"When firms reject job applicants, they usually don’t ghost them" Actually, this isn't true, I've applied to hundreds of jobs and they almost always ghost.
Not only is Bryan wrong here, he's *egregiously* wrong. Ghosting happens all the time when applying to jobs. It even happens pretty frequently after an interview has happened.
[Came to this post very late so - first off - apologies for tagging my comment onto yours (to get it near the top) even though it's not particularly related.]
Bryan's graphs get something ELSE wrong....something that almost all journalism gets wrong about the mating market. The problem is the bogus notion of the unitary 'Man' and 'Woman' stereotype. Let me explain:
In order to be really revealing OK Cupid's stats would need to distinquish between how the most pretty women rate men and how the least pretty rate them. (that would almost certainly reveal a huge difference.
Similarly the 'how 'men' rate women would need to distinguish between the ratings of the 'babe magnet' alpha male at one extreme and the nerdy 'beta' males at the other. Only then would these graphs really paint an accurate picture.
".... a theme that gets very little attention in journalism about sexual pair bonding – the huge difference between the fortunes of what one might term the More and the Less Desired of each sex. Opinion pieces, sometimes serious and sometimes coy, on the subject of unfair sex are to be found in abundance. What always strikes me when I read this kind of journalism is how it is always framed in terms of a generic species called ‘Women’ and a generic species called ‘Men’; as if the perceived ‘unfair’ asymmetries under discussion are entirely ones between the sexes. The huge intra-sexual differences between the experiences of pretty women and ‘plain’ ones; and between confident ‘alpha’ males and ‘betas’ – this never gets considered."
This is true, but online blast emails are extremely easy to set up. I was doing those with Lotus Notes twenty years ago. The large firm I worked with still sent physical letters to candidates that interviewed in person, unless they went through a recruiter (the recruiter handled all of that, which I learned after upsetting one by sending such a letter).
I don't think it's that onerous to at least contact candidates who were interviewed. But in the years I've been working it seems to be ever more common not to bother even with that.
That is truly shameful. I think executives need to think carefully about that. Many firms intelligently use their recruiting, especially campus recruiting, as a form of marketing ("we hire the best and the brightest"). It is an extremely powerful tool (see McKinsey, Bain, the bulge-bracket investment banks, hedge funds,...), and the big law firms do this as well. Needlessly upsetting people strikes me as bad business. It probably does not matter for CPG or manufacturing, but for professional services firms it would be deeply foolish to not take the time to send out a physical letter, or at least an email, stating that they applicant is no longer under consideration. That is an oversight that signals internal drift. Bad HR is often an indicator of internal problems at a firm (most execs throw boring stuff to cost centers such as HR, and not overseeing that they are doing their job probably means other cost centers are flailing as well).
I expect the calculation is that as it becomes normal throughout workplaces not to send rejection letters, even for those who have interviewed, people take less affront to it. Although conversely the rarer it becomes, the easier it is to distinguish your company through the basic courtesy of following up.
I'm assuming that what Bryan means by "ghosting" is radio silence after an interview, or at least after some level of personal (eg not a form letter) communication with the employer. Obviously when you're sending out applications you'll be lucky to hear back from 10-15%, and that sucks but it's not the same thing.
That said I still think Bryan's priors are a bit out of date. I wouldn't call ghosting the norm, exactly, but it's very common, even well into the recruiting process. And I've applied to jobs in many fields, from shitty service work to Big 4 positions for which I was very much qualified. It can be tough.
So true. Of the 87 applications I sent out in my recent job search, (all for jobs that I was fully qualified for), exactly one sent a form email turning me down. Not a peep from the other 88. Finally, I answered a job ad where I could apply in person. They hired me on the spot. Good thing, because it's a great job.
For my sister-in-law, her rating of men was 99% least attractive, 0.99% acceptably attractive and 0.01% most attractive. Most attractive being certain especially talented performers who don't know she exists. When my sister-in-law was in her 20s she would have dates with some of the 0.99%, but these men were never that interested in her.
The crazy thing is that the negative vibes my sister-in-law had about the 99% of men she found unattractive oozed from her persona. All the more crazier as my sister-in-law was not gifted with the looks to be in a position of being picky about men, but she absolutely was! And so it is that she has never married.
Fortunately, my wife was less picky and somehow I got her to fall for me.
I’m 55 and very near triple digits. Obviously not in incel land. I asked my girlfriend about this chart in bed last night. I think of myself as normal and not particularly attractive. I have definite negatives in my own mind. Her response was that I exude masculinity and a protector/doer kind of alpha vibe. Not work boots and jeans but obviously not soft handed either. I’m a slight bit dickish too but in a way she finds acceptable. Like the guy who won’t take bs and will argue the point when someone is being a douche while out. And I’m better looking than I think I am. Also, I’m tall (6’6”) and intelligent, and that would break the whole deal if the last wasn’t true. She’s actually a librarian and would find a dumb guy unacceptable.
The conclusion I had to come to is that I’m blessed and guys who didn’t get this suite need some help, which is why I mention it. Much of this stuff came down to how I was raised and trained myself. I’d also point out that she had two kids (as did I, separately), so her attitudes were not much like your sister in law, though her ex husband was dominating to the point she calls him a narcissist. Kind of a ‘pick me’ girl, as many (most?) of the girls were back when I was a kid.
I still think going for the masculine vibe would be the way I’d go if I were 25 again. And the women like your sister in law are going to be having a lot of cats. I feel bad for them, they’d probably have been good mothers, but they ruled themselves out.
I think the masculine thing is a big unspoken problem with a modern generation of men raised by women. They either take on the toxic animal "thug" persona, or they are soft. Anger coming out of such "soft" men terrifies women. The opposite of that, men in control, able to to resist visible anger but also able to withstand external force, that is something women seem to like. What is amusing is that women supposedly wanted sensitive men when I was young (1990's), but no one ever say that in person. I almost feel like it was some kind of advertising policy that became widely held, but not realistic.
I'm surprised how my comment resonated with readers. My SIL is a very good hearted person. But there was something instinctive in her that created friction with most men. As she has aged she has generally become less social with everyone. But I don't think she has made a new guy friend in many, many years - her best male friend is a long time neighbor, but she doesn't socialize with him.
