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Yeah, dating apps clearly capture a small subset of the sexual market. Firstly, user numbers aren’t ‘that’ high compared to truly universal apps like Instagram which a substantial proportion of non-elderly people have. Tinder reports 75m “active” users worldwide. Depending on source maybe 20-30% of those users are women. Many of those women (I say from personal experience with my friends and women I know) never meet anyone from the app, it’s purely an attention button when they’re single through the ‘likes’ / swipes feature. Other occasionally text someone but don’t meet up. Of the women I know who have used Tinder, I’d estimate maybe 20% have actually dated or fucked someone they met on the app.
So again the relevant grouping shrinks. The population of Tinder and Bumble and Hinge who are having sex with people from the apps are largely a small, promiscuous sub-group that is unrepresentative of much of wider society. Even in gay society, which is much more promiscuous and has fewer inhibitions about sex, daily Grindr users are a minority, just three or four million worldwide on by far the top platform for gay hookups, when it’s likely at least a hundred million gay men live in countries where Grindr is the main gay hookup app. And indeed comprehensive surveys of the gay community find substantial numbers of older gay men in largely settled relationships; the specific world of the urban gay scene, white parties, gay clubs, Grindr, drag race fandom etc is a subset of a more more heterogenous community. 70% or more of gay men in some surveys have downloaded Grindr, but the number regularly hooking up on it is a tiny fraction of that.
What is really the case is that hookup apps, as open meat markets, capture the imagination of people interested in sex and dating (which is many people, I’d say), both becuase they’re very public and because they’re interesting - and, of course, because they represent a source of a lot of data. A huge amount of modern research on the sexual marketplace is based on the OkCupid stats released like a decade ago, for example. Collecting data is the single biggest burden by far in psychological research, especially if you’re not just studying college students.
The emphasis on a tiny proportion of highly promiscuous urbanites therefore heavily screws up our understanding of the romantic marketplace; average people are much more boring by comparison and require much more work to study.
Well, why not?
It’s obvious from the statistical and anecdotal data points that there is a substantial fraction of young women who are voluntarily choosing to stay single. I think knowing why they are doing this is the key to understanding the problem and potentially finding a solution (if one exists). Given that they are on apps at all, they must be at least “interested in sex and dating” as you say.
If the answer is that these women are fucking turbochad on the reg, or are minor chad’s side piece, then the incels are right and the solution is to crack down on all forms of heterosexual nonmonogamy.
If the answer is that these women would love to be in a relationship with guys who really exist and who would mutually agree, but matchmaking is the rate-limiting step, then Scott and friends are right and the solution is for Elon Musk to buy Tinder.
If the answer is that these women straight up do not want to be involved romantically or sexually with the men who fell the same about them, and have better quality of life single, then the solution is probably to go all-in on VR AI waifus and rev up the industrial baby-making factories to continue the species.
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