Yeah, I don't think most of these arguments hold much water.
People are just self delusional and want to think they're above average - in everything. You see it in looks, you see it in driving skill (75-90% of people think they're above average drivers), you see it at work (70% of people think they're better at their job than average), you see it in self evaluation on every metric (75% think they're "good" people).
Okay, so all these 70%+ of people think they're great at everything - the median American man is 5' 9" and 190 lbs and makes like $50k a year, on the trustworthiness front, a full 50% of people of both genders cheat on their partners. They're crappy in every possible respect. The median American woman, same deal, just shorter and 170 pounds. Everyone is broke Humpty Dumpty, perceiving themselves as Gaston or Belle, and this is a recurring theme true in basically every society. You don't need to resort to skewness and different average calculations to surface any of this, it's just basic self delusion without reference to underlying reality.
On wanting to be a "beautiful mid" - actually hot people have hot friends for the most part. People self-segregate, by looks, by wealth, by education, by career, and it's a pretty strong effect. All the rich pretty people hang out together, and all the poor ugly ones do, too.
Yes, people are self-delusional and are biased in thinking they're better than they really are in almost everything (though, as Rob Henderson notes, the social life evaluation is an interesting exception where the reverse effect is seen).
But what I tried to convey here is that regardless of above, skewed distributions do really exist. Another good example is walking capability: on a scale from 1 (can't walk - babies, heavily disabled, severely injured) to 10 (professional racewalkers) almost everyone is a 9, while 2-8 would be small groups of people with various degrees of injury, disability or toddlerhood. This distribution would be extremely left/negative skewed: the mode and median would be 9, and the mean would probably be like 8. Most people would probably rate themselves 9 - above average (both the mean - 8 - and the "wrong midrange" average of 5), and they would be right.
For most things though, you can do an objective test or capability assessment to measure the true results across the population. And it seems that some, maybe most, believe that with very extensive and thorough surveying and research someone will eventually be able to collect fully unbiased results that will confirm the hypothesis that the attractiveness is normally distributed and "the average is 5". But I don't think this will ever happen - there is no objective test for attractiveness, all we will ever have is subjective survey responses, affected by our culture. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
And keep in mind, this is the percentage of people of both genders who will *admit* it, and the number who have done it but won't say so is larger.
This isn't the only data source. A study by David Buss and David Schmitt discovered that 60 percent of men and 53 percent of women admitted to having attempted to lure someone else’s mate into a committed relationship.
As far back as the Kinsey studies, 50% of American males and 26% of females told him they had had extramarital sex, and that was back in the 50's. As women's liberation and feminism became stronger, more women became comfortable with cheating as well in the coming decades.
In the 70's, Shere Hite ran a study claiming that 50% of married women in the 1970s had affairs, while Cosmopolitan in 1980 had 69% of their married respondents over 35 saying they had cheated.
In general, around 20 / 25% (F/M) of both genders admit cheating *in their current relationship.*.
It's difficult to get solid numbers, but all the numbers we do have point at something very much like "roughly half of people of both genders cheat at least once over their lifetimes."
Report being cheated on can refer to one partner they have had who cheated on them. If they have had several romantic relationships throughout their life, that doesn't imply that half of the population is cheating on their partner. It is possible that one of their partners cheated on them, and then 5 others did not over the course of 20 years. Attempting to get someone else to cheat while you yourself are single is also not the same thing as cheating. Extramarital sex can refer to pre-marital sex, it doesn't necessarily refer to cheating while in a relationship. The Kinsey studies actually surveyed people for if they had ever cheated on someone, and only 19% of women and 23% of men said they had.
> Report being cheated on can refer to one partner they have had who cheated on them.
Most of these were the other direction though - people of both genders admitting *they* had cheated, so not susceptible to the skew that you're pointing to here.
Yes, there are definitely "serial cheaters" who cheat on multiple partners over their lifetime (I actually think the modal cheater is probably a serial cheater), but this doesn't get around all the direct admissions of self-attributed cheating.