My wife was completely opposite. She is very comfortable around men and enjoyed dating, not for any romantic need, but she enjoyed the socializing.
I happened to catch her right when she was wanting to have a more serious relationship. I demonstrated the masculine attributes of being modestly athletic, competitive but fair and of seeking a serious occupation / steady income. Thirty five years we are happily married and best friends.
It amazes me how two sisters can have such different dispositions!
I'm happy for you. I had poor relationships for other reasons until I got some recovery from codependency in my 50s. Life is good now, you always wish you were ready for the message earlier though.
Maybe, but to me I look around and I see guys who were more attractive according to the criteria I apply to women I guess - body shape, symmetrical features, good hair. That must not be the criteria they are using.
Many women would agree with you. But if even 2% of women have a preference for it, there are only like 0.2% of men that tall, so they each have 10 women who'd really like them
Absolutely. I think over prioritizing height, and not realizing that there's often easy alpha in searching through short men for a short king, is a clear cut case of mild irrationality
Dude, you are 6-6. You are near the top of the charts in the one category that nearly all woman want and filter on. Why you would declare yourself unattractive is baffling to me.
Because 6’3-4” is a realistically attractive height for men and this chap is into freakish territory at 6’6”. Difficulties in almost all aspects of daily life at this height. Only attractive to unusually tall women, that is over 5’10”. The average height for women in North America is 5’6” and we get a sore neck from looking up past 6’3” all the time.
That data is collected from dating sites, where people rate opposite sex by looking at the pictures?
If so, this is such an oversimplification of female attraction. Yes, physical appearance plays a big role in attraction, much bigger for men than for women, but for women, chemistry, emotional connection, shared values - all together comprise a larger factor. A typical man disgusts a typical woman to a much lesser degree than this chart suggests.
The data above doesn't show that, if anything, it shows the opposite. Men and women rate people according to appearance and on that dimension women are fussier about appearance than men.
Men’s attractiveness to women is not primarily visual or based in physical beauty. So attraction does not register when there is only visual information. This does not mean that men are on average unattractive to women as the title suggests, but rather *unattractive based on looks alone*
Like the article says, men generally win women over with other means- devotion, loyalty, humor, charm, charisma, etc
Probably one reason the sexes seem totally, almost pathologically unable to empathize with the other's experiences on dating sites. Some men - a number of whom may have developed actual self-esteem issues from their experiences on those sites - look at all that easy attention and validation and get legitimately angry about what they see as women complaining about their many suitors not being sufficiently hot.
But I think many women find this obsession with superficial attention to be just as baffling - why are they supposed to enjoy getting random DTF (or at best low-effort copypasta) messages from strangers? The sexes are very different, nowhere moreso than in matters of romance, and without the ability to even comprehend how things look from the other side, discourse itself just stalls out.
You will deeply offend many women by claiming that "the sexes are different." Even if they are only a bit different, it is concentrated in mate selection, where the evolved strategies are clearly different. The hard-left modern feminism pushed on these women has warped many of them and made them have unhealthy views of themselves as well as others. That same modern "feminism" has also transformed many men in ways that are bad for everyone.
If anything, the promotion of trans rights has helped in promoting the idea that there really are sex differences and they matter. Unsurprisingly, the promoters of these radical modern types of feminism are pushing back against trans rights and any possible violation of their females-ALWAYS-must-get-preference privileges that have come to define modern life in the West.
No, I'll offend women and men who are proponents of the widely-hated, astroturfed social progressivism that currently dominates our elite cultural institutions.
I'm not offended. I lean left but not so far my brains fall out. And I am very, very tired of idiot lefties insisting that we're all a 'blank slate'. We ARE in fact deeply, deeply different.
I think the truth is in the middle. Yes women are less driven by pure visuals-it's very rare for women to masturbate to a photo of a man, even a super hot, fit one. But they do to erotic literature, usually envisioning a conventionally attractive man in the narrative. Looks are important but they usually need to be accompanied by more than just the visual.
The issue with this piece is it's assuming men and women are operating from the same baseline in terms of the variables of attraction, and it's more like apples and oranges. That women aren't rating men highly from just photos doesn't equate to "most men disgust women."
I am going to disagree here. Women are not monolithic, and each individual does as she prefers. We need to get back to treat individuals as individuals. The modern obsession with groups (gender, race, sexual orientation, religion,...) has been poisoning every aspect of our society. We need to stop it. We need to resist this growing stain on our souls.
If this is true then there’s an important takeaway that Bryan missed: nowadays, a significant number of matches start on apps- If you’re a man on the apps, you have to assume most women will not find you immediately appealing based on looks alone; you have to take some serious effort to craft a profile that demonstrates all these other qualities and send well written messages that are appealing in other ways. This is why an app like tinder, which is all instantaneous visual reaction, is a losing proposition for all but the top 1% in physical attractiveness. But other apps that allow an opportunity to demonstrate valuable qualities are a better bet. Men should internalize that they have to work harder to demonstrate their value. I think a lot of young men are starting tinder profiles, getting no reaction, and concluding that it’s all hopeless, when this is the worst possible strategy.
It's why I think Bumble (women have to message first) is the best dating app. It effectively bypasses this whole dynamic - for men, you know you clear the "disgust" hurdle; for women, you won't have to get messages from people who disgust you.
Please explain how the chart measures female attraction to social status? I have seen, many times, women change their opinion on a dime when finding out he had a high-status job or owned a luxurious home in a desired neighborhood. This is why women get so upset over seemingly unimportant fibs such as men claiming to be physicians or part of wealthy families. For most men, they could not care less if their potential date had a high-status job or was from a family of wealth and influence, but women care more about this than physical appearance. I once knew a short, ugly, unpleasant little man who always dated beautiful women because he was from a wealthy family. I felt bad for his wife because she was my friend's little sister and a wonderful human being. He was a terrible husband that she was forced to divorce, but she lives in a doorman building in Greenwich village and her children each have bedrooms bigger than my last condo in lower Manhattan. In her mind, it was worth the hassle to give her children a better life. Go to Manhattan, LA or Washington, DC and you will see this everywhere.
I use dating apps; they are no magic bullet, that’s for sure.
