationship they find will be tainted by knowing they weren't good enough to party with but good enough to marry.
I am confused by this.... I would feel much better about myself knowing I was the one good enough to marry rather than the one who was only good enough to party with.
Ah, I feel this is because something deeper happened than simply "a small subset of men are monopolizing the sex marketplace", something more on the level of morality and ego than can be represented in concrete facts.
Specifically, I believe we've seen a devaluation and financialization of morality (what makes me a valuable person?) in a broader sense. Christopher Lasch caught the beginning of this back in the 70s, arguing that we now judge ourselves in terms of the views of our peer group rather than relative to an authority figure or multigenerational community.
The result is that sleeping around becomes a mark of virtue (at least, among men). This sentiment is at odds with more "traditional" forms of morality and virtue, particularly coming from religious traditions, and the resulting internal conflict can cause a lot of psychic distress, a lot of asking "who am I really?" and "am I really good enough, is she merely 'settling' for me?"
If you can navigate that conflict and feel satisfied that you were good enough to marry, then I applaud you for having a level head and for having your values in order. But I expect many men do not feel this way :(
Relationships are two-party affairs. What a man thinks of himself obviously affects how he behaves in a relationship but is not as important as the view that the woman has for him. This is what constitutes the basis of the relationship.
If there are no kids, then for a woman that has spent the best years of her life dating attractive alpha males, an unattractive male is never going to measure up.
Empirical evidence leads me to believe that kids can change that and be a stabilizing influence, bridging the gap between these models since both parties are able to make compromises by coming together and focusing on their kids.
The problem is your spouse will not really find you attractive sexually. She will be with you because you have money and are a good provider. She really wants to be with the guy she partied with in her younger years, not you.
That’s always been the case. People’s goals are different at different times during their life.
There’s always a transactional aspect to being in a relationship. Are you good looking enough, healthy enough, wealthy enough, well connected enough, emotionally connected, personality etc.
It may not be fruitful to frame a relationship exclusively in those pros and cons terms, but that’s the way nature has always worked.
Women are having a lot more sexual partners, a lot sooner in their lives, today than at any previous point in history.
This invalidates any historical models of sexual behavior.
You can very well imagine a woman in Victorian times, keeping her virginity until her arranged marriage (in less developed Western countries this was still the case up until the 70s and 80s) to an average, physically unattractive male. The fact that he was the only male she knew sexually could very well provide the basis of a stable and healthy, loving longterm relationship, assuming he wasn't completely incompetent in giving her pleasure. This woman has acquired her model of a sexual relationship from the only man she ever knew. She never has a chance to find better, to compare.
This is definitely no longer the case. Women in developed countries are spending the formative and best years of their lives with multiple sex partners thus developing expectations and also reinforcing their baseline models and sexual norms acquired from said interactions. An average physically unattractive male looking for a stable longterm relationship faces very slim odds with this type of woman -very prevalent in the West- today unless he performs massive compromises and lowers his requirements.
I don't want to sound regressive or socially conservative, but this obviously does not bode well for the future of these societies. A permanent, ever-rising underclass bombarded daily with norms of sexual desire and models that it can never meet. One should expect the incel phenomenon -still at its infancy- to drastically intensify. Life-like sex robots may alleviate part of the problem but are probably at least 50 years away. Let us hope that VR comes together in providing alternate meaning-generating realities, sooner.
>An average physically unattractive male looking for a stable longterm relationship faces very slim odds with this type of woman -very prevalent in the West- today unless he performs massive compromises and lowers his requirements.
Do you mean an average physically unattractive male has a better chance of acquiring an average physically unattractive mate?
The mere idea that a society where a woman may have multiple sexual partners to compare against and the idea and that a man may need to exceed the standard "completely incompetent in giving her pleasure" in order to win her affections is inherently unstable reads a lot like someone claiming heavier than air flight is impossible in the 1980s. It's utterly inexplicable. People have been having sex with more than one person for a LOT longer than the 80s. What did happen in the 80s is the beginning of a massive rise in inequality that began with the top 10% earning 26% of all income in 1980 to where we are at the present time where they earn half while the bottom 50% share around 10% between them down from 2O%.
What you are framing as a crisis caused by too much female sexual choice is in fact a crisis of inequality wherein females are choosing "not poor" and the group "poor" expands year after year. Vastly more females escape this trap because men overwhelmingly value youth and attractiveness while women want people with some degree of complimentary earning power.
More recently what has happened is that the internet has allowed more niche groups to connect with their fellows. Incels are a group not of those who aren't getting any but rather those who aren't getting any who have decided to blame society in general and more particularly women. They are fetishizing both self hate and hatred of women. In the context of their in group communication their behavior and statements that would in larger contexts be considered aberrant are normalized by familiarity because people confuse repetition with truth.
If you want to decrease the negative impact of this behavior address inequality, make mental health more broadly available at zero cost, keep shutting down such communities and start putting people in prison who publicly call for acts of violence against others.
Driving evil and maladaptive behavior into hiding means less people will encounter it. Thus fewer will let its poison turn their pain into evil, or begin to view it as normal.
Wishing women boinked fewer men is a complete failure of analysis.
TL;DR Unprecedented availability of multiple vectors that enable promiscuity today, unprecedented self-reinforcing feedback loops that strengthen specific models of behavior.
We haven't seen anything yet, this is just the beginning.
> People have been having sex with more than one person for a LOT longer than the 80s.
This is not accurate for less-developed countries, which is what I mentioned. I've lived in eastern Europe during the 70s and the 80s, the social stigma for a woman having multiple sex partners before marrying was enormous. Doesn't mean it didn't happen but it was definitely not the norm. Today, teenage girls in the west go through sexual partners like they go through cell phones.
> What you are framing as a crisis caused by too much female sexual choice is in fact a crisis of inequality wherein females are choosing "not poor" and the group "poor" expands year after year.
Income inequality is a very weak factor and does not explain female hypergamy today. Spend two weeks living on campus in any US college watching poor but extremely attractive male students and you can validate that for yourself. Money does not buy love or sexual attraction. Spend some time on incel forums reading their posts, assuming you can see past the hate and lingo, and you will realize that most/all of them crave these lost-youth experiences. They don't necessarily just want a partner in their 30s or 40s, but to feel wanted and loved in their 20s. Once they realize that opportunity is gone forever, they have to pick up the pieces.
> Incels are a group not of those who aren't getting any but rather those who aren't getting any who have decided to blame society in general and more particularly women.