Only the Cosmopolitan survey and the Shere Hite survey directly address self-reported cheating. Cosmopolitan readers are, ehh.. Probably not representative of the American public. The Shere Hite survey is pretty old, but I'll have to check it out
Most people who give ratings aren’t imagining ratings as percentiles on a distribution, they’re imagining it as a metric of similarity between two platonic opposites. So, the average not being 5 doesn’t imply that the distribution isn’t normal. Most people’s prior experience with 0-100 or 0-10 rating systems comes from school, where “average” is more like 8/10 (at this point due to grade inflation, more like 9/10). Gender differences in scale perception might also be wholly responsible for this difference. Reported feelings of attractiveness as probably not a great indicator of actual attraction anyways. The incel Pareto stuff is more about dating success than reported attractiveness
Although I think that a "metric of similarity" is the ideal way to think about attractiveness scales, the way that people think about it in practice seems to be muddled combination of absolute attractiveness and relative attractiveness.
I agree that gender-based differences in scale perception might explain the different distributions. I elaborate on the idea in this post:
A couple of things feel off about the makeup meme.
For one thing, some women do use makeup like the figure in the top-left. If "heavy makeup" isn't the proper way to describe their appearance, then what is? "Extreme makeup"? I'm trying not to sound derogatory.
Secondly, as Von notes, many men like no makeup at least as much as light or heavy makeup. Unless we take the conspicuous position that makeup does nothing, we're left with the question of how to reconcile this. Are the makeup-indifferent and makeup-disliking men a minority? Does makeup improve some women's appearances, but not others? Does makeup help on bad days (e.g. in case of acne or baggy eyes) but not good ones? The meme paves over these nuances.
I'm also skeptical about your interpretation of the OkCupid data, but I've written about that here:
Both makeup and things like cosmetic surgery need to be done right, and not in an excessive way to look good. If you see a woman and think "that's a lot of makeup" or "she had her lips done", it means that whatever she did or had done to herself was done wrong. But if she looks just right, it might be her "what men think no makeup is" makeup, or the work of a really good surgeon.
I remember seeing a TikTok of a very attractive girl who was like "Many men approach me and say that I look beautiful and SO NATURAL. The reality is: my nose job cost $15k, my jaw was $20k, my cheeks were $10k..." and so on.
Also, at least in Central Europe, some lower middle class wear heavy makeup or have excessive cosmetic surgery to conspicuously show that they can afford heavy makeup and cosmetic surgery. It is a "poor man's idea of high status".
In general, I think that both makeup and cosmetic surgery can be extremely effective, especially for ugly women and mids - when done right.
It's also good to have a proper reference frame. One might argue that, for example, Lauren Sanchez Bezos is fake and ugly, but she still looks way better that any other "natural" woman pushing 60.
I read men saying "I prefer natural women" as virtue signalling and/or rejecting the lower middle class excessive makeup/surgery status game.
I believe that what most men actually want is the "what heavy makeup really is" and "what men think no makeup is" look, depending on the occasion (date night vs everyday). If you can find a girl that looks like "what men think no makeup is" without any actual makeup - good for you! Most men aren't that lucky though, hence all the memes.
>>I believe that what most men actually want is the "what heavy makeup really is" and "what men think no makeup is" look, depending on the occasion (date night vs everyday). If you can find a girl that looks like "what men think no makeup is" without any actual makeup - good for you! Most men aren't that lucky though, hence all the memes.
Do you really believe that all of these men grew up without mothers or sisters, and have thus no idea what a 'natural' woman is? They never saw them in the morning or evening before or after makeup?
I believe what most men actually want is women without makeup. Like, none at all. Ugly stuff.
And I must say I think the meme about men and 'women without makeup' is nonsense. Do they think that men didn't grow up with sisters and mothers, and see them in the morning or evening without makeup???
I prefer women without makeup. Always have. And I have seen a lot of them. Am married to one of them.