But two advantages they do have is: 1) you can get dealbreakers out of the way immediately, and 2) you expand the pool of people available. If I go to the same coffee shop, the same workplace, the same gym, the same pub, the same grocery store….and at roughly the same time for each, it’s likely I’m running into generally the same people.
I think the actual evidence shows that an expanded pool of options is actually a negative for relationship formation at a societal level. If you find it easy to meet women on dating apps, then your experience is far from typical.
I guess I'd need to know what you mean by "at a societal level."
Are you saying society is better off if any particular individual has fewer choices?
I guess you'd also have to further define what you mean by "easy" with regard to meeting women on dating apps. I'd say I spend 10 minutes a day (a few minutes at at a time at various points in the day) swiping on profiles on 3 different apps. Maybe a couple minutes more on occasion.
With that amount of effort, I'd say I wind up with 2-5 actual real world first dates a month. To me, that's worth it.
On the other hand, I won't disagree with the idea that the far better way to meet people is to go to activities one likes (hiking club, activist event, Meetup group, church, etc).
He guessably meant that when people know the choice is to mate with someone in their narrow surroundings or be alone for good, they tend to be less choosy than the Internet has made them.
And he sees that lesser choosiness as a societal good, for some reason he surely knows.
To stand a chance of winning a Coke fridge I had to sign up for three apps. I'm no longer in the market for a partner but wottheheck I joined a dating app called Academic Singles. Within a week I had a hundred responses from women, mostly attractive and many much younger than I am , none of which I answered btw. It seems that eligible men in their 70s are in high demand.
This, The OK Cupid data also shows that the correlation between "this person is attractive" and "I would date this person" is much lower for women than for men.
Yes, but if I am are on a dating website and the women consider me to be unattractive, I can't imagine any woman would be willing to find out if I had chemistry or an emotional attraction with her. On the contrary. I would be ruled out immediately
You know what rules out a lot of men? The insistence on meeting immediately to see if there's 'chemistry'. I can promise you there won't be for us middle-aged. We're not thirty anymore, our hormones don't rage like they used to, and while men would probably shag 80% of the women they see, women are pickier and will be at any age. Chemistry doesn't always happen on sight or at first meeting. The two men I've been in love with were not super-attractive initially and I wrote them off as 'just friends' yet I wound up in LTRs with both of them. People who think chemistry happens immediately don't understand how it works and will blow you off when they should have given it time. Swipe left.
I'm OK with waiting for chemistry and most men would be. BTW, like you, I am older.
I am postulating that women have so many choices on apps that they do not need settle for a man who doesn't induce chemistry right away. Why bother. There is always another man who is better looking just one swipe away. Why waste time on someone who isn't a perfect fit? Apps are 60-75% male. Women have so much choice that it can be overwhelming
This is a really good point. But the reality is much of dating takes place via the apps these days, so how women rate men on the apps actually matters a lot. And it should be noted that OkCupid's dating profiles are probably the most robust among the apps. So you are getting a LOT more than just 6 pictures to judge someone from.
"The study, co-authored by Claudia Brumbaugh of Queens College, appears in the June issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
"Men agree a lot more about who they find attractive and unattractive than women agree about who they find attractive and unattractive," says Wood, assistant professor of psychology. "This study shows we can quantify the extent to which men agree about which women are attractive and vice versa."
More than 4,000 participants in the study rated photographs of men and women (ages 18-25) for attractiveness on a 10-point scale ranging from "not at all" to "very." In exchange for their participation, raters were told what characteristics they found attractive compared with the average person. The raters ranged in age from 18 to more than 70.
Before the participants judged the photographs for attractiveness, the members of the research team rated the images for how seductive, confident, thin, sensitive, stylish, curvaceous (women), muscular (men), traditional, masculine/feminine, classy, well-groomed, or upbeat the people looked.
Breaking out these factors helped the researchers figure out what common characteristics appealed most to women and men.
Men's judgments of women's attractiveness were based primarily around physical features and they rated highly those who looked thin and seductive. Most of the men in the study also rated photographs of women who looked confident as more attractive.
As a group, the women rating men showed some preference for thin, muscular subjects, but disagreed on how attractive many men in the study were. Some women gave high attractiveness ratings to the men other women said were not attractive at all."
Yes, good comment. This rings true, I’ve been saying it for years, but I hadn’t seen the research.
This is partly why it’s a numbers game for men. Some women will just plain find you a lot more attractive than the median woman does. I’m married to such a woman.
Both men and women take different attributes into account. Like many men, I prefer heavier women. Skinny is a negative to me. I am fat now, but I was not for most of my life. I have dated women everywhere between fat and too thin, because body size is simply not important to me. There are many women who care or not about size, not to mention those who have different preferences (including many larger or even taller women who have bizarre requirements such as having a man possess thighs in a larger circumference than her own).
Aella did a survey on women rating men's attractiveness that isn't *that* grim. A lot of men in the 4-5/10 category, but at least it's not as many under "least attractive".
Yes, I find Aella's data much more persuasive. The data presented in the post simply don't pass the sniff test; most women do, indeed, settle, and outside of the artificial environment of dating sites actually settle pretty easily.
That said, the bottom quartile of men really are atrocious and extremely low quality, you have to get to bottom 5 percent of women to get that bad.
Aella's data was only 100 women selected from her audience ("probably disproportionately liberal, white, etc., and reflects the tastes of that type of woman") though. So even if the results are more intuitive (mostly negative ratings, but closer to the midpoint), I think the data is likely much lower quality (I don't see a reference to the OKCupid data, but my recollection was that it was much higher n, and the OKCupid userbase, assuming it was that, should be more representative than Aella's followers). It seems plausible to me that Aella's audience are simply being nicer and more reflective than the OKCupid audience.
Yeah, ignore any of Aella's "data" - it's all absurdly biased. There's a reason she does not work for a reputable organization and is an "independent researcher."
In fairness to Aella, I think many of her surveys, especially the larger sample ones, are much higher (and acceptable) quality; not just, or majority, her twitter followers.
Having lead academic social science research, I think people overstate the difference between the samples of and hers: much social science research is just based on convenience samples, like hers, whether that's unrepresentative online opt-in samples (ubiquitous in psychology), but especially in sex research (and prior to the rise of online crowd-sourcing, much social science and sex research was just on whatever undergrads you had to hand to pay in course credit).