This is very superficial since you are not examining the root causes. Look at advertisements today, movies, sports, Facebook, Instagram, reality shows, series on Netflix. We are bombarded by models of sexual attraction every minute of every day, models that are so skewed towards a specific minority that your average physically unattractive male literally stands no chance whatsoever. It's these projected models that strongly reinforce female hypergamy (for both attractive and unattractive women) while at the same time pushing the unwanted males further into the abyss. The worst of all possible worlds. Additionally, not only have all artificial limiters (e.g. social stigmas and pressure towards non-promiscuity) been lifted but accelerators like Tinder have wreaked havoc. Carnage on a societal level.
> If you want to decrease the negative impact of this behavior address inequality, make mental health more broadly available at zero cost, keep shutting down such communities and start putting people in prison who publicly call for acts of violence against others.
If you take the OkCupid studies seriously (you should), then you'll realize how antithetical to any sort of progress your recommendations are. You can't hide this problem or explain it away by shouting mental illness. This is a huge chunk of the population at large and if you miss or deliberately ignore the root causes because they tend to make you uncomfortable then your approximation of reality is completely off and any sort of analysis that you're performing invalid. Look at smoking in its heyday. Imagine being blasted by "smoking is cool" ads, watching most of "successful" society smoke whilst you not being able to afford even a single cigarette. How would that make you feel? Is that a mental illness on your part? Is it not conditioning massively amplified by very specific agents and societal effects? Should you just learn to "deal with it?"
Now consider that smoking is neutral in terms of self-perception of how other people see you compared to sexual rejection by other living, breathing humans. The psychological damage of realizing one is not wanted can be immense. We are talking about a core biological need and for the vast majority of people reason to exist. Surrogate activities (video games, traveling, hobbies of all sorts) are the counterbalance but they're not yet good enough to make this problem disappear.
OkCupid research opened the floodgates but there will be additional studies like the one linked here and societal effects coming home to roost (as it's been clearly happening). At some point, those effects will be too obvious to be ignored or explained away. Let us hope that ways to manage this catastrophic problem manifest, before the ticking time bomb goes off.
People in the former oppressor class always frame societal upheaval in terms of disorder caused by the moral failings of the former victim in this case your talk of female promiscuity.
After we freed the slaves im sure lower income laborers too poor to have been responsible for owning anyone were put off by having to compete for jobs.
Incels long for an imaginary time when naive women would have accepted their advances and been happy instead of chosen men like jobs or cars by comparing specs.
They rationalize away any actual responsibility for their own lives by pretending it's all down to immutable factors like height, race, facial structure and mock fellow incels for trying to improve health, self, or wealth because this would invite self blame for not doing so.
Inequality is a legitimate concern but this evil self hate isn't on society. We will have to help everyone we can with mental health support and for those who commit acts of violence and terror we have bullets and jail cells.
Do you have a better idea or would you like to indulge yourself in more nostalgia for a world that was worse for everyone except middle class white men?
> Inequality is a legitimate concern but this evil self hate isn't on society.
Of course this self-hate is on society, to imply otherwise because your morals won't allow you to see the facts is to stick your head in the sand. Imagine having a heroin addict on withdrawal surrounded by people using heroin. Blasting him day and night with models that reinforce heroin usage and then blaming him for not being able to cope.
> Do you have a better idea or would you like to indulge yourself in more nostalgia for a world that was worse for everyone except middle class white men?
You didn't address any of my points and suggestions and you're implying that I'm "nostalgic about the past?" Is that really what you got from everything I wrote? Let me put it in plain terms. We have a serious problem here and ignoring it because it's confronting and/or treating it with "bullets and jail cells" is not going to make anything better.
Locking up or shooting terrorists in the act of murdering people puts a hard limit on the number of people they can murder. This is like saying violence never solved anything while ignoring WW2.
I repeat myself but what specifically would YOU like to do about the problems you yourself have outlined. I think mental health support and fighting inequality are reasonable suggestions what is your counter offer. If you ran the world how would you fix it.
While personally I applaud this new-found freedom for women, and while I hope we'll figure out ways to adapt, I do share your fear to a slight degree. Maybe I'm too optimistic, but I really think we can adapt.
I think most of my worries stem from an increase in reactionary politics combined with a growing group of young, 'have-not' males. That seems to me like a particularly bad combination.
Has it? The question is not if people change. The question is who they choose and why - now, versus before.
> There’s always a transactional aspect to being in a relationship. Are you good looking enough, healthy enough, wealthy enough, well connected enough, emotionally connected, personality etc.
That doesn't explain the decrease in sex. As a group people are supposedly still about the same.
> It may not be fruitful to frame a relationship exclusively in those pros and cons terms, but that’s the way nature has always worked.
If we talk about humans, the article talks about the changing data. The proposed explanation is that views have changed. You're saying that views always have been like that. So there is a difference in data.
I think you have a very limited understanding of sexual attraction... it is not static. It can grow for someone as you get to know them and spend time with someone.
It's always interesting to watch my attraction for someone who was really hot up front start to slide down the more they talk, or the other way around. Personality is so much more important than level of initial attraction.
Raw sexual attraction is instant and involuntary, not cerebral, cultivated. It doesn't depend on anything other than a person's biology. Looks, smell, maybe other biological factors that are hard to quantify. If a woman is with you for other reasons, then she's just not into you sexually and you're playing a game in nightmare mode if you're trying to establish an LTR with an attractive female that has other opportunities or keep it going without issues (e.g. cheating). That does not mean that other slow-burn factors such as intellectual chemistry or friendship do not apply, but it does mean that they work synergistically and on top of the raw animalistic part which is the foundation.
This is all based on decades of empirical observations. On the plus side for men, it is definitely possible to learn to detect this extremely reliable indicator. On the minus side, one needs a lot of experience with many different women, which isn't the case with average, physically unattractive males.
There is something to this, but it depends a lot on attitude. It will be true for someone who's entitled or an ingrate, and everyone should run fast and long away from such a person. There are a lot of them.
On the other hand, people who have suffered at length can be quite grateful to find a decent person. Someone like that can make a great wife (or husband).
Relationships are hard enough as it is, imagine stacking the deck further against you by going for someone that's psychologically unstable. Definitely neither smart nor wise, at least for the rational type given the massive time & effort investments required.
The guy who is among the top 10% of men is the one who is good enough to party with AND good enough to marry. However, though this guy has a plethora of women at his disposal, he can only select one for marriage.
For the women who weren't chosen, their first choice guy is no longer an option, so they have to settle for a plan B (that is, a less desirable man).