Example in another domain. In many assessments, a “pass mark” is 50%. Typically, more people pass than fail, so the “median mark” must be over 50% and it’s highly likely that the average mark is also. Some tests are even calibrated so that the average mark is around 65%, which usually leaves the “pass line” at -1 standard deviation
When used on women, I suggest that most people use a very similar ranking system. A woman of median attractiveness is around 7, a 5 is not unpleasant, and ratings below 5 indicate unattractiveness.
A 1-5 scale is more likely to map to a median of 3, because people will parse 3 as “middle” rather than “pass”. Most men find most women to be st least passably attractive, which skews the median upward on the 1-10 scale but not the 1-5 scale
On the 1-10 scale, both sexes are “pass” ranking, not comparatively ranking. On the 1-5 scale, men move to a more comparative ranking.
But maybe women are too
Men place a high value on women’s appearance but evaluate it generously. Women place less value on men’s appearance but rate it more harshly.
Let’s assume that, for women, 5 on 1-10 is “his appearance doesn’t do anything for me”. Most men rank a 3 “meh but I’ll overlook it”. But a man gets over 5, his appearance carries a lot of weight
Men see attractive women all the time, so moving from attractive to super-attractive triggers only a small response. But if women mostly see “unattractive” men, then even an attractive man is significant and a super-attractive man is very infrequent. Thus the emotional weight of attractiveness is out-of-scale for the frequency. Because average is value * frequency, this creates a strong left skew
None of this is inherently a problem. It only becomes an issue when the two scales are superimposed and the “7” woman thinks she should get a “7” man. But a “7” woman is actually pretty close to average, while a “7” man is really rare. Within her sex, a “7” woman has the same rank-ordered attractiveness as a “3” man!
This is a fun piece with some piercing observations. My main criticism is that a lot of the strong points get mixed in with the weaker ones, diluting the overall message.
For example, I think it's a great point that people tend to conflate the mid-range with the mean and that for many distributions this is completely inaccurate. It's very clever to describe attractiveness as a combination of natural traits (normally distributed) and skills (power law). I like this a lot.
Bu it's not self-evident that "the value of attractiveness" implies a positive skew, it seems plausible it could have any effect- even the opposite. It's also not obvious that only women get shamed for being below some attractiveness standard, in fact you yourself cite incels in this article obsessed with their own feelings of inadequacy.
There's also a longstanding theory in evolutionary psychology (that has admittedly been challenged a bit more recently) of the 'coy female' vs 'aggressive male' on account of women being far more selective than men in choosing mates. This would explain the different skew observed in the distribution of women > men and men > women ratings. I think the overall argument would be stronger if you mentioned this theory exists and listed some of the recent criticism as justification to consider your alternative theory. Still a fun read!
It seems to me that most of this misses the point of the people discussing the issue. Sure, the math is great as far as it goes... but...
Let us assume that the actual underlying (and definitely unstated) assumption is that the goal is marriage, which involves the pairing of one man and one woman. And let us assume that the one man 'should' be matched with a woman who is his 'equal', and that the 'one to ten' scale is designed to 'find' these equals.
This would mean that the various talked about mismatches are social mismatches. They represent a woman or man who is saying, "In the universe of prospective marriage partners, someone who is like 'this' is someone that would 'match' me."
“Men are not shamed for looking below average like that.” It is not at all clear that this is true. In fact, the whole blackpill theory is that it is not. Regardless, it cannot just be assumed to be true a priori without evidence.
You can't prove a negative - to challenge my negative claim you have to prove it's otherwise with examples.
Men are shamed for many things related to or contributing to low attractiveness - being weak, skinny, poor, shy, coward, low status or romantically unsuccessful - but usually not for being ugly itself (gender-neutral fat shaming is the only exception I can think of).
Also, the blackpill theory is not the best social theory out there. It might quite possibly be the worst one.
Why do you consider blackpill possibly the worst? I am not saying it’s totally correct, but it does rest upon some data, such as women’s near-universal preference for height, facial symmetry, jaw line, and body proportions.
