OkCupid used to run a sort of stats blog. Unfortunately I think they took them down so all I have left are screenshots. There are a couple of interesting things going on online that are illustrative of a darker side to dating.
1. The top 80% of women tend to message the top 10% (or less) of men, while men message according to an approximately normal distribution
2. Aggregate male ratings of female attractiveness are approximately normally distributed, while female ratings are heavily skewed such that most men are rated below average.
The overall indications are that the vast majority of women go for the highest ranked men. Now, from an evolutionary perspective, this makes some sense, a woman can have one child every month, while a single man can impregnate an entire village. Unfortunately, when you erase cultural norms that correct this innate tendency by encouraging long term committed relationships, the result increasingly resembles hypergamy, where a small population of men are sleeping with the majority of women.
And so the lowest ranked males, who ultimately cannot simply "learn to groom" or "be themselves" or "be confident" end up isolated and perpetually frustrated. Then when a tiny minority act upon their wholly justified misery, the entire bottom end of the distribution get slandered as "incel" and "terrorism".
This article is moral panic bullshit, as inane and disconnected from reality as blaming Eminem for teenage violence.
You want to talk about mental health? Imagine living a life where you are innately driven to desire companionship and affection, but are consistently unable to receive it because of physical and psychological limitations to your status as a desirable mate. Couple this with a broken culture which indirectly encourages hypergamy and notmalizes infantalism well into your 20s and now you have a serious chronic loneliness crisis - but the perception is that it's just those nerds everyone bullied in high school so there's no need to pay it any attention.
While that's true, is there any reason to expect that the distribution of "successful connections" would be any different than that of initial messages? Or that it wouldn't be even more skewed towards the edges?
That's fair! Data on who women respond to would be helpful here, but that would have to somehow be disentangled from messages in the form of "fuck off, creep".
1. The top 80% of women tend to message the top 10% (or less) of men, while men message according to an approximately normal distribution
2. Aggregate male ratings of female attractiveness are approximately normally distributed, while female ratings are heavily skewed such that most men are rated below average.
The overall indications are that the vast majority of women go for the highest ranked men. Now, from an evolutionary perspective, this makes some sense, a woman can have one child every month, while a single man can impregnate an entire village. Unfortunately, when you erase cultural norms that correct this innate tendency by encouraging long term committed relationships, the result increasingly resembles hypergamy, where a small population of men are sleeping with the majority of women.
And so the lowest ranked males, who ultimately cannot simply "learn to groom" or "be themselves" or "be confident" end up isolated and perpetually frustrated. Then when a tiny minority act upon their wholly justified misery, the entire bottom end of the distribution get slandered as "incel" and "terrorism".
This article is moral panic bullshit, as inane and disconnected from reality as blaming Eminem for teenage violence.
You want to talk about mental health? Imagine living a life where you are innately driven to desire companionship and affection, but are consistently unable to receive it because of physical and psychological limitations to your status as a desirable mate. Couple this with a broken culture which indirectly encourages hypergamy and notmalizes infantalism well into your 20s and now you have a serious chronic loneliness crisis - but the perception is that it's just those nerds everyone bullied in high school so there's no need to pay it any attention.