Yeah, there are similar problems in academic research, though not as extreme. In any case her data is limited to a very specific subgroup and is unrepresentative.
A sample of 100 could be acceptable if it is a truly random sample, but reading your comment, it would not appear to be the case, unless one dates in that pool (I most certainly did not before I married a non-white, non-left female).
But in addition to the point about unflattering pictures, note that the OkCupid users were generally single, and the pool of single men as a whole is much worse than the pool of coupled men. Especially beyond maybe age 30.
Also true of women but the effect is weaker, because as someone else noted the bottom quartile of men is really, really bad. Way worse than the bottom quartile of women.
If you look at the original OkCupid article from 2009 ( Your Looks and Your Inbox ) there are also examples of 4 guys (I think all of them are founders or employees of OkCupid) who were rated as "significantly less than medium attractive" . And one of them, pictured with guitar, definitely wouldn't look out of his place on a modeling stage. So your assumptions are disproved by examples.
Also, why do you think that the singles being less attractive than the coupled is something that applies only to men?
That seems surprising. One might expect people to select their most flattering pictures for their dating profile. What is the explanation for it being the reverse?
Many men have literally no flattering photos. One of the reasons why "man with a fish" is such a tinder stereotype is because after catching a fish is one of the rare times men get their photo taken in good lighting
This morning I was presented with a man whose first photo suggested 'Serial killer'. I'm sure he wasn't, but still. Even when he smiled he looked horrible. What he needed to do was get his eyebrows re-shaped, they were the kind that makes one look naturally evil (ex: Luigi Mangione, who now no longer looks like a terrorist).
They might pick what they think is their most flattering picture but that doesn’t mean it’s not really low effort. IIRC OkCupid was free. I never looked at men on dating sites but lots of women had e.g. selfies that they took in a mirror, which is less flattering than the style of any of Aella’s pictures.
I expect the average man put less effort into his dating profile picture than the average woman because men put less thought into their appearance than women in general.
It's funny: Many men send dick pics because they can't understand why women don't like them; they'd *LOVE* it if women send them vadge pics! Yet they never think, "I'm motivated by a good-looking, groomed, stylishly dressed woman, maybe they're attracted to the same in men!"
Aella adjusted the raw data, so her post can't be used as evidence for this:
"I normalized the results, cause it’s hard to get an average of ‘1’ if the lowest possible ranking is 1, so by default the lowest ranking was pulled down to 1, and the highest to 10, stretching all the men evenly across this spectrum."
EDIT: Maybe I misunderstood, and that normalization was only for that one section, and not for the histogram?
When you say that the bottom quartile of men are as bad as the bottom 5 percent of women, are you speaking only of appearance, or of overall "quality?" Either way, that seems wrong. What is the basis of this claim?
See, this is where women's mate preferences are off the rails. At a point if you're snobby picking for specific characteristics and traits and features to see which gives you "the tingles", you've already lost the plot on building a relationship and are window shopping with your womb like a consumer who just got their first paycheck.
Men choose women based on who's face they could put up with on a daily basis and a romp, and that's the ONLY reason most women are mids.
If men only went after the women who give them "the tingles", 90% of women won't pass the sniff test.
Overall quality; for amount of effort put into appearance, the 5/25 rule is if anything generous to men.
Men are way, way more likely to be violent, criminals, addicted to drugs, gamblers, to be rude, to talk over others in conversation, to not maintain basic hygiene, to not maintain basic cleanliness, less likely to be able to cook, to take care of themselves domestically more generally, more likely to shirk on childcare and domestic work, and the earnings advantage of men disappears at lower income levels. In a huge range of negative traits, I am confident that you need to go way deeper into the left tail on women to be "equally bad" as the bottom quartile man.
If we only consider appearance, I think you are way off. The bottom 5% of women in appearance are all extremely fat and ugly, like over 300 pounds. No amount of "effort put into appearance" will compensate for this. In general, most "effort put into appearance" (aside from the effort required to not be fat) is superfluous. The 25th-percentile man is almost infinitely better looking than the 5th-percentile woman.
Regarding overall quality, it is true that the very worst men are worse than the very worst women, mostly because they are more violent. But I think you are not being fair to men in this comparison. For example, the 5th-percentile woman is a drug addict, but the 25th-percentile man is not. I'm not sure where you get the idea that men are more rude or more likely to talk over others in conversation; that seems wrong. In general, it seems like you tried to think of ways that men are worse than women, but you didn't try to think of any ways that women are worse than men (you could start with staggering levels of mental illness).
I genuinely tried to find a source that looked at interruptions or speaking over people and couldn't find any that didn't find that men were way more likely to do so.
Many sources, but the formal and informal largely aligned.
I agree that the bottom quartile man is not addicted to drugs AND a problem gambler AND violent AND a slob AND useless around the house AND inconsiderate, but I do think there's a pretty good chance he's at least one of the above!
Exactly. We continue to go to dentist, hairdresser, and take care of ourselves into old age. Single seem to check out of general maintenance if they don’t have a primary carer, mother or wife. Shame. We will never even meet them unless they clean up their act and learn to take a decent selfie.
Women have plenty of problems. But ultimately, I’m a man, and I care about what I can do differently. Whining about women all day will get me absolutely nowhere. Life isn’t fair, all you can do is play the hand you’re dealt.
Agree with this. It seems like Bryan is reading off and old script where the overwhelmingly vast majority of people get married. That's becoming less and less true every year.
That link is deeply misguided. The purpose of free speech was never utilitarian. It was intended to simply allow people to enjoy the rights they already had in the new world. We do not want to live in a society that throws people in jail for unpopular opinions, no matter how offensive. Furthermore, many accepted rights today were unpopular vulgarity in the past (LGBT rights is an obvious example).
The largest problem in the US today is not that we have too many rights, but rather that our rights have been massively restricted via powerful interest groups (universities, corporations, non-profits,...). No one in the US imagined that non-profits and universities would ever grow so large, and deviate so far from their missions. We probably need a an upper bound on non-profit assets and revenue, above which corporate taxation applies.
Luckily, for corporations the free market is a very effective governing body.