Well, for example I think it is the worst in the practical sense since it leads to destructive outcomes on both personal and social levels. For comparison, bluepill is constructive on social level and slightly destructive on personal level, redpill is constructive on personal level and slightly destructive on social level, and whitepill is neutral on both levels.
I was thinking more about whether its claims are true than the impact on the individual or society from believing those claims. My sense is that blackpill theory has some validity, though like any theory, it has proponents who are making claims with questionable evidentiary support.
Beauty isn't that subjective. Women are far more picky with looks than men are and we constantly see them going after the same types of men on dating apps, for instance. Most men have to take what they can get.
1. There are a lot more men than women on dating apps (often 2/1 or worse) so they more or less get their pick of the pie. I would also guess that men are more willing to go on more dates more often then women, so it gets even more skewed. I have no hard data to back this up its just a hunch. The apps suck! Everybody knows this.
2. There is nothing to go off on dating apps other than looks, so if women have any looks preference at all, it will be very pronounced in the data. It is my personal experience that women, care about looks, but a lot less than men. Call that the beige pill if you want.
Women care about looks just as much as men do, they're far more picky with it than men are. Even if the ratios were even, women would still be infinitely more picky (as we see in person) due to being the sexual selectors due to the greater reproductive burden falling on them.
While this is technically true for unlabeled scales, it's a trivial matter to look at some scales that use centiles and find the same above average effect. It's not specific to self ratings of attraction.
Do you think age standards are playing some role in dating app data? If 25yo men looking at a distribution of 25yo women are subconsciously treating 40yo women as outside the reference set, whereas 25yo women are subconsciously including a lot of comparatively well-dressed, well-groomed 40yo men in the reference set against which they're evaluating their age cohort?
Yeah the main problem with this is it old 2014. Coming from a person who randomly found out about what is happening with men and women today. It's like an alternate reality. Then again I haven't really "tried dating" it's more of a thing that kept happening despite me but my kid is just a little older than this data and people are different.
The generation of we didn't get to learn social skills and think they are the only person in the world that matters are dating and I have read some sick shit.
I was under the delusion that the MAGA hate rhetoric was just the crazys getting permission to be openly racist and sexist. Same with the woke movement. Just the same things I had been hearing for year now given the opportunity to feed off its own biases and legitimacy to act out their hate.
But no apparently it's a generation of individual who don't know how to be part of a civil society. A Capitalist societal maybe but there's very little civil about capitalism. So now you look at people like a thing that can be quantified like you are ordering then off Amazon.
FYI it is not okay to be so nasty to someone that they want to kill themselves. You infact are mentally dysfunctional if you think talking to anyone as if they are worthless or like something you have to scrape off your shoe because you enjoy doing so.
Don’t think this article does a very good job arguing its main point. It largely rests on vibes based assertions about societal expectations of women (while essentially implying little to no expectations on men?) with no data to back those vibes up.
One could just as easily argue it makes sense evolutionarily for women to be pickier and rate men lower on average since they’re at more risk in a relationship!
Stating there’s *literally zero* negative societal implications for being an ugly man is an incredibly egregious assertion as well. There’s plenty of studies showing attractive women and men get treated better.
This article feels like an expression of frustration at societal expectations of women rather than about some true understanding of why men and women might view each other differently.
Human mating strategy is directly linked to rarity of beauty, in that we constantly readjust our values according to the prevalence of beauty (when the tide rises or falls, we rerate all the ships accordingly). This is why, for example, fuggly women do fine in Alaskan mining posts. People are wired to respect the bell curve for beauty. Thus average is 5 and standard deviation matters
Yeah, I don't think most of these arguments hold much water.
People are just self delusional and want to think they're above average - in everything. You see it in looks, you see it in driving skill (75-90% of people think they're above average drivers), you see it at work (70% of people think they're better at their job than average), you see it in self evaluation on every metric (75% think they're "good" people).
