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PaperclipPerfector  10d ago (text post)   35659 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 20, 2025

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Any society where women are free to make their own sexual choices is going to be a society where the majority of men end up as incels.

Seems like this is a claim that should come with some evidence. Depending on what you mean by "free to make their own sexual choices," women have more or less been able to choose and reject suitors for centuries in the West. And even in ancient times, they usually had some say in who they got married off to. Where they didn't, they were literally property, and if you are advocating that we'd be better off in a world where fathers simply sell their daughters and females are livestock, well... You need to read less Dread Jim. In very few societies have women ever been sexual and breeding chattel in the way he keeps advocating.

He did. It’s the old OKCupid data showing that, while male rate the average woman as averagely attractive, women rate the average man as extremely unattractive. And indeed any man below the 5th percentile or so.

Of course, it would be nice to have replications but there never will be, because if true this strongly indicates that any society where women are free to choose their mates or to remain single will be one where huge numbers of both sexes die alone. The latter choice was not possible in historic societies and is the main reason for our current predicament IMO. That is why I advocate for progressive and extremely high rates of taxation for single men and women approaching 30.

From the link:

Men don’t just find women more attractive; men’s ratings closely follow a bell curve, with 6% of women getting the minimum rating and 6% getting the maximum rating.

Women don’t just find men less attractive; the median and mode rating is 2 out of 7. Even more strikingly, the second most-common rating is 1 out of 7 — and near-zero men in the sample received 7 out of 7. (Over the years, by the way, I’ve repeatedly said “exactly zero,” but if you look close at the original post archived by Gwern, that’s not quite true).

The OkCupid results are far from unique. But the graphs are stark enough to inspire mutual anger. Common angry male reactions include: “Women have absurdly unrealistic standards” as well as “Women are just cruel.” Common angry female responses include: “It’s not our fault that most men suck” and “Why should I settle?”

But the only thing less constructive than anger is mutual anger. The data reveal an ugly truth that we all need to face. While there are several ways to capture this ugly truth, my favorite is just: The typical man disgusts the typical woman. You can expand this to: The median man moderately disgusts the typical woman, and the bottom quarter of men strongly disgust the typical woman.

[Various musings on how men and women can treat each other with empathy]

Update: Stefan Schubert points out that the OKCupid estimates of the male-female gap are unusually extreme. Emil Kirkegaard agrees after thoroughly reviewing a wide range of measures. True enough, but we should trust the OKCupid data more. The big advantage of the dating website rankings is that they greatly reduce Social Desirability Bias by getting both men and women in a “What do you REALLY think?” frame of mind.

That is why I advocate for progressive and extremely high rates of taxation for single men and women approaching 30.

You're still doing it. If men are single because women would prefer not to settle for anyone but Chad, taxing single men is punishing the victim.

Men and women. If both sexes are aware of an imminent need to pair up, I think that they will be able to sort it out. The current system encourages both sexes to shoot for the stars and crash to earth.

If the men are looking for Chad, that's a different problem. But the OKCupid data you were referring to earlier do not indicate it's "men and women".

You’re implying there’s no marginal men who who would marry before 30 facing huge tax penalties but don’t when they aren’t facing those penalties? That seems unlikely. Many men are in long relationships around that age that would likely see faster marriage and children. Others would feel more pressure to find a spouse. So would women since the same would apply to them, and bigamy remains illegal in much of the West. So, yeah, I’m pretty sure it would make a big difference.

I am sympathetic to the idea of a bachelor tax, but it seems like it would either end up being a cruel punishment on the unattractive. And if you add some sort of loophole, it is bound to get exploited (see: professional rejecters)

There couldn’t be professional rejecters – you’d get 3 rejects and then you’re out, you pay the bachelor-spinster tax. If you do not reject, and are therefore rejected by those who drop out, you keep getting official dates with counterparts. Imagine the creatures who would find each other in the deepest depths of hell, 20-30 one-sided rejections below ground.