So this graph doesn't measure men's "holistic" attractiveness. It only says that most guys can't get by on looks alone. But there are several other ways to be very attractive to women!
It’s in the woman’s interest to loudly and publicly proclaim the “ick” factor when she is approached by a man she doesn’t find attractive.
The woman needs to make it clear to her social circle, to herself, and to other men, that she is out of the low status guy’s league, lest his interest end up suggesting she’s not as attractive and high status as she makes herself out to be. The best way to do this is to label the guy a “creep” or “out of touch”, so his advances don’t suggest anything about her status as much as they do about his delusions.
Or maybe evolution is telling us something; the 19th century romantic novel, aggravated by Disney musical in the 20th century, where two young people meet and fall in love because they're the best of the best for each other (prince and princess), is a rare anomaly.
Maybe it's natural that half of men never reproduce (because historically they've always been cannon fodder) unless they kidnap women; maybe it's healthy for rich men to accumulate several women and for them to accept it (many already do so as lovers in an informal way, cause monogamy prohibits them from being wives).
Maybe evolution tells us: "Young men, don't look for a wife, sublimate your high libido in building and/or destroying the world around you, and as Achilles said, you die gloriously or old in your cot surrounded by offspring." And perhaps evolution is telling us: "Young women, don't idealize young men. Don't you see? In the end, none of them are that good. Save yourself to attract a man who has already accumulated power and your children will grow up safe."
- "90% of swipes by women are for men over 6’0, which does not reflect the importance women place on height in the real world. …What we see with algorithmic online dating isn't a mechanism to assign the perfect match to each person of the opposite sex. Instead, we've created a machine where the top 20% of men mate with many different partners and the top 80% women try to get the top 20% of men to date and ultimately marry them (and not just have sex with them)." Arnold Kling, 24 Sep 23, https://archive.ph/MKrpq
- "Men swipe right on 60% of women, women swipe right on 4.5% of men. The bottom 80% of men are competing for the bottom 22% of women and the top 78% of women are competing for the top 20% of men. A guy with average attractiveness can only expect to be liked by slightly less than 1% of females. This means one “like” for every 115 women that see his profile." Erik Torenberg, 23 Sep 23, https://archive.ph/Ps8pI
- “Most single men on dating apps struggle to even get “likes” from women. Only a tiny minority of men receive a preponderance of matches, and that this disparity was comparable in scale to the income inequality of South Africa under apartheid. In contrast, the match disparity among females was similar to the magnitude of economic inequality found in Western Europe.” Attraction Inequality and the Dating Economy, Quillette, 12 Mar 19, https://archive.is/EvIj5
- "Women Say 80% of Men Are “Below Average. Are women’s standards just too high? A study by dating app OkCupid found that women find 80% of men unattractive or 'below average.'", Medium, 9 Sep 22, https://archive.is/SvBrV /
I think the 20% number is far too high. I bet it is more like 3%. I remember reading two different papers long ago, one in Europe and one in Africa. The former was interesting in that more women were sexually active than men, but all the women were sharing very few men. The African study was about AIDS, but it had a lot on how prostitutes spread disease, but also how many poor women had transactional relationships with men (they stayed in their home, or the men would live in their home and pay their bills while they were working far from, then return to their wives back in the villages).
What I found fascinating was that the poor communities had more equal relationships, while the wealthy European country had a situation where all the women were shared by a few high-status men. I have never been able to find those papers again.
Yes this is based on an initial impression from women’s perception of status where they are being driven by their evolutionary heritage to acquire resources by having their choices to mate.
However if you accounted for men’s attraction to a woman’s personality outside of her sexual appeal, the graphs would be so skewed against women.
That’s why the modern woman has discovered they can spread themselves on tinder etc but can’t find someone to sincerely invest in them long-term.
>if you accounted for men's attraction to a woman's personality
This is meaningless. There is no separating the two in romantic or sexual relationships. If a man is interested in a woman sexually, the woman would have to go out of her way to make him dislike her personally. Likewise, if a man does not initially find a woman attractive, but ends up hanging out with her and getting to know her anyway; then the more he ends up liking her personally, the higher the likelihood he will end up liking her romantically.
Life isn't Dungeons & Dragons. There's no balance here. The vast majority of men are not physically attractive enough to seduce women by their looks alone. We should be accepting of this, and make some effort to create and restore spaces for courtship that don't leave the vast majority out in the cold.
A man who finds a woman attractive will by default like her personality. And the more attractive she is, the worse behavior she can get away with before crushing her seductee's faith. Gal Gadot would have to cheat on me with my own father for me to dislike her personality.
But in the modern era where we humans are able to think for ourselves instead of being slaves to evolution, as you correctly pointed out, why not simply hire a woman for the night instead?
It is wayyyyyyyyyyyy cheaper, comes with minimal downsides if you practice safety precautions, and is legal in many countries.
The rule of thumb is that for women, boats and airplanes, you should typically charter them instead of purchasing them since the rental cost is much more economical.
I am not saying your advice is terrible. But it is sorta like giving advice on how to get the best lease rates* on a brand-new car, when that is not the recommended method of having a car to begin with.
*the recent low lease rates on EVs being the exception
I think you fundamentally misunderstand evolution. It is baked in. We do not "think" about it. There may be a few people who go against their feelings and cultivate a different view against their natural one, but it is extremely rare and rather difficult. Many who have such as strong will are more likely to use it in more productive efforts, be they economic, political or spiritual.
Everyone always forgets the second half of this stat, which found that women were willing to date an “average” man (which due to their distorted perceptions really meant a top 20% man) while men were only willing to date a top 20% woman (which actually meant top 20%, because their perceptions were accurate). But both men and women were only willing to date the best of the opposite sex.
This is 2009 data pre-smart phone era when dating sites were actual sites.
How representative were the male and female populations? Haven't these sites typically been far more skewed to have more males and likely males who, especially back then when there was more of a stigma to using dating sites, were more 'desperate' and lacked social skills to find women in real life?
Yes, makeup matters. Not just in hiding flaws but a woman who wears makeup is conscientious of her appearance. As the article points out, what hurts many men is they make no effort to improve their appearance.