So even if you were "good enough" to marry, you weren't first choice in that either.
You're premise is based on a fallacy... that there is a strict ordering of men, and women all have the same order.
A marriage is about finding a person who fits with you, and you can build a life together. That is not the same person for everyone. My best partner is not the same as your best partner.
I never said there was a strict ordering of men. But there are characteristics that will make one man more desirable than another (e.g. good looks, height, wealth, social status, intelligence, etc.). How these factors rank may vary depending on the woman.
You say that "a marriage is about finding a person who fits with you, and you can build a life together". So take the viewpoint from a pragmatic woman's perspective; wouldn't these aforementioned traits be desirable because the man who possesses them is a candidate more likely to provide the best life to build together?
First, wouldn't everything you said about men also apply to women? How is it different?
Second, there are a lot of other traits that aren't inherently good or bad; things like "do you like going out on the weekends or staying in" and "does your communication style work with mine?" and "are the things you are good at complimentary to the things I am good at?"
My best friend and his wife get along great, but both my wife and I can't imagine living our lives like they do. I am sure they feel the same about us.
> First, wouldn't everything you said about men also apply to women? How is it different?
This thread has been discussing the implications of the observation quoted in the article: "Sexual activity was largely unchanged among unmarried women, along with no notable decline among gay men, researchers reported."
So it's unclear what point you're trying to make in relation to that.
Your premise omits the possibility that there is correlation among the diverse orderings that women apply to men. Or even barring that, that they don't converge to an aggregate ordering which is what GP is explaining that men experience.
Some traits will be clearly desirable, but so many aren't. Introvert/extrovert, opinions on how to raise kids, family goals, what sort of place you like to live (rural/urban), political views, conversation style, etc. Those are going to vary greatly amongst people.
Yes, some preferences vary widely, while others are more narrow, such as height, income, seniority/authority, and facial structure. In aggregate there is a clear spectrum from desirable to less desirable along those dimensions. It's definitely true that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, or attraction more generally, but it's hard to believe that being 1.60 m tall won't make you (in general) less attractive as a man.
While it might be true, I’ve seen too many cases of infidelity and or dead bedrooms with relationships that didn’t had the former.
Also speaking from my own experience while I’ve experienced finding women more attractive as I got to know them better it wasn’t the same type of an attraction, as it wasn’t sexual but rather more complex in terms of seeing long term future possibilities and wanting to share experiences with them in order to enrich my own life, but it never really affected how physically attractive I found them.
Maybe I’m different, maybe men are different in general but at least for me I won’t settle for someone that doesn’t want to jump me or that I wouldn’t want to jump them to me it seems unnatural.
Sexual attraction is multifaceted, but by far the strongest and most important/longest-living aspect regarding the strength of a relationship is the biological component which is for all intents and purposes instant and present from the very beginning. If that's absent, you're definitely stacking the deck against you in a major way. I am not saying an LTR can't work, but you'll be putting in substantially more energy, time and effort to make it happen.
It's the difference between playing a game in easy vs nightmare mode.
This is all based on empirical observations. I am 55 years old, I've had more than 100 sexual partners in my life and a lot of relationships, some of them lacking the initial biological/animalistic sexual attraction factor I described here. I've been married twice, now divorced and in a long-term relationship with my partner. I have two daughters in their 20s.
It can. But is reliability really the #1 attribute for people out there? Most people want a partner who excites them and who makes them happy. If they're unreliable then that can be a problem but usually a very desirable person has reliability in addition to everything else. When you're settling - you're usually settling for someone who is at least reliable but isn't very exciting.
After dating lots of people, one of the major factors in what made me decide to build a life with my wife was that I could count on her to be a reliable partner. That is soooo huge when choosing someone you are going to build a family with. It is way more important than any sort of animal sexual attraction.
Why not? After 12 years of marriage I told my wife that and it cleared the air. We both knew it but it remained unsaid for so long and had been having an adverse affect on the relationship.
Yes, it was a tough and emotional week. But things are better out in the open and we have started to rebuild the relationship on love, not lust.
She did ask if I was having affairs. But I honestly said that I'm finished with sex now, I've just no time or interest in playing the chasing games. There are more important things in life.
On the other hand people might be a bit more experienced when they finally have kids. And they might even have better ways to evaluate their prospective parent-partner.
Some citations for your thesis below. To your last point, IMHO, you're going to continue to see a decline in the total fertility rate (US is roughly ~1.77 this year, lowest on record) as women shift from casual seeking in their 20s to relationship/nesting in their 30s and find the market for partners to be much smaller than they would've anticipated, while also nearing the end of natural fertility (fertility rates start to drop ~35 years old) [1].
> As I stated previously the average female “likes” 12% of men on Tinder. This doesn't mean though that most males will get “liked” back by 12% of all the women they “like” on Tinder. This would only be the case if “likes” were equally distributed. In reality, the bottom 80% of men are fighting over the bottom 22% of women and the top 78% of women are fighting over the top 20% of men. We can see this trend in Figure 1. The area in blue represents the situations where women are more likely to “like” the men. The area in pink represents the situations where men are more likely to “like” women. The curve doesn’t go down linearly, but instead drops quickly after the top 20% of men. Comparing the blue area and the pink area we can see that for a random female/male Tinder interaction the male is likely to “like” the female 6.2 times more often than the female “likes” the male. [2]
> The researchers determined that while men’s sexual desirability peaks at age 50, women’s starts high at 18 and falls from there. [3]
> “The age gradient for women definitely surprised us — both in terms of the fact that it steadily declined from the time women were 18 to the time they were 65, and also how steep it was,” said Elizabeth Bruch, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Michigan and an author of the study. [3]
> you're going to continue to see a decline in the total fertility rate as women shift from casual seeking to relationship/nesting in their 30s and find the market for partners to be much smaller than they would've anticipated
These women tend to be wealthier on average, and thus have access to various “artificial” methods for conception. Egg freezing is becoming mainstream.
True, but there's not that many as a percentage of their age cohort [1], and egg/embryo freezing combined IVF is no guarantee you can carry a fetus to term [2]. Maybe you can afford a surrogate (~$30k-120k depending on the arrangements), but the math continues to work against you as you age. This is the unfortunate medical reality, that you can buy possibilities but not guarantees. The amount of wealth you need to "hack" a family together (biologically and a support system after birth) in older age is significant.
I would very much be interested in stats on employees who use this benefit, and if they're unable to have kids in the future regardless of having their eggs frozen, regret their decision to prioritize their career over starting a family.