Okay, so all these 70%+ of people think they're great at everything - the median American man is 5' 9" and 190 lbs and makes like $50k a year, on the trustworthiness front, a full 50% of people of both genders cheat on their partners. They're crappy in every possible respect. The median American woman, same deal, just shorter and 170 pounds. Everyone is broke Humpty Dumpty, perceiving themselves as Gaston or Belle, and this is a recurring theme true in basically every society. You don't need to resort to skewness and different average calculations to surface any of this, it's just basic self delusion without reference to underlying reality.
The "better than average effect" is robust across hundreds of studies, with n=1M: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31789535/
On wanting to be a "beautiful mid" - actually hot people have hot friends for the most part. People self-segregate, by looks, by wealth, by education, by career, and it's a pretty strong effect. All the rich pretty people hang out together, and all the poor ugly ones do, too.
Yes, people are self-delusional and are biased in thinking they're better than they really are in almost everything (though, as Rob Henderson notes, the social life evaluation is an interesting exception where the reverse effect is seen).
But what I tried to convey here is that regardless of above, skewed distributions do really exist. Another good example is walking capability: on a scale from 1 (can't walk - babies, heavily disabled, severely injured) to 10 (professional racewalkers) almost everyone is a 9, while 2-8 would be small groups of people with various degrees of injury, disability or toddlerhood. This distribution would be extremely left/negative skewed: the mode and median would be 9, and the mean would probably be like 8. Most people would probably rate themselves 9 - above average (both the mean - 8 - and the "wrong midrange" average of 5), and they would be right.
For most things though, you can do an objective test or capability assessment to measure the true results across the population. And it seems that some, maybe most, believe that with very extensive and thorough surveying and research someone will eventually be able to collect fully unbiased results that will confirm the hypothesis that the attractiveness is normally distributed and "the average is 5". But I don't think this will ever happen - there is no objective test for attractiveness, all we will ever have is subjective survey responses, affected by our culture. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
A lot of the ratings referenced are done by third parties though, not self reports
Way less than 50% of people cheat on their partners
Not really, see this chart from the 2023 American Perspectives Survey:
https://imgur.com/a/OU5l5l4
And keep in mind, this is the percentage of people of both genders who will *admit* it, and the number who have done it but won't say so is larger.
This isn't the only data source. A study by David Buss and David Schmitt discovered that 60 percent of men and 53 percent of women admitted to having attempted to lure someone else’s mate into a committed relationship.
As far back as the Kinsey studies, 50% of American males and 26% of females told him they had had extramarital sex, and that was back in the 50's. As women's liberation and feminism became stronger, more women became comfortable with cheating as well in the coming decades.
In the 70's, Shere Hite ran a study claiming that 50% of married women in the 1970s had affairs, while Cosmopolitan in 1980 had 69% of their married respondents over 35 saying they had cheated.
In general, around 20 / 25% (F/M) of both genders admit cheating *in their current relationship.*.
It's difficult to get solid numbers, but all the numbers we do have point at something very much like "roughly half of people of both genders cheat at least once over their lifetimes."
Report being cheated on can refer to one partner they have had who cheated on them. If they have had several romantic relationships throughout their life, that doesn't imply that half of the population is cheating on their partner. It is possible that one of their partners cheated on them, and then 5 others did not over the course of 20 years. Attempting to get someone else to cheat while you yourself are single is also not the same thing as cheating. Extramarital sex can refer to pre-marital sex, it doesn't necessarily refer to cheating while in a relationship. The Kinsey studies actually surveyed people for if they had ever cheated on someone, and only 19% of women and 23% of men said they had.
> Report being cheated on can refer to one partner they have had who cheated on them.
Most of these were the other direction though - people of both genders admitting *they* had cheated, so not susceptible to the skew that you're pointing to here.
Yes, there are definitely "serial cheaters" who cheat on multiple partners over their lifetime (I actually think the modal cheater is probably a serial cheater), but this doesn't get around all the direct admissions of self-attributed cheating.