Anyway the real problem is not lack of cohabitation/marriage but childnessness. And that power lies entirely in women’s hands, legally. Just give some of it back to men: no abortion or contraceptives unless the husband/boyfriend gives his consent. His DNA, his choice, it takes two to tango, whatever cliché you prefer. Then you put the spinster tax on childless couples.

Or just pay like 10% of the most motherhood-friendly women to produce 20 children and raise them in an orphanage (they can visit of course) , that also works and intrudes less in people's personal lives.

Or just pay like 10% of the most motherhood-friendly women to produce 20 children and raise them in an orphanage (they can visit of course) , that also works and intrudes less in people's personal lives.

I am always amazed at the things people will propose just to avoid rolling back 70 years of feminism.

Can’t turn back abortifacients.

And it’s one thing to want more children, another to force others to have children they don’t want to have.

Just give some of it back to men: no abortion or contraceptives unless the husband/boyfriend gives his consent.

In most longterm cohabiting childless couples the man is often as or more opposed to kids than the woman.

He has no say in the matter legally, therefore his opinion is irrelevant and he is blameless.

Besides, let’s go with your hypothesis, say in 40% of couples who could be having more children, the woman holds out – remove her lock, and that’s still a substantial increase in fertility.

Or just pay like 10% of the most motherhood-friendly women to produce 20 children and raise them in an orphanage (they can visit of course) , that also works and intrudes less in people's personal lives.

Orphanages???

This exists, it's called surrogacy, there are couples who will pay for it, and there would be more if it were subsidized, as there's a waiting list for adoption of young children, though 20 sounds excessive. There probably isn't any way to make giving birth more than a couple of times for someone else not extremely low status. There was a thread a bit ago on DSL where a poster was talking about considering surrogacy so that his hot young wife doesn't lose her figure, and there's no way for the relationship between him and the surrogate, or the well off gay couple and the surrogate not to be pure power dynamics at scale.

Pumping out 20 children would be their career, they’d be comfortable. Just wombs essentially; artificial ones would also work. Our bottleneck is in the production of children, yet paradoxically, in resources, children are not costly, and we are swimming in resources. It should be easy to lift the barriers and ramp up production, provided we do not take an exceedingly sentimental stance on where children come from (“when a mommy and a daddy love each other very much….”) .

Then, if most women would rather have status than children, that’s not the state’s problem. It gets its taxpayers anyway, and children are brought into the world, which I find morally good, while still not forcing anyone.

I’m saying both that your allusion to “orphanages” suggests that you don’t know what you’re talking about, and that even the underclass doesn’t want to be “just wombs” professionally for 30 years. Not that you aren’t in good company, Socrates suggested it on the Symposium, just there are reasons you’ll mostly see that system in bleak dystopian novels.

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A bachelor/spinster tax wouldn't necessarily be a cruel punishment on the ugly, because it would encourage them to couple up with eachother. A punishment on the shy, maybe.

Most girls are shy by default (at least when it comes to dating), particularly the ugly ones.

I'm not necessarily sure this is the case; I suspect fewer options encourages more active attempts to garner attention.

More beautiful people can wait for love to fall out of the sky, but less conventionally attractive people don't have this option and tend to have to fight for it. Attractive people can afford to be coquettish, less attractive people need to be direct. You can tell this is the case by how strongly many women react to the idea of asking men out: the implication is that you're a loser if you have to ask a man out -- what are you, a pick me?

You’re implying there’s no marginal men who who would marry before 30 facing huge tax penalties but don’t when they aren’t facing those penalties?

That is not, in fact, what I am implying. I am implying that the penalties on men would barely move the needle (except perhaps in useless ways such as sham marriages for cash), not that it literally wouldn't move it at all.

I suspect that it would convert a large number of cohabiting relationships into marriage.