We had a friend over to our home, who earlier in life judged my partner for leaving a career to have children, and could not have a child of their own now. The regret during our conversation was palpable while she watched our children play in our backyard, and frankly it hurt my heart.
Maybe tinder isn't reality and many in fact most people meet each other outside of tinder. 78% of women aren't actually chasing the top 20% of men and are in fact available to meet outside of hook ups on tinder.
Reducing women to vaginas on legs that can't be obtained outside of tinder is a big part of why 1/3 not 80% of men aren't getting much play.
For other contributing factors I would look at generational differences in socialization and inequality.
Nowhere on the radar is "hypergammy" a piece of incel lingo not spoken but suggested.
Honesty I'm surprised to read this thread on hacker news instead of reddit.
Tinder is definitely real and used by the majority of young people living in big cities. I am in my late twenties and all my friends, male and female, used it at some point or another.
Whether people use it to find relationships is a different question. I did not use it for that, but some of my friends did... (or tried...)
However, your theory doesn't hold up. The study found that men who had part time employment, no employment, or were students were more likely to be sexually inactive. There isn't any data that suggests that those men are only using Tinder and failing or anything else you described.
If you define inequality in terms of employment or wealth, you may be right, but that does indeed still suggest the culprit is hypergamy actually as women select men with better employment prospects.
Women wanting a man with a job that pays enough not to live with mom isn't "hypergamy". The literal problem you are naming is inequality wherein an increasing minority can't afford a decent life despite working. It's not a defect in female choice its about the bottom 1/3 sharing a single digit percentage of the wealth and income. Females aren't all chasing the top 20% rich tall guys they are all chasing someone high enough on the fiscal totem pole to have something which is a lot broader than 20% and leaves 1/3 hung out to dry not 80%.
Female choice is rational our society is not. We cannot fix anything if we cannot even identify the problem.
That still is hypergamy. You are just stating that women have preferences. That is exactly what hypergamy means. That women have preferences that suit their own tastes. That is their prerogative.
What is not true though is that this is entirely an economic problem. If it were entirely economic, then why did sexual activity decrease for men but not women? Is that because men gave up? Are men disproportionately likely to self sabotage? Are men disproportionately likely to suffer from economic inequality than women? Do men not care about economic status in partners but women do?
It disproportionately effects men because it's much more acceptable for a lower status women who is at least somewhat physically attractive to set up shop in a higher status man's life than vice versa.
Furthermore men value youth far more than women do so a only moderately physically gifted 20 year old might be valued over her counterpart a dozen years older and twice as well off herself.
Young poor females are in a much better position to leverage their looks and youth.
Basically men pick boobs and youth and men pick status and ability to support and you have somehow identified the women as the parties making an irrational choice and labeled this hypergamy.
> It disproportionately effects men because it's much more acceptable for a lower status women who is at least somewhat physically attractive to set up shop in a higher status man's life than vice versa.
But it doesnt add up. Given that most relations are monogamous, both have as much sex as the other in a relation. So you either need a very high relationship turnover rate or sex outside of the relation to have this sex imbalance between genders.
Incomplete data doesn't need to line up especially when that data never supported 80% of men chasing 20% of the women in the first place. It supported 33% of young men being abstinent and a lesser number of females which is perfectly reasonably congruent with women getting involved with the remaining 67% of younger men and older men.
I also didn't say that men didn't have preferences either.
I don't think there is any disagreement so the word 'hypergamy' shouldn't be a dirty word.
However, I think the people expressing concern about female hypergamy are saying the same thing you are but that for men they might have broader taste and for women more narrow and that may lead to situations where vast swaths of men are un-dateable. I don't have any opinion on that scenario. I don't know much about it.
> The tendency for women to deceive men and leech money and resources off them.
> An evolutionary psychology theory that beta males and feminists refuse to look at or even acknowledge exists. They will usually blame the MGTOW and MRA community for making it up, but that just shows their lack of research, even though these same groups will tell their detractors and opponents to "do your own research" or "educate yourself".
The theory itself is the study that women seek higher status men and men with more resources to give her seed to the best possible mate. There is nothing inherently wrong with this, but left unchecked can cause societal problems.
> Evolutionary Psychology theory on the instinctual desire of humans of the female sex to discard a current mate when the opportunity arises to latch onto a subsequent mate of higher status due to the hindbrain impetus to find a male with the best ability to provide for her OWN offspring (already spawned or yet-to-be spawned) regardless of investments and commitments made to a current mate.
If good looking poor chicks and middle income+ chicks of all degrees of attractiveness want middle income+ men with acceptable social skills then poor men or people with bad hygiene, and or social skills will be left with the poor and unattractive portion of that Venn diagram.
Whats more the intersection of physically unappealing and poor is a much smaller group than JUST poor which is HUGE so not all of them will likely find mates.
If you want to bring up why don't the poor but reasonably attractive dudes just interact with the more financially well off females this certainly happens but it is a MUCH less successful strategy for a man.
>Maybe tinder isn't reality and many in fact most people meet each other outside of tinder. 78% of women aren't actually chasing the top 20% of men and are in fact available to meet outside of hook ups on tinder.
No, Tinder is reality. It's naive to believe that just because it's a platform that facilitates communication and hookup that it's somehow disconnected from reality in it's own little microcosm or niche.
All Tinder does is reflect human behavior. Between Tinder, OkCupid and N other apps you have more than enough data needed to draw some very damning conclusions. Way beyond "more than enough", actually.
People who reject reality and live in their own little fantasy worlds will find themselves in for a bad surprise when they come to.
I mentioned this in a post further below - this is not new knowledge. Long before online dating apps, in the 90s, there existed alt.seduction.fast newsgroup that outlined all of this for people. Read Neil Strauss' "The Game" for some chilling truths, and then bring yourself back to 2020 and look at what is happening today. It isn't much different.
It’s only my anecdotal experience but part of the reason for me is that a lot of men are not even trying (edit: anymore) and simply more or less consciously gave up. In my days even as a nerd I tried to fit in, go to parties, bars, tried to hang with popular guys, or just do interesting thing (my hack was playing in a band, but doing art or skateboard, was ok too, you see the point). Nowadays I feel like you either have young boys hanging without girls, thinking that behaving like in a music video with shiny cars is what is attractive, or men simply staying in front of their computer not doing any social activity. Sure the picture is important on Tinder, but in my experience the most important thing is having an “interesting“ life and being social (or at least socially validated). It‘s as if a lot of men have simply chosen to forget what is attractive and think being good looking is everything.