Only the Cosmopolitan survey and the Shere Hite survey directly address self-reported cheating. Cosmopolitan readers are, ehh.. Probably not representative of the American public. The Shere Hite survey is pretty old, but I'll have to check it out
Half of all men and half of all women are cheating on their partners?
More or less - see my above reply to Sectionalism Archive where I mention several data sources.
This is as old as the ancients, who believed that Vulcan (the ugliest of the gods) and Venus (the most beautiful) were husband and wife.
Now do standard deviation, mean absolute deviation, and kurtosis. ;)
Seriously: great job!
Most people who give ratings aren’t imagining ratings as percentiles on a distribution, they’re imagining it as a metric of similarity between two platonic opposites. So, the average not being 5 doesn’t imply that the distribution isn’t normal. Most people’s prior experience with 0-100 or 0-10 rating systems comes from school, where “average” is more like 8/10 (at this point due to grade inflation, more like 9/10). Gender differences in scale perception might also be wholly responsible for this difference. Reported feelings of attractiveness as probably not a great indicator of actual attraction anyways. The incel Pareto stuff is more about dating success than reported attractiveness
Although I think that a "metric of similarity" is the ideal way to think about attractiveness scales, the way that people think about it in practice seems to be muddled combination of absolute attractiveness and relative attractiveness.
I agree that gender-based differences in scale perception might explain the different distributions. I elaborate on the idea in this post:
https://matthewmilone.substack.com/p/weighing-stars-is-difficult
A couple of things feel off about the makeup meme.
For one thing, some women do use makeup like the figure in the top-left. If "heavy makeup" isn't the proper way to describe their appearance, then what is? "Extreme makeup"? I'm trying not to sound derogatory.
Secondly, as Von notes, many men like no makeup at least as much as light or heavy makeup. Unless we take the conspicuous position that makeup does nothing, we're left with the question of how to reconcile this. Are the makeup-indifferent and makeup-disliking men a minority? Does makeup improve some women's appearances, but not others? Does makeup help on bad days (e.g. in case of acne or baggy eyes) but not good ones? The meme paves over these nuances.
I'm also skeptical about your interpretation of the OkCupid data, but I've written about that here:
https://matthewmilone.substack.com/p/weighing-stars-is-difficult
Both makeup and things like cosmetic surgery need to be done right, and not in an excessive way to look good. If you see a woman and think "that's a lot of makeup" or "she had her lips done", it means that whatever she did or had done to herself was done wrong. But if she looks just right, it might be her "what men think no makeup is" makeup, or the work of a really good surgeon.
I remember seeing a TikTok of a very attractive girl who was like "Many men approach me and say that I look beautiful and SO NATURAL. The reality is: my nose job cost $15k, my jaw was $20k, my cheeks were $10k..." and so on.
Also, at least in Central Europe, some lower middle class wear heavy makeup or have excessive cosmetic surgery to conspicuously show that they can afford heavy makeup and cosmetic surgery. It is a "poor man's idea of high status".
In general, I think that both makeup and cosmetic surgery can be extremely effective, especially for ugly women and mids - when done right.
It's also good to have a proper reference frame. One might argue that, for example, Lauren Sanchez Bezos is fake and ugly, but she still looks way better that any other "natural" woman pushing 60.
I read men saying "I prefer natural women" as virtue signalling and/or rejecting the lower middle class excessive makeup/surgery status game.
I believe that what most men actually want is the "what heavy makeup really is" and "what men think no makeup is" look, depending on the occasion (date night vs everyday). If you can find a girl that looks like "what men think no makeup is" without any actual makeup - good for you! Most men aren't that lucky though, hence all the memes.
>>I believe that what most men actually want is the "what heavy makeup really is" and "what men think no makeup is" look, depending on the occasion (date night vs everyday). If you can find a girl that looks like "what men think no makeup is" without any actual makeup - good for you! Most men aren't that lucky though, hence all the memes.
Do you really believe that all of these men grew up without mothers or sisters, and have thus no idea what a 'natural' woman is? They never saw them in the morning or evening before or after makeup?
I believe what most men actually want is women without makeup. Like, none at all. Ugly stuff.