It would be a interesting research challenge to take 100 men and test their success with women based on how they dress. I'm thinking that men who dress well do much better gaining the positive attention of women.
You are correct and most men will do any and everything *except* improve their appearance.
They go to the gym all the time, they take showers, they wash their clothes, they comb their hair in the morning and for some reason this bare minimum -- this piece of cardboard -- is supposed to be sexually attractive. Men really *do* need make up, they *do* need form fitting and suggestive clothing that shows off their arms, abs, and thigh muscles etc..., they do need to shave, and they *do* need plastic surgery the majority of the time.
Don't care to be attractive. They wonder "how can I be physically either unattractive or unremarkable and attract women to myself at the same time?"
They want to tie their identity to this bland and boring "masculine" aesthetic when it is clear that all of the most attractive men... every man that has ever inspired a "mania" among women and girls has been, to an unmistakeable degree, aesthetically androgynous.
Women would have never swooned over Elvis, Bowie, Michael Jackson, Prince, any Oldie star, or rocker, or boy band, or KPOP star if they were these overly large disgusting, caveman looking troll things that *men* think are attractive and therefore aspire to be.
You may be projecting your own preferences here a little--men often report doing better after going to the gym. The average guy isn't going to be Bowie no matter how hard he tries.
You claim that these men are popular among women because of their looks while it's extremely possible that they are adored by women because of their fame and wealth.
And the assertion that most men need plastic surgery is just funny
The amount of women subject to this phenomenon are infinitely fewer than the women who are willing to chase beautiful, lithe, clean shaven men with makeup on down the street.
No, women are attracted to men with money and power. Have you seen the Tinder findings? 80% of women are attracted top the top 20% of men. The other 80% of men are invisible to them.
But why do more men not dress better and spend more money on their looks? Do men have a non-verbal pact not to outdo each other? Women seem inclined to compete against each other.
In certain localities of the USA plastic surgery is a huge business and such business is clearly targeted at women. Women are clearly more likely to spend money on such surgery. Why is this?
Do women not understand that that if they could get together and stop competing with each other they could save a lot of time and money?
Because men compete with each other mostly for dominance and resources, which outweighs the importance of physical attractiveness. Women place SOME importance on physical attractiveness, but not as much.
Women may have evolved to compete through appearance because men are more visually oriented in mate selection.
As for you last question, I recommend reading up on Game Theory. Women’s competition over appearance persists because the individual incentives to defect from collective action are very strong, and coordination problem is very large.
Because men’s physical attractiveness is much less controllable than women’s.
If we could get laid by putting on makeup and waxing our bodies, it would be 100billion dollar industry for men by now.
The physical traits that women value in men and appeal to their gaze are more genetic. Height, body frame, facial bone structure, head shape, eyes, penis size, hairline, forehead, facial thirds, and so on.
The reason society doesn’t acknowledge this is because of this underlying subtle hatred of men.
That's because the fashion industry today is, by and large, run by people who hate straight men. I recommend looking into the past, photos and magazine articles from before 1960. Some of the specifics won't translate (e.g., not too many guys were suspenders today), but the general ideas will.
It's a skill like any other, and mastering a few basic concepts (like what is a good fit) gets you a long way. If you want to learn and improve, there are hundreds of hours of tutorials just on YouTube.
The thinking “people should just change” is a silly proposition. Millions of people aren’t changing their innate natures lol.
This is the result in the breakdown of monogamy in liberal societies. You either have monogamy (and women settling) or you have this, which is a reflection of polygynous attraction. Human society can’t exist without monogamy.
Polygynous societies are violent and polygynous male animals kill each other for mates. The future is South Sudan or extinction with crashing fertility rates. Good luck men.
"When firms reject job applicants, they usually don’t ghost them" Actually, this isn't true, I've applied to hundreds of jobs and they almost always ghost.
Not only is Bryan wrong here, he's *egregiously* wrong. Ghosting happens all the time when applying to jobs. It even happens pretty frequently after an interview has happened.
[Came to this post very late so - first off - apologies for tagging my comment onto yours (to get it near the top) even though it's not particularly related.]
Bryan's graphs get something ELSE wrong....something that almost all journalism gets wrong about the mating market. The problem is the bogus notion of the unitary 'Man' and 'Woman' stereotype. Let me explain:
In order to be really revealing OK Cupid's stats would need to distinquish between how the most pretty women rate men and how the least pretty rate them. (that would almost certainly reveal a huge difference.
Similarly the 'how 'men' rate women would need to distinguish between the ratings of the 'babe magnet' alpha male at one extreme and the nerdy 'beta' males at the other. Only then would these graphs really paint an accurate picture.
I wrote about all this in this essay 'The Less Desired': https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/the-less-desired
".... a theme that gets very little attention in journalism about sexual pair bonding – the huge difference between the fortunes of what one might term the More and the Less Desired of each sex. Opinion pieces, sometimes serious and sometimes coy, on the subject of unfair sex are to be found in abundance. What always strikes me when I read this kind of journalism is how it is always framed in terms of a generic species called ‘Women’ and a generic species called ‘Men’; as if the perceived ‘unfair’ asymmetries under discussion are entirely ones between the sexes. The huge intra-sexual differences between the experiences of pretty women and ‘plain’ ones; and between confident ‘alpha’ males and ‘betas’ – this never gets considered."
Glad I'm married... and glad I work for myself!
Seems especially cruel after an interview.
Ghosting must be by far the most common response to job applications – partly because the barriers to applying for many roles are so low.
This is true, but online blast emails are extremely easy to set up. I was doing those with Lotus Notes twenty years ago. The large firm I worked with still sent physical letters to candidates that interviewed in person, unless they went through a recruiter (the recruiter handled all of that, which I learned after upsetting one by sending such a letter).
I don't think it's that onerous to at least contact candidates who were interviewed. But in the years I've been working it seems to be ever more common not to bother even with that.
That is truly shameful. I think executives need to think carefully about that. Many firms intelligently use their recruiting, especially campus recruiting, as a form of marketing ("we hire the best and the brightest"). It is an extremely powerful tool (see McKinsey, Bain, the bulge-bracket investment banks, hedge funds,...), and the big law firms do this as well. Needlessly upsetting people strikes me as bad business. It probably does not matter for CPG or manufacturing, but for professional services firms it would be deeply foolish to not take the time to send out a physical letter, or at least an email, stating that they applicant is no longer under consideration. That is an oversight that signals internal drift. Bad HR is often an indicator of internal problems at a firm (most execs throw boring stuff to cost centers such as HR, and not overseeing that they are doing their job probably means other cost centers are flailing as well).