I think it is quite reasonable approach that these men are taking. I'd think of myself in that category. With society going in direction where social norms are evolving faster than many have mental bandwidth to deal with, it would be wise to just save time, money and energy to acquire that fake attractiveness. May be men have also taken cue from pop song 'You are beautiful just the way you are...'
What social norms are really changing that are so very overwhelming? The only really changing social norm is wider acceptance of different lifestyles and people, and if it takes some people serious bandwidth to process the golden rule, maybe these people really should be sitting out on the outset of society for better or worse.
It seems harsh, but I see a lot of people externalize all their personal issues on perceived societal changes outside of their control, when really the the only change happening to society is the expectation that you treat everyone with equal respect.
Equal respect? Social norms are a lot more complicated than that, man. You have to repeat all the right shibboleths, (subtly) honour the ingroup, and show appropriate hatred towards the outgroup.
E.g. if you're among roughly progressive upper-middle white people, your shibboleths are stuff like your comment, your ingroup that you're not allowed to overtly acknowledge exists but that you must still honour is progressive upper-middle class white people, and the outgroup you should show sufficient:
A, hatred towards the rich
B, disdain towards is lower-class white people.
Showing appropriate opprobum vers the outtribe might not be strictly speaking necessary, just highly recommended. Wouldn't want to be mistaken for them.
My wife works with both men and women to fix their problems with finding a good relationship, and what you describe is the most common way of thinking among those men.
Most of them are too stubborn to deviate from "they just have to accept me the way I am".
Seriously, getting a nice haircut, dressing nicely, grooming yourself and smelling good has nothing to do with your personality.
In this sense, men have it way easier than women, because men can influence their chances significantly without much effort. And that doesn't mean "fake", it means presenting yourself.
It's pretty simple basically, if you want a woman to pick you, you have to offer her something. And the same will be true for the women, who you will expect to offer you something.
I mean what you say sounds pretty reasonable. I wonder it also sound reasonable if I say "Well black men have it really easy, they have great skin tone and better physique than average. All they have to do is to not dress like punk or wear hoodies and have hair cut short so they don't have run in with police often"
There is an element of truth in this- just remove the word 'black' from your comment,as it's not necessary: I see a lot of young adults(I was one of them some years ago), who dress and behave in public in a way that it almost guarantees unnecessary attention(not in a good way), including from police. Dress like a normal person,not like some low life drug dealer,who spent 10 years on heroin, drop the idiotic language -'oi bruv' and so on and suddenly life becomes better. Even the hardcore criminals were fast to realise that it's much better to wear a suit and a tie than a tracksuit and and a hoody.
Anyway, colored men (mainly indian guys in my wife's practice) significantly increase their attractiveness by dressing nice and well groomed, so same rules apply.
But what I get from your explanation is that it's all the womens fault of not looking past that. Well maybe it's time for you to face reality.
This assumes people really want to do that. Children are too expensive unless you have a lot of resources already. I think if costs of basic living keep increasing the future is increasingly childless for many people.
I'm 30, and I only know one person in my peer group whom owns a home, and he can only afford it because it's way out in the boonies. If people my age find things like home ownership out of reach, having children becomes a roadblock and therefore becomes undesirable.
Where do you live? I'm in Houston, a place with a low cost of living relative to California. I'm in my early 30s, and I know lots of people aged 25-35 who are marrying, buying homes, and having kids.
Well, personally I'm running a small online company. The company is basically just me, and it pays enough to support me. That means I can live anywhere without changing my income, so living where it's cheaper effectively makes me richer.
Oil & gas has a major presence here in Houston, and is a huge employer of engineers -- not sure about compsci people, but probably them too. The salaries are not as high as California, but the effective housing-adjusted salaries are probably higher. You can buy a nice 3+ bedroom house in a safe neighborhood for $200-400k. When, in California, Google giveth and the landlord taketh away, that isn't really money in your pocket (except you still owe taxes on it).
That's not really the point, though. Of course you can have children with nothing but a shirt on your back.
People want control over their lives, and this is one of the chief reasons why people want to own homes. They want to do with their property as they see fit, have a place to truly call "home", provide a sense of security, and have a place where they can raise their children under ideal conditions where a landlord can't just raise the rent or evict them.
When aspects of self determination such as ownership are removed, people become demoralized. If people don't feel a sense of agency, but can fill the void with artificial fulfillment like TV, games, food and "travel", the likelihood that they're going to want to bring children into the world is going to be diminished.
Of course, for much of history, people didn't own homes. The difference between now and times gone is people would choose starting a family in order to fill that void. But when there's plenty of "soma" for everyone, and people's dreams feel out of reach, what exactly is the incentive for the average person to have children?
Children pretty much remove control from your life one way or another. However, they do absorb the sum of who you are in many ways, and in that way they are an expression of self-determination as much as its remover. For example, I like to sing quite a bit, I lack talent so that ultimately doesn't impact my professional life in any way, however my kids adore my singing. They validate my self-expression in a way that would be difficult for me to get otherwise.
I do periodically feel a lack of agency from my kids and their needs basically controlling my life, but I also feel an immense sense of accomplishment for satisfying, or at least attempting to satisfy those needs.
People are unhappy when reality doesn’t meet expectations, and so if you grew up with the expectation that your children will grow up in a house and backyard and whatever else, and you can’t attain it, then you will be unhappy.
Technically, you can raise children in a war torn country, since it obviously has happened for many millennia. But with the advent of birth control, it’s much easier to choose.
People want to provide a stable home for their children.
Having to move can mean your kid has to find all new friends, and if buying a home is a complete impossibility for you, you might be further down Mazlowe's hierarchy than starting a family, and might have a life that's more financially brittle than you'd want it to be when you're taking care of kids.
This has been studied by sociologists and it basically comes down to people having more opportunities outside of the home to make money. For poor families, kids are viewed as an asset since you can use their labor to earn income through farming or other services. For higher-income homes, having a kid means you might have to reduce hours at work, miss promotion opportunities and so on. So people decide to not have kids.
There is immense pressure from most parents to have their children settle down and have kids. If that requires the parents to make financial contributions to enable this, that will increasingly happen.
I've heard it put succinctly (from more than one person): "I'd rather have 25% of a winner than 100% of a loser". Absent any artificial pressure for monogamy, the data and outcomes described in this thread don't seem too surprising.
Do most people meet on apps to have casual sex or are they looking for a romantic relationship and sex is part of the dating process?
I believe sex is an integral part of getting to know someone and determining long term relationship viability. That does not mean the connection with the person was made in pursuit of sex.