And I must say I think the meme about men and 'women without makeup' is nonsense. Do they think that men didn't grow up with sisters and mothers, and see them in the morning or evening without makeup???
I prefer women without makeup. Always have. And I have seen a lot of them. Am married to one of them.
Also, the 1..10 scale is not linear
Example in another domain. In many assessments, a “pass mark” is 50%. Typically, more people pass than fail, so the “median mark” must be over 50% and it’s highly likely that the average mark is also. Some tests are even calibrated so that the average mark is around 65%, which usually leaves the “pass line” at -1 standard deviation
When used on women, I suggest that most people use a very similar ranking system. A woman of median attractiveness is around 7, a 5 is not unpleasant, and ratings below 5 indicate unattractiveness.
A 1-5 scale is more likely to map to a median of 3, because people will parse 3 as “middle” rather than “pass”. Most men find most women to be st least passably attractive, which skews the median upward on the 1-10 scale but not the 1-5 scale
On the 1-10 scale, both sexes are “pass” ranking, not comparatively ranking. On the 1-5 scale, men move to a more comparative ranking.
But maybe women are too
Men place a high value on women’s appearance but evaluate it generously. Women place less value on men’s appearance but rate it more harshly.
Let’s assume that, for women, 5 on 1-10 is “his appearance doesn’t do anything for me”. Most men rank a 3 “meh but I’ll overlook it”. But a man gets over 5, his appearance carries a lot of weight
Men see attractive women all the time, so moving from attractive to super-attractive triggers only a small response. But if women mostly see “unattractive” men, then even an attractive man is significant and a super-attractive man is very infrequent. Thus the emotional weight of attractiveness is out-of-scale for the frequency. Because average is value * frequency, this creates a strong left skew
None of this is inherently a problem. It only becomes an issue when the two scales are superimposed and the “7” woman thinks she should get a “7” man. But a “7” woman is actually pretty close to average, while a “7” man is really rare. Within her sex, a “7” woman has the same rank-ordered attractiveness as a “3” man!
This is a fun piece with some piercing observations. My main criticism is that a lot of the strong points get mixed in with the weaker ones, diluting the overall message.
For example, I think it's a great point that people tend to conflate the mid-range with the mean and that for many distributions this is completely inaccurate. It's very clever to describe attractiveness as a combination of natural traits (normally distributed) and skills (power law). I like this a lot.
Bu it's not self-evident that "the value of attractiveness" implies a positive skew, it seems plausible it could have any effect- even the opposite. It's also not obvious that only women get shamed for being below some attractiveness standard, in fact you yourself cite incels in this article obsessed with their own feelings of inadequacy.
There's also a longstanding theory in evolutionary psychology (that has admittedly been challenged a bit more recently) of the 'coy female' vs 'aggressive male' on account of women being far more selective than men in choosing mates. This would explain the different skew observed in the distribution of women > men and men > women ratings. I think the overall argument would be stronger if you mentioned this theory exists and listed some of the recent criticism as justification to consider your alternative theory. Still a fun read!
It seems to me that most of this misses the point of the people discussing the issue. Sure, the math is great as far as it goes... but...
Let us assume that the actual underlying (and definitely unstated) assumption is that the goal is marriage, which involves the pairing of one man and one woman. And let us assume that the one man 'should' be matched with a woman who is his 'equal', and that the 'one to ten' scale is designed to 'find' these equals.
This would mean that the various talked about mismatches are social mismatches. They represent a woman or man who is saying, "In the universe of prospective marriage partners, someone who is like 'this' is someone that would 'match' me."
“Men are not shamed for looking below average like that.” It is not at all clear that this is true. In fact, the whole blackpill theory is that it is not. Regardless, it cannot just be assumed to be true a priori without evidence.
You can't prove a negative - to challenge my negative claim you have to prove it's otherwise with examples.
Men are shamed for many things related to or contributing to low attractiveness - being weak, skinny, poor, shy, coward, low status or romantically unsuccessful - but usually not for being ugly itself (gender-neutral fat shaming is the only exception I can think of).