I expect the calculation is that as it becomes normal throughout workplaces not to send rejection letters, even for those who have interviewed, people take less affront to it. Although conversely the rarer it becomes, the easier it is to distinguish your company through the basic courtesy of following up.
I'm assuming that what Bryan means by "ghosting" is radio silence after an interview, or at least after some level of personal (eg not a form letter) communication with the employer. Obviously when you're sending out applications you'll be lucky to hear back from 10-15%, and that sucks but it's not the same thing.
That said I still think Bryan's priors are a bit out of date. I wouldn't call ghosting the norm, exactly, but it's very common, even well into the recruiting process. And I've applied to jobs in many fields, from shitty service work to Big 4 positions for which I was very much qualified. It can be tough.
He obviously meant after an interview.
So true. Of the 87 applications I sent out in my recent job search, (all for jobs that I was fully qualified for), exactly one sent a form email turning me down. Not a peep from the other 88. Finally, I answered a job ad where I could apply in person. They hired me on the spot. Good thing, because it's a great job.
For my sister-in-law, her rating of men was 99% least attractive, 0.99% acceptably attractive and 0.01% most attractive. Most attractive being certain especially talented performers who don't know she exists. When my sister-in-law was in her 20s she would have dates with some of the 0.99%, but these men were never that interested in her.
The crazy thing is that the negative vibes my sister-in-law had about the 99% of men she found unattractive oozed from her persona. All the more crazier as my sister-in-law was not gifted with the looks to be in a position of being picky about men, but she absolutely was! And so it is that she has never married.
Fortunately, my wife was less picky and somehow I got her to fall for me.
I’m 55 and very near triple digits. Obviously not in incel land. I asked my girlfriend about this chart in bed last night. I think of myself as normal and not particularly attractive. I have definite negatives in my own mind. Her response was that I exude masculinity and a protector/doer kind of alpha vibe. Not work boots and jeans but obviously not soft handed either. I’m a slight bit dickish too but in a way she finds acceptable. Like the guy who won’t take bs and will argue the point when someone is being a douche while out. And I’m better looking than I think I am. Also, I’m tall (6’6”) and intelligent, and that would break the whole deal if the last wasn’t true. She’s actually a librarian and would find a dumb guy unacceptable.
The conclusion I had to come to is that I’m blessed and guys who didn’t get this suite need some help, which is why I mention it. Much of this stuff came down to how I was raised and trained myself. I’d also point out that she had two kids (as did I, separately), so her attitudes were not much like your sister in law, though her ex husband was dominating to the point she calls him a narcissist. Kind of a ‘pick me’ girl, as many (most?) of the girls were back when I was a kid.
I still think going for the masculine vibe would be the way I’d go if I were 25 again. And the women like your sister in law are going to be having a lot of cats. I feel bad for them, they’d probably have been good mothers, but they ruled themselves out.
I think the masculine thing is a big unspoken problem with a modern generation of men raised by women. They either take on the toxic animal "thug" persona, or they are soft. Anger coming out of such "soft" men terrifies women. The opposite of that, men in control, able to to resist visible anger but also able to withstand external force, that is something women seem to like. What is amusing is that women supposedly wanted sensitive men when I was young (1990's), but no one ever say that in person. I almost feel like it was some kind of advertising policy that became widely held, but not realistic.
I'm surprised how my comment resonated with readers. My SIL is a very good hearted person. But there was something instinctive in her that created friction with most men. As she has aged she has generally become less social with everyone. But I don't think she has made a new guy friend in many, many years - her best male friend is a long time neighbor, but she doesn't socialize with him.
My wife was completely opposite. She is very comfortable around men and enjoyed dating, not for any romantic need, but she enjoyed the socializing.
I happened to catch her right when she was wanting to have a more serious relationship. I demonstrated the masculine attributes of being modestly athletic, competitive but fair and of seeking a serious occupation / steady income. Thirty five years we are happily married and best friends.
It amazes me how two sisters can have such different dispositions!
I'm happy for you. I had poor relationships for other reasons until I got some recovery from codependency in my 50s. Life is good now, you always wish you were ready for the message earlier though.
>Also, I’m tall (6’6”)
I think you're really under rating that. Being that tall is not a footnote to getting triple digits.
Maybe, but to me I look around and I see guys who were more attractive according to the criteria I apply to women I guess - body shape, symmetrical features, good hair. That must not be the criteria they are using.
I honestly would say that's *too* tall. I think anything over 6'4" is although it wouldn't be a deal-killer. But, I'm also okay with short guys, too.
Many women would agree with you. But if even 2% of women have a preference for it, there are only like 0.2% of men that tall, so they each have 10 women who'd really like them
I think women are silly to focus so much on height. So many short great guys, as long as they don't have Short Guys Disease!
https://www.growsomelabia.com/post/what-s-so-terrible-about-short-guys-ladies
Absolutely. I think over prioritizing height, and not realizing that there's often easy alpha in searching through short men for a short king, is a clear cut case of mild irrationality
Dude, you are 6-6. You are near the top of the charts in the one category that nearly all woman want and filter on. Why you would declare yourself unattractive is baffling to me.
Because 6’3-4” is a realistically attractive height for men and this chap is into freakish territory at 6’6”. Difficulties in almost all aspects of daily life at this height. Only attractive to unusually tall women, that is over 5’10”. The average height for women in North America is 5’6” and we get a sore neck from looking up past 6’3” all the time.
That data is collected from dating sites, where people rate opposite sex by looking at the pictures?
If so, this is such an oversimplification of female attraction. Yes, physical appearance plays a big role in attraction, much bigger for men than for women, but for women, chemistry, emotional connection, shared values - all together comprise a larger factor. A typical man disgusts a typical woman to a much lesser degree than this chart suggests.
Exactly what this data reveals is that men are more visual than women. Playboy is for men, and Playgirl is for gay men.