This of course doesn't change who is having all the sex, but the intention may be very different.
Still could be a powder keg. Lack of sex will drive young men crazier than lack of wealth. “Incel” terrorism is already much more common than class terrorism where poor people just start killing rich people.
> Them being defective is a problem we can only address by making mental health services more available not by fixing imaginary social problems.
I feel like 100% of your comments in this thread could be applied to any current social justice protests and they would be just as out of place, but you'd get shot down. There are studies, there's data, but for you it appears being able to imagine other reasons has more weight, and the studies get waved away with as "imaginary social problems".
> Incel communities absent moderation devolve quickly into hate for women, imaginary "facts", and veneration for acts of terrorism and murder.
Right, right, but nothing like that has happened here, yet you've imagined, shall we say, alternative facts as possible explanations of what has been scientifically studied. Why?
> It is exactly like visiting a white supremacist online community with a different target population.
To be honest, you sound like one, only with a slightly different perspective. They'd replace "incel" with "nigger" and spout pretty much the same stuff. If you showed them studies on police violence, they'd say "Maybe that isn't real and many in fact are just criminals", making up some random thing that may or may not explain something (without offering any statistics, of course, and ignoring statistics that suggest the opposite) and speak of "imaginary social issues".
I was a student at UCSB at the time. He killed one of my good friends. He was a hardcore incel before it was a thing. Many incel communities praise this monster.
Perhaps you mistakenly believe I said all the people who missing out on human interaction are defective. This isn't so. Lets review context.
the parent poster
>> “Incel” terrorism is already much more common than class terrorism
My response
> Them being defective is a problem we can only address by making mental health services more available
The subject is people who literally commit acts of terror and murder because they themselves collectively blame women for not having sex with them and instead collectively gifting their virtue to higher status men instead of concluding that they are failing at the mating game. There is NOTHING that society needs to fix about itself in order to avoid mutilation and murder. The perpetrators of such crimes are defective in the literal not pejorative sense in the same fashion that a leaky gas line that is liable to blow up and kill people. Suggesting that resources be devoted to help such people before their actions harm themselves or others is the opposite of gross.
The problem is most men go after women 18-25 years old. They don't want the women that are 25+. This is important because it is often men who select which women to go after. Women typically don't go after men in terms of dating selection.
18-25 is a lot of fun, but if you want a relationship you either have to find a trust fund baby or become a sugar daddy which most men don’t want.
Hookups and casual dating with someone that is just getting by is fine proper relationships is much harder.
My current partner is just under 7 years younger than me (I’ve just turned 34) she has good enough of a career that if we can go to Tenerife or Ibiza on a whim for a weekend we don’t have to plan for it and even if I end up spending a bit more money she doesn’t feel like she’s selling herself out and I don’t feel exploited.
Even after 1 year in a relationship there is a big difference between buying a girl a drink or paying for dinner and paying for a flight and a hotel.
The good ones won’t be comfortable with the latter and you probably don’t want to get into a relationship with those who would expect you too.
> believe many of these men will eventually find someone once enough of the women who are now rejecting them face biological realities and are forced to settle if they want to have children.
Who wants to be last choice? Maybe many of these men will wise up and marry a foreign girl(despite the usual shaming) or just hire sexual workers.
Things move faster in women world: in their 20s they run the show and a lot of average or above average men get rejected/ignored. In their 30s, the situation changes cardinally,as a lot of top candidates are already in relationships/married/kids,etc. So now most of those left behind moved on a bit,got better jobs,higher income,some even hit the gym,and so on. So now they are the ones who are choosing and all of sudden,a lot of women don't cut it anymore. This becomes substantially more difficult in their 40s,50s,60s. Just a couple of days ago was reading an article,where a good looking( for her age), 59 years old woman couldn't get even a decent date,as all the guys were essentially not good enough ( a fat belly, bad,teeth,no desire for sex,etc.) However,one commenter made a good point about it: I am a wealthy,good looking man in 60s, and naturally,I'm only interested in 20-30 year olds...
It is interesting that you are simultaneously ressentful of women not dating men of their age and simultaneously happy about old men dating young women.
Given that there are similar amount of girls and boys, this guarantees that younger men of next generation will have to compete with older men for same pool of women.
I don't resent women.I was simply stating the state of affairs.There are so many cases,where attractive, intelligent,and educated women do struggle to find a long term partner,even though 'on paper' they tick all the boxes, except that they are no longer in their 20s. As for older men chasing young women: I have no issue with that, as long as the the whole thing is mutually acceptable,which is essential in any healthy relationship.
Then everything is ok? Young guys without partners can simply wait till they are older. Assuming bigger age gap in relationship remains as normalized, their time will come.
The assumption that a "foreign girl" is easier to get is both offensive and wrong.
Given the ratio of men and women in Asian culture for example, it's a much crowder competition space. That's even more true considering the fact that a large percentage of those Asian women in the US are either highly educated, or from wealthy families that sent them study abroad. They look for partners who are equally educated/successful.
>The assumption that a "foreign girl" is easier to get is both offensive and wrong.
I don't think that assessment is wrong or offensive (although I wouldn't say "foreign").
I think a lot of the problem is culturally related. I've had far better relationships with people I've dated outside of typical white middle class US culture. US parents often inflate egos to absurd levels, set unrealistic relationship expectations, and frequently create terrible personalities, especially for their daughters.
"Easier" isn't inherently a bad thing in this context. I would argue dating someone with reasonable expectations who is actually kind, approachable, and less afflicted by negative culturaly induced behaviors is far more appealing than someone who assumes they're better than say 90% of the population which a lot of US women have adopted in their dating mentalities.
As someone from a low-tier country, I'd say I had very good success with American woman. Which was surprising given that I expected them to be unapproachable from what I read online. I think Americans might be more interested and willing to compromise with strangers than their own kind; for both sexes.
There's a lot of "foreign girls" that aren't asian, and the competition space you described was artificially created. If you want to claim "offensive" and "wrong", you need to provide a better response.
to whom is it offensive? there is no sense of honor or duty when it comes to mating, LTRs or even hookups - it's largely a factor of mutual attraction and the extent to which both parties want to continue it (and perhaps have children). if that comes from your hometown or in a foreign country, why is that offensive? would you not move for a job out of some weird notion of loyalty?
we compete for mates in relatively tight geographic circles. that means that one's attractiveness can change purely based on location (arbitrage in the american english sense of the word).
handsome, blue eyed, blonde haired men are a dime a dozen in Berlin, NYC and Seattle. that can be massively arbitraged in Latin America and SE Asia (possibly elsewhere); you suddenly have exotic and attractive features. similarly for wealth: $100K is mediocre in NYC and fairly rich in above locales. etc.