Assuming we accept OK Cupid data as accurate (which I see no reason not to), it still captures only a slice of online perspective. The incel takeaway is "Women are unreasonably selective and would rather get run through by Chads than settle down with a nice ordinary guy." And yet plenty of nice ordinary guys find wives. Hmm. Curious.

I believe the modern dating market is hellish and I'm glad I'm not in it. But I'm personally a data point in favor of "you don't have to be a Chad, and no,.you don't have to settle for an obese single mother either."

I am unsympathetic to arguments against women having choices for a number of reasons, but most of all because the men most likely to make them tend to also make it obvious why they don't get chosen.

I think one could make a very reasonable argument that both women and men shouldn't have choices (or at least, not that many).

What is that argument? Given a choice between loneliness and being stuck with someone undesirable, the latter is worse, IMO.

When you're given too many choices (and particularly when some of those choices are sort of fake), your standards for "undesirable" grow to the point to which you end up alone instead of with someone that could be good enough if both parties could put an effort (which they won't, because they have "choices").

Then there's the issue of dating apps, they are just too frictionless: you can swipe like 300 people if you so wish, conversations will end abruptly for the slightest reason, plans will be cancelled at the last moment, etc.

This means that, even if you're engaging them in good faith, your incentive is to actively get many matches, and then you're suddenly setting up dates with n different girls, and then rather than having to individually reject the ones you like the least, your incentive is to ghost them.

It's all some sort of terrible prisoners' dilemma that brings the worst out of both sexes.

I agree that the current dating market is kind of hellish and having seemingly infinite choices (except they all have infinite choices too) is unhealthy. However, I think realistic proposals have to encompass the sort of slow-moving, societal changes that require persuasion and adoption of healthier attitudes, not some sort of patriarchal regime or state-mandated breeding program, which is what incels proposing that young people (but especially women) shouldn't be given a choice usually circle around to.

The "not that many" is key. This one specific man you don't like or spinsterhood is a bad deal. But so is 100 messages a day from random men on an app. I'm not sure what approach rate is ideal, but maybe it's something like six realistic choices.

Aside from how overused that one study is, the other major problem is that the womens’ answer is straight up incorrect, therefore bullshit. Women have the capacity to actually rank men on a respectable bell curve (just like gay men can rank women), they just choose not to because they concentrate on the ‘what will that answer say about me?’ implications. Similar to how straight men will sometimes performatively deny that an attractive man is attractive, or say that they can’t tell because they’re so straight it hurts and blinds.

The big advantage of the dating website rankings is that they greatly reduce Social Desirability Bias by getting both men and women in a “What do you REALLY think?” frame of mind.

It’s the opposite. If they were ranking some strangers as anthropologists, far from the context of their own coupling, they’d give a straight answer, as they usually do in the other studies. But on Okcupid, they think rating merely above average men as above average marks them as easy, low quality, desperate participants in the coupling game.

Also possible. It would be nice to have some kind of backing, though. Are you going on experience? Intuition?

Aside from how overused that one study is

I agree wholeheartedly, I just don’t think that a serious attempt at real data collection is going to happen for societal reasons, so we’re stuck with stuff that got scraped when nobody cared yet.

I just don’t think that a serious attempt at real data collection is going to happen for societal reasons

In "The Typical Man Disgusts the Typical Woman" post Update (the post that y'all are discussing), Caplan links to Emil Kirkegaard's analysis of four much more representative data collections:

  • General Social Survey (GSS), USA
  • NLSY Add Health, USA
  • Wisconsin longitudinal study (WLS), USA
  • German General Social Survey (ALLBUS), German

In all of these, the OK Cupid's stark disparity in ratings do not reproduce. Women's photos do tend to get slightly higher attractiveness ratings, but, you know, there's probably a reason why both men's and women's magazines are full of half-naked women.

You need to read less Dread Jim.

Or perhaps more practically, locate the bars that cougars frequent, if one looks/is still on the younger side.

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