The data above doesn't show that, if anything, it shows the opposite. Men and women rate people according to appearance and on that dimension women are fussier about appearance than men.
It does.
Men’s attractiveness to women is not primarily visual or based in physical beauty. So attraction does not register when there is only visual information. This does not mean that men are on average unattractive to women as the title suggests, but rather *unattractive based on looks alone*
Like the article says, men generally win women over with other means- devotion, loyalty, humor, charm, charisma, etc
Probably one reason the sexes seem totally, almost pathologically unable to empathize with the other's experiences on dating sites. Some men - a number of whom may have developed actual self-esteem issues from their experiences on those sites - look at all that easy attention and validation and get legitimately angry about what they see as women complaining about their many suitors not being sufficiently hot.
But I think many women find this obsession with superficial attention to be just as baffling - why are they supposed to enjoy getting random DTF (or at best low-effort copypasta) messages from strangers? The sexes are very different, nowhere moreso than in matters of romance, and without the ability to even comprehend how things look from the other side, discourse itself just stalls out.
You will deeply offend many women by claiming that "the sexes are different." Even if they are only a bit different, it is concentrated in mate selection, where the evolved strategies are clearly different. The hard-left modern feminism pushed on these women has warped many of them and made them have unhealthy views of themselves as well as others. That same modern "feminism" has also transformed many men in ways that are bad for everyone.
If anything, the promotion of trans rights has helped in promoting the idea that there really are sex differences and they matter. Unsurprisingly, the promoters of these radical modern types of feminism are pushing back against trans rights and any possible violation of their females-ALWAYS-must-get-preference privileges that have come to define modern life in the West.
No, I'll offend women and men who are proponents of the widely-hated, astroturfed social progressivism that currently dominates our elite cultural institutions.
I'm not offended. I lean left but not so far my brains fall out. And I am very, very tired of idiot lefties insisting that we're all a 'blank slate'. We ARE in fact deeply, deeply different.
I think the truth is in the middle. Yes women are less driven by pure visuals-it's very rare for women to masturbate to a photo of a man, even a super hot, fit one. But they do to erotic literature, usually envisioning a conventionally attractive man in the narrative. Looks are important but they usually need to be accompanied by more than just the visual.
The issue with this piece is it's assuming men and women are operating from the same baseline in terms of the variables of attraction, and it's more like apples and oranges. That women aren't rating men highly from just photos doesn't equate to "most men disgust women."
Women masturbate using devices without even thinking of another human being.
I am going to disagree here. Women are not monolithic, and each individual does as she prefers. We need to get back to treat individuals as individuals. The modern obsession with groups (gender, race, sexual orientation, religion,...) has been poisoning every aspect of our society. We need to stop it. We need to resist this growing stain on our souls.
I have literally never heard of this. Can you point me to even an anecdote?
If this is true then there’s an important takeaway that Bryan missed: nowadays, a significant number of matches start on apps- If you’re a man on the apps, you have to assume most women will not find you immediately appealing based on looks alone; you have to take some serious effort to craft a profile that demonstrates all these other qualities and send well written messages that are appealing in other ways. This is why an app like tinder, which is all instantaneous visual reaction, is a losing proposition for all but the top 1% in physical attractiveness. But other apps that allow an opportunity to demonstrate valuable qualities are a better bet. Men should internalize that they have to work harder to demonstrate their value. I think a lot of young men are starting tinder profiles, getting no reaction, and concluding that it’s all hopeless, when this is the worst possible strategy.
It's why I think Bumble (women have to message first) is the best dating app. It effectively bypasses this whole dynamic - for men, you know you clear the "disgust" hurdle; for women, you won't have to get messages from people who disgust you.
Or simply find women in better places, such as religious services, volunteer work, ....
Please explain how the chart measures female attraction to social status? I have seen, many times, women change their opinion on a dime when finding out he had a high-status job or owned a luxurious home in a desired neighborhood. This is why women get so upset over seemingly unimportant fibs such as men claiming to be physicians or part of wealthy families. For most men, they could not care less if their potential date had a high-status job or was from a family of wealth and influence, but women care more about this than physical appearance. I once knew a short, ugly, unpleasant little man who always dated beautiful women because he was from a wealthy family. I felt bad for his wife because she was my friend's little sister and a wonderful human being. He was a terrible husband that she was forced to divorce, but she lives in a doorman building in Greenwich village and her children each have bedrooms bigger than my last condo in lower Manhattan. In her mind, it was worth the hassle to give her children a better life. Go to Manhattan, LA or Washington, DC and you will see this everywhere.
You've contradicted yourself.
It would seem the answer is dating apps are a poor method to search for a mate, since there's almost no room for personality to come through.
I use dating apps; they are no magic bullet, that’s for sure.
But two advantages they do have is: 1) you can get dealbreakers out of the way immediately, and 2) you expand the pool of people available. If I go to the same coffee shop, the same workplace, the same gym, the same pub, the same grocery store….and at roughly the same time for each, it’s likely I’m running into generally the same people.
I think the actual evidence shows that an expanded pool of options is actually a negative for relationship formation at a societal level. If you find it easy to meet women on dating apps, then your experience is far from typical.
I guess I'd need to know what you mean by "at a societal level."
Are you saying society is better off if any particular individual has fewer choices?
I guess you'd also have to further define what you mean by "easy" with regard to meeting women on dating apps. I'd say I spend 10 minutes a day (a few minutes at at a time at various points in the day) swiping on profiles on 3 different apps. Maybe a couple minutes more on occasion.
With that amount of effort, I'd say I wind up with 2-5 actual real world first dates a month. To me, that's worth it.
On the other hand, I won't disagree with the idea that the far better way to meet people is to go to activities one likes (hiking club, activist event, Meetup group, church, etc).
He guessably meant that when people know the choice is to mate with someone in their narrow surroundings or be alone for good, they tend to be less choosy than the Internet has made them.
And he sees that lesser choosiness as a societal good, for some reason he surely knows.
To stand a chance of winning a Coke fridge I had to sign up for three apps. I'm no longer in the market for a partner but wottheheck I joined a dating app called Academic Singles. Within a week I had a hundred responses from women, mostly attractive and many much younger than I am , none of which I answered btw. It seