Attraction Inequality and the Dating Economy
quillette.comI wonder what studies there are on what features women find attractive in order of priority. How many of those could men generally do something about?
How easy/hard would it be for a male generally to increase their attractiveness through effort - sufficient enough to compete with the existing top 20%? Or is that not possible - due to genetic fitness (or maybe environmental vars only marginally in their control - diet as children etc)?
Assuming that men COULD increase their attractiveness to compete with the EXISTING top 20% of men - would the size of the top cohort that 80% of women compete for increase? Or not? I.e. are women looking for a particular level of minimum quality that won't change much over time? Or if that 20% figure remains constant - that their desire in this respect is a relative value; relative to the overall quality of mate choices available currently.
Getting down to the brass tax questions I'm building too.
Does that 80/20 figure of women chasing men amount to a cultural fact that men are lazy in terms of trying to appear attractive? Do men find more women attractive - not because they are less choosy, but because women put more effort into being attractive? Or are women just choosy and men easy?
What drives female choosiness? If that 20% figure stays constant no matter what men do - then one explanation might be that mate choice for women is highly status driven. But something must mitigate it generally right? Outside of the tinder abstraction - women settle for less than the top 20% all the time. Don't they?
Intuitively it seems that it should be possible. Physical fitness, confidence, kindness, empathy, social standing, even appearance: these things can all to a large extent be improved through effort.
Facial attractiveness seems extremely important to both genders, and is rather difficult and expensive to change. But certainly someone with a merely average face could achieve overall attractiveness by pumping enough points into the above areas.
It seems like the study discussed skewed in terms of the dataset was sites that are picture-based primarily and thus generally perceived as geared towards hook-ups. This could also be interpreted that guys are more open to casual sex with whomever and women tend to be already compromising by agreeing to casual sex therefore looking for a higher threshold of attractiveness?
That doesn't answer if improving attractiveness increase the 20% to go beyond 20%, or if it just change who is in the 20%.
Ie, by improving physical fitness, confidence, kindness, empathy, social standing, and appearance, are you simply improving your relative status in the dating pool.
That's where my intuitions lean... that culturally men just aren't used to having to work on their attractiveness...
But you'd need long term cross-cultural data to confirm.
> If that 20% figure stays constant no matter what men do - then one explanation might be that mate choice for women is highly status driven.
Pretty easy to test. Look if the data is different based on time period or nationality. The ability to spend time and effort on being attractive is not a natural constant, so it should fluctuate depending food availability, wars, and so on.
Women are attracted (on a visceral level) to a man's genetics, most of which you can't change. In varying order of importance: 1. Height 2. Facial traits that demonstrate high testosterone pre-natally and during adolescence: high-set cheekbones, a chiseled jawline, a proeminent chin, forward growth of the maxilla, positive or neutral canthal tilt, having a full head of hear and not being bald 3. Broad shoulders (swimmer physique)
Recently started using dating apps and also read the book 'Dataclysm', so this is a timely article. I can confirm it's all true - men are treated like second class citizens on these apps because that's just the way it is. Very average or even ugly looking women will get hundreds of messages, some of them from very attractive men, no matter what they do, so they don't do much of anything. A man with no bio, only one so-so picture, and who doesn't respond in a timely manner has literally zero chance but I see girls act that way all the time. Very commonly you see girls with bios that are nothing but a list of requirements - "6 foot, works out, nice, is funny, no hookups, follow me on Instagram if you want to talk."
I don't think there's anything we can or should do to change but it is a raw deal for guys. Also note that apps like Tinder seem very artificial and surreal (e.g. like they don't actually matter) and I do believe this skews behavior.
I'll just point out that attractiveness changes quite a lot over time, as well as the importance people give to it.
Maybe whatever calculations they're doing should take age into account?
Is it valid to apply the Gini coefficient math to dating as they do?
> On a list of 149 countries’ Gini indices provided by the CIA World Factbook, this would place the female dating economy as 75th most unequal (average—think Western Europe) and the male dating economy as the 8th most unequal (kleptocracy, apartheid, perpetual civil war—think South Africa).
Why wouldn't it be?
Interesting, though I do think the author is somewhat callous. There is something distinctly human, I think, about love and pair bonding and both the idea of "love at first sight" as well as the tale of "Beauty and the Beast". In my experience, there are certain women of varying attractiveness levels who seem to like me just for being me, rather than because I possess an extraordinary degree of some single quality like strength or intelligence (which would assume we strictly follow polygyny).
Of course, the desire for polygyny exists, but to assume that that is all there is to "mating" is somewhat Hobbesian. Then again, the inequality w/r/t men is somewhat inherent across time keeping in mind the "average man" gives the life vests to women & children, charges across the front into the enemy's machine gun nest, and toils the fields for their master. Hell, if you lost the war you became a eunuch and lived the rest of your life a slave. So I don't think this inequality is anything new.
Ultimately, though perhaps there's still lots of inequality in the "dating economy", I think it's better in our society than it has ever been. Most anyone can work to get in shape, or pursue their hobbies. There's no caste structure, and though some people have it easier than others (resources from parents or genetics), it's more than possible with dedicated effort to change oneself because that seems to be something people struggle hard to do. Additionally, there's more variety in our culture than ever before. Women and men can be attractive for different reasons, and so there's many groups people can fall into. There's intelligent people, athletic people, social people, creative people, spontaneous people, mysterious people, etc. Instead of there just being one group -- royalty ala Madame Bovary -- there are many different groups you can choose to be in which nets you much more opportunity than ever before.
I'm glad I was able to think through this and come out of it with an honest, optimistic take; it's too easy -- at least for me -- to be nihilistic when you see an article like this
The subset of people who go on swipe left style dating sites are not a random slice of the population.
This really does poke a few holes in the equity of outcomes view. Interestingly it also pokes a few holes in the unrestrained capitalism view. As we've seen society in the past restrain individuals and produce more equitable outcomes.
We've seen via enforced monogamy a society with more equitable outcomes. Was it better or worse?
It’s subjective of whether it was better or worse.
We better get sex robots quick or who knows what’s going to happen when more guys are more frustrated.