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What if the whole problem is "equality" catching up with men and catching them unaware? Women have been plagued by having to invest into their looks and "personality" to attract a mate:
improve your face by applying makeup and styling your hair
improve your body by wearing the right clothes and shoes
improve your social standing by having the right friends and the right hobbies
and so on
In a relatively monogamous world where marriage was expected, they had to compete against each other: if you wanted a husband from the top third of the distribution, you had to take make sure you're in the top third yourself. Men, on the other hand, didn't really have to compete among themselves: first of all, they weren't evaluated just by their looks and personality, and second, why bother?
And now, when casual dating is a thing, men suddenly find themselves squished into a narrow band of absolute attractiveness, while women no longer have to run as fast as they can just to stay in the same place, so that when it's time to get married they can settle down with the best possible option.
Those charts where men rate women as 5 on average and women rate men as 2 on average? Truth in television, because it's not a relative scale, it's an absolute scale. Women have been pushing the envelope of what it means to be viscerally attractive for centuries, of course men suck at that. Can you imagine treating your face, your body, your wardrobe, your hobbies and your social circle from the time you're 12 as means to maximize your attractiveness to women? Of course those who manage to learn that or win the genetic lottery get all the girls - it's lonely at the top.
Sooner or later the dating market will fix itself. Men will learn to preen themselves, will know that "foundation" is not just a construction term or a sci-fi novel, will be able to answer what the best and the worst parts of their body are and will act on that knowledge. Women will gradually adjust their expectations, relearning the value of male companionship. But the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent, as Keynes said. Or virile, in this case.
I think 'the Squeeze' is a great term for that. Women are gaining power in all aspects and are now putting the 'squeeze' on men. But I also see some problems with that.
The environment I grew up in always held up a very critical lens towards society. Being an active and earnest participant in the rat race of social status and wealth was looked down upon. 'What matters is what's on the inside, not the outside' and other similar tropes. You shouldn't chase personal aspirations that are guided by shallow and vain markers of status and wealth. Instead, aim towards the greater good of how to make the world a better place. That, ultimately, was the true 'high status'.
I feel that the core of that sentiment is inherently humanistic and altruistic. Maybe it's because I grew up with it but I automatically assumed that a lot of the aspirations of any well meaning do-gooder person, especially here, came from a similar place.
So coming from that kind of thinking I can't for the life of me understand how anyone can in any way shape or form look at 'the squeeze' and go 'this is fine'.
From a sort of ingroup/outgroup pathology perspective I understand why there exists a lot of 'you deserve it' rhetoric, like you espouse here. But then what? Because it was bad for women we can now do it to men because... what, we hate them? Two wrongs will make a right? I had sort of assumed, particularly because of my environments rhetoric, that pushing people, men and women, to focus on looks was... bad? I certainly got the feeling that it was the case after being inundated with news stories about the dangers of women being too thin because that's what fashion show runway models looked like. Though those stories are now a distant memory.
Aside from that I find your assumptions about equality harmful to your argument as a whole. Men won't turn to makeup to charm women. We already know what men turn to. Steroids, MMA and drugs. I've already seen drastic societal changes where I live because of this very distinct change in social dynamics. A drastic escalation of violence at all ages, drug use at all ages and status symbols like cars and clothes.
I mean, from an EA perspective, is it useful for everyone to have to spend more time on status, wealth and looks in an eternal 'arms race'? Maybe it's my anti-equality priors shining through, but I don't think 'equality' is doing anyone any good here.
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What are you even talking about? Are you referencing some kind of immortal man who was dating people in their 20s 50 years ago and is still dating people in their 20s? twenty year olds today have no concept of what dating was like in the past. Even defining "a husband in the third of the distribution" implies men were competing with each other.
You must not be seeing the same people I'm seeing. Women lead men in obesity albeit only by a bit. In every way men have become less attractive women have also become less attractive.
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In the United States, 84% of men and 80% of women are overweight or obese. Or if you look at obesity alone 50.8% of men and 53.4% of women are obese. This is lower for younger people, so the dating market is a bit better, but not so much as to obviate the point. This is not a population where women are "pushing the envelope" of attractiveness or where they are heavily optimizing their attractiveness from a young age. It is a population where both men and women are unhealthy in a visible way that makes them less attractive, in roughly equal proportions. And weight seems to have an even bigger impact of female attractiveness than male attractiveness. (Now, this makes the rise in overweight/obese people itself a prime candidate for the rise in sexlessness, it seems to make sense that if people were less attractive they would be less interested in having sex with each other. But people seem to think there isn't enough of a correlation for this to make sense, though I haven't looked into the statistics to check. I also don't know what the statistics look like if you look into something a bit more subtle, like if a sedentary lifestyle reduces sex-drive or motivation or something.)
The idea of women relentlessly optimizing for attractiveness is prominent in our culture, not only because the people doing that are more visible but because of its role in feminist rhetoric and pop culture discourse. Similarly, overweight and obese people are stratified by education/class/intelligence/race/social-circle, such that for many people their prevalence might seem like societal dark-matter which shows up in statistics but not real life. (Similar to that large chunk of the population which can't do simple intellectual tasks like reading a bar graph.) But we shouldn't mistake their prominence in discourse for something with much relevance to population-level statistics.
Now, one upshot of this is that if you're a normal weight it's unclear how much statistics about dating apply to you. But normal weight people probably tend to want to date someone else who is also normal weight, not just for an attractive and healthy partner but because of all the other things like class/intelligence/social-circle it correlates with, so this doesn't really correspond to being favored in pursuing that goal either.
Is this true? Maybe it was back in the 90s. I'm sure some of these "overweight or obese" women look like fertility goddesses (though not all of them obviously).
I was just going off anecdotes regarding what people on the internet say influences attractiveness for them and others. I tried looking for a study to provide something a bit more substantial but didn't find anything useful after a couple searches on Google Scholar. So I tried asking ChatGPT ("Is the impact of obesity on attractiveness different for men and women? Cite your sources.") and it actually gave me real studies, one of which was what I was looking for, though its description of what the study said was not accurate. And looking up the study found there was also an equivalent one done for women. This is the first time ChatGPT has provided me with useful information, out of the 4 times I have tried using it as an information source.
Anyway, it's a pretty small study so maybe there's a better one out there, but it shows what I would expect. It's from 2005 if you think it has dramatically changed for some reason, but I doubt that, particularly since the results were broadly similar for the different cultures of Britain and Malaysia.
Male physical attractiveness in Britain and Malaysia: A cross-cultural study
Female physical attractiveness in Britain and Malaysia: A cross-cultural study
Per Table 2 in both studies, BMI accounted for 84.1% of the variance in female attractiveness rated by British men, but only 53.7% of the variance in male attractiveness rated by British women.
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