Also, the blackpill theory is not the best social theory out there. It might quite possibly be the worst one.
Why do you consider blackpill possibly the worst? I am not saying it’s totally correct, but it does rest upon some data, such as women’s near-universal preference for height, facial symmetry, jaw line, and body proportions.
Well, for example I think it is the worst in the practical sense since it leads to destructive outcomes on both personal and social levels. For comparison, bluepill is constructive on social level and slightly destructive on personal level, redpill is constructive on personal level and slightly destructive on social level, and whitepill is neutral on both levels.
I was thinking more about whether its claims are true than the impact on the individual or society from believing those claims. My sense is that blackpill theory has some validity, though like any theory, it has proponents who are making claims with questionable evidentiary support.
Beauty isn't that subjective. Women are far more picky with looks than men are and we constantly see them going after the same types of men on dating apps, for instance. Most men have to take what they can get.
This can be explained by the face that
1. There are a lot more men than women on dating apps (often 2/1 or worse) so they more or less get their pick of the pie. I would also guess that men are more willing to go on more dates more often then women, so it gets even more skewed. I have no hard data to back this up its just a hunch. The apps suck! Everybody knows this.
2. There is nothing to go off on dating apps other than looks, so if women have any looks preference at all, it will be very pronounced in the data. It is my personal experience that women, care about looks, but a lot less than men. Call that the beige pill if you want.
Women care about looks just as much as men do, they're far more picky with it than men are. Even if the ratios were even, women would still be infinitely more picky (as we see in person) due to being the sexual selectors due to the greater reproductive burden falling on them.
While this is technically true for unlabeled scales, it's a trivial matter to look at some scales that use centiles and find the same above average effect. It's not specific to self ratings of attraction.
Do you think age standards are playing some role in dating app data? If 25yo men looking at a distribution of 25yo women are subconsciously treating 40yo women as outside the reference set, whereas 25yo women are subconsciously including a lot of comparatively well-dressed, well-groomed 40yo men in the reference set against which they're evaluating their age cohort?
Yeah the main problem with this is it old 2014. Coming from a person who randomly found out about what is happening with men and women today. It's like an alternate reality. Then again I haven't really "tried dating" it's more of a thing that kept happening despite me but my kid is just a little older than this data and people are different.
The generation of we didn't get to learn social skills and think they are the only person in the world that matters are dating and I have read some sick shit.
I was under the delusion that the MAGA hate rhetoric was just the crazys getting permission to be openly racist and sexist. Same with the woke movement. Just the same things I had been hearing for year now given the opportunity to feed off its own biases and legitimacy to act out their hate.
But no apparently it's a generation of individual who don't know how to be part of a civil society. A Capitalist societal maybe but there's very little civil about capitalism. So now you look at people like a thing that can be quantified like you are ordering then off Amazon.
FYI it is not okay to be so nasty to someone that they want to kill themselves. You infact are mentally dysfunctional if you think talking to anyone as if they are worthless or like something you have to scrape off your shoe because you enjoy doing so.
Don’t think this article does a very good job arguing its main point. It largely rests on vibes based assertions about societal expectations of women (while essentially implying little to no expectations on men?) with no data to back those vibes up.
One could just as easily argue it makes sense evolutionarily for women to be pickier and rate men lower on average since they’re at more risk in a relationship!
Stating there’s *literally zero* negative societal implications for being an ugly man is an incredibly egregious assertion as well. There’s plenty of studies showing attractive women and men get treated better.
This article feels like an expression of frustration at societal expectations of women rather than about some true understanding of why men and women might view each other differently.
Human mating strategy is directly linked to rarity of beauty, in that we constantly readjust our values according to the prevalence of beauty (when the tide rises or falls, we rerate all the ships accordingly). This is why, for example, fuggly women do fine in Alaskan mining posts. People are wired to respect the bell curve for beauty. Thus average is 5 and standard deviation matters