> Who wants to be last choice? Maybe many of these men will wise up and marry a foreign girl
Is being a desperate choice of someone who faces "economic realities" so much better than being a desperate choice of someone who faces "biological realities"?
Given that apparently quite a few men have an issue if their wife makes more money than them, probably. Being a provider is generally valued by men, being a romantic fallback not so much.
Well, it's a scale. My prior is that most men (people, really) would feel proud providing for their family and feel empty being "loved" by (what is essentially) a prostitute. Marrying a foreign girl (on purpose, not because you just happened to meet and fall in love) sounds to me more like the latter. But I could be wrong.
That's not how it's worked out in any society where family formation has been limited for large numbers of young men. The research on the calming effect of family formation on young men is very straightforward: when a population of young men doesn't have the opportunity to form families, _they_ become the powder keg. It's true at multiple scales, from individual criminality to societal unrest.
There is a difference though: Western societies don't strongly couple "allowing" young men to have a family to them having a job. Lots of unemployed, bored, frustrated single young men is different from having employed, frustrated young men.
I have no idea how class plays into this dynamic, but I assume it's not the poorest that aren't having sex, unlike in the societies where this dynamic works as a powder keg.
The theory has not borne out in reality. Japan and China are the countries with the most young incels/sexless men/male virgins per capita are among the most peaceful in the world. It's a good theory, sexual frustration => violence, but it's just not happening.
That's not really how theory works; the claim isn't that this is the single and sole determinant of civil unrest. This Atlantic article[1] looks more broadly at the effect of the young male subpopulation's size on unrest, this[2] paper references the mitigating effect of family formation on individual crime rate, this[3] one both covers unrest due to low family formation (generally through the mechanism of uneven sex ratios, given how out of favor polygamy currently is), as well as effects on individual crime.
That being said, this little excursion into Google turned up some nascent evidence that this historical dynamic is shifting. The modern world is very odd in lots of different ways: wealth, recreational opportunities, the incredibly wide social circles one's exposed to. It's entirely possible that this dynamic has changed, but the research hasn't caught up yet.
But you presented the theory as a causative link between family formation being unavailable for young men and civil unrest.
It's a classic case of correlation is not causation. Yes, there have been societies where men couldn't form families that were violent (like the Wild west in the US) but that doesn't mean that that was the cause of it.
Similarly, many on the left have long thought that porn viewing causes sexual violent crime against women. And there is ample evidence showing that men who view porn are more likely to be sexual offenders than non-viewers. But then came the internet and the amount of porn and porn viewers skyrocketed - but the amount of sexual violence against women didn't - therefore busting the theory.
In the same way, evidence from Japan, China, South Korea and even India means that there can't be a causative link between family formation being unavailable for young men and civil unrest.
Are the plethora of cases where cigarettes did not cause cancer compelling proof that they don't?
Perhaps these counterexamples are evidence of additional factors, in cancer or in unrest, but they do not prove that a causal relationship doesn't exist.
If you had a very large group of heavy smokers and if you could demonstrate that the lung cancer prevalence among this group was not higher than among the general population then yes, that would be compelling evidence against the theory that smoking causes lung cancer.
Say you went to a city with no air pollution, a high rate of exercise, great diets with antioxidants and omega-3s, no asbestos or radon, and no genetic predisposition to lung cancer. And you find that, in this city, heavy smokers have a lower rate of lung cancer than the general population of the world.
Do you conclude that the overwhelming abundance of data that shows that smoking causes lung cancer is wrong? That there cannot be a causative link between smoking and cancer because there is a counterexample where it didn't appear? I would say that these other factors are also having an effect of comparable scale.
Yup, I would conclude that if the heavy smokers in this city have a lower rate of lung cancer than the rest of the inhabitants in that city that smoking doesn't cause cancer.
So you have a comparison between unrest in Chinese people who are starting families and those that are not? You keep trying to push this analogy into a territory where the evidence is a lot stronger than what you've given. You compared the country to other countries, and it's analogous to comparing a city with a higher cancer rate to a city with a higher smoking rate and saying that smoking cannot cause cancer.
Data suggests that social unrest in China has increased in correlation with incel count. I would count that as supporting evidence for the theory above. But you're saying, correct me if I'm wrong, that, because the initial rate of unrest was so low, and the increase didn't push that rate above that of other countries, incels cannot be a causal factor in unrest?
Help me understand where we disagree here. What part of ´inability to start a family->unhappiness->social unrest' do you think is questionable?
You don't seem to realize is that you have a theory X -> Y and I can find some X for which X -> Y is false, then the theory is false.
Regardless of the theory.
I have found such X. In principle you agree, but you want to save your theory so you say "Well, if X and not Z then Y!" and that explains my counter example because my group probably had Z.
Here Z being the racist idea that Asian people are less violent than others and that that's why social unrest hasn't erupted in their countries.
You might be right. But then your theory is "inability to start a family and non-asian -> social unrest." Clearly, not the same as "inability to start a family -> social unrest."
The theory is that an increase in X causes an increase in Y. You've pointed out cases that have a high X and low Y as counterpoints. But in order to make the point you're making you need to provide evidence that increases in X have not lead to increases in Y, so we can control for initial X.
Back to cancer, heavy smokers who did not develop cancer are an example of some X for which X->Y is false. Like you said, you would need to take a random sample of cases and see whether Y correlates with X against a control group.
You introduced the concept of Asian countries having lower rates of social unrest, and I have never said this is related to race at all. Perhaps you are reading into the genetic confound in the cancer example, but it was just intended as an example of a confound within the analogy. There are plenty of differences between life in these countries and elsewhere that can act as confounds.
Not sure what variance has to do with it? Thing is, you can always "patch" an X leads to Y theory when faced with opposing evidence by blaming confounding factors. But that is not very scientific. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot
I'm just trying to say that very few things are actually that causal in big complex systems. I'm trying to say that such issues are very likely have many-many factors, and we see an aggregate effect.
And so in case of such aggregates arguing for-against them with very simple first-order reasoning is kind of useless. Because each piece of data (supporting or counter evidence) just explains a part of the big picture. So, without accounting for all data we can't really make general statements about what causes the aggregate effect that we see.
Yes, we can use "very simple first-order reasoning" even when we argue about very complex problems. If you say that "swans are white" it is enough for me to find a single black swan to prove your hypothesis wrong.
> when a population of young men doesn't have the opportunity to form families, _they_ become the powder keg. It's true at multiple scales, from individual criminality to societal unrest.
Well, perhaps videogames and internet porn (both inaccessible in the past) could workaround that now ...
Remember that "mental health" is inseparable from "society", in that the categories of "mental illness" are constructed based on some idea of "normal within society" (to those who doubt this: how else could we go so quickly from "homosexuality is a disease" to "homosexuality is perfectly normal"? The values of society changed and the DSM changed to reflect that. This is simply the nature of "mental illness", there is no recourse to a more [although not completely] universal notion of biological health like with physical illness. Plenty of philosophers and psychologists like Thomas Szasz and Michel Foucault, himself a gay man, have written about this at length).
If society's "normal" (which tends to include a "healthy sex life" or at least a supportive social community) becomes impossible for many to achieve, the question for many is no longer "maybe something is wrong with me?" and becomes "maybe society is the problem?"
No, it's more like "this society doesn't really work for me, to hell with it!" Basically, the most dangerous people are those with nothing to gain by remaining lawful and nothing to lose by becoming criminals.
> Sounds like mental health problems are even more rampant than we guessed. We should probably handle that.
Other than generalized chemical castration I don't see how you could eliminate the "problem" of most of the male population unfulfilled sex drive. For all its problems and unfairness, patriarchal society provides an answer to that problem, if an ugly one.
At the risk of sounding cold... anything that causes the mortality rate of men in this high risk category to rise significantly would likely reduce the overall problem. For example, making the choice of suicide readily available for young men that face poo life prospects, and the choice of ending your own life for the better of society a virtue, perhaps even heroic.
Whether enough people would see such a thing as acceptable for it to become policy is an entirely different issue.
I don't imagine that it would be drastically different then raising a son today and here; the odds would still be excellent for a son to grow up an be successful.
Mind if I ask what you had in mind to make you think that such a situation would dissuade someone from raising a son?
A bit different than using some of America's extremely, extremely extravagant wealth for the poorest in the nation compared to forcing people to hitch up and support a kid for ~18 years just in case a man gets angry.
Oh got it, you're one of those people who's unable to reason about the way things work without becoming overcome with emotion and desperately cramming the conversation into a simple-minded framework of "who's to blame so we can get mad at them".
I'm not really interested in that kind of conversation, thanks though!
It's because I don't believe you have any actual evidence, and even if you did, you'd end up arguing that a lack of relationships could explain someone becoming a danger to society. That alone is difficult to argue since they could have issues parallel that could have caused it.
It seems possible to me that creatures that are denied their biological imperative can develop some very aggressive behaviours. If 80+% of men in society are angry, I'd be a bit scared.
I must have some screwed up genes, myself. Healthy, relatively well-off, and dare I say occasionally charming, I am seriously considering never having offspring.
I would be scared to date them. Dating partner that angry when denied what he wants means you will get abused, either verbally or physically and likely both.
And given strength difference between women and men, it is safer to be alone then with someone who is into outrage at 24 for not having partner yet.
I think people become more human the more you treat them as humans that can grow. If you see others through the lens of risk assessment, you'll surely see lots of risk.
Yeah, but I can treat people as human without putting myself in danger. I can treat a guy as human without entering romantic relationship.
Romantic relationships don't cure anger nor violence. But, women who believe so are the typical domestic abuse victim. They date guys thinking they will change them and blaming themselves for abuse.
I mean, abuse is a real thing (and both genders do abuse). But someone who can get so angry and is physically stronger is double bad news.
> Romantic relationships don't cure anger nor violence.
I can honestly pinpoint you the day my life changed forever for the better. It's the day I lost my virginity. That one moment where I felt myself being accepted made me realize I was good enough.
Ever since then, I'd become less angry, more confident, more loving of myself, more charitable towards other people's insecurities instead of positioning myself higher in some imaginary pecking order.
I am far from being truly non-judgmental. I am also still very competitive with others, not un-occasionally in some mean, vicious way. But I no longer feel completely rejected by women, which, for some reason, mattered so much before that very moment.
Obviously, I am just one person and my anecdote may mean nothing to the breadth of your experiences. But I can't agree with this one sentence.
I would definitely say I had a much more toxic attitude towards others before. I recall back then fantasizing about violence, either self-inflicted or unto others.
While I'm sure there may be many studies that illustrate the continued abusive behaviour of men who have romantic relationships, I ask myself whether it's possible to show how many men would've been otherwise angry and aggressive had they not experienced acceptance earlier in their lives.
And perhaps I have not specifically addressed your point that it is risky to date known angry people. And I am sure you are right about that.
The point I was making however is more about being a very young man, the insecurities felt as a teenager, the moments that can change the trajectories of their lives, before they become truly angry men. I only hope that other insecure young men could experience that kind of relief from anxiety as I did.
Yes, there is continuity of abusive behavior in relationship. In general, close family members and dependent people gets to experience that most. Note that this is not exclusive to male abuse, female abuse exists too and is more likely to happen to dependents and family.
If you see sex as only proof of being accepted (as opposed to friendships and other social contacts), then I can see how it eases anxiety. It does not sound as if woman in question was important here.
If it is about physical aspect, prostitution sounds like fair way to solve it. If it is about philosophical or social aspect, making self worth less dependent on sex would help there.
The worth given by woman when having sex is however only illusion. Women deciding on having sex with you or not is not actually deciding on your worth. The range of reasons for sex varry quite a lot, from positive to negative, from emotional to practical or to physical or just routine. But actual decision making is not scoring of worth.
I can't help but detect some cynicism in your response.
Who it was with mattered. Being desired mattered. Buying it would have felt empty for me.
> The worth given by woman when having sex is however only illusion.
This isn't the first time I've encountered this idea. I'm sure everyone is exposed to the idea from a very young age. As a teenager, I would've accepted it rationally but rejected it emotionally. Being told something like that would be as effective as telling a hormonal teenager to stop being so emotional.
Your view is extremely narrow and inconsiderate of the feelings of the men who've been excluded. Indeed, @wutbrodo's comment when a population of young men doesn't have the opportunity to form families, _they_ become the powder keg is correct. Having a powder keg in society definitely causes suffering.
The data from old OK-Cupid studies clearly show that most women are only immediately attracted to a very small subset of men. It is these men who are having all the sex. Seems like a powder keg over time as the excluded men become bitter and forced to postpone getting married and starting a family. I believe many of these men will eventually find someone once enough of the women who are now rejecting them face biological realities and are forced to settle if they want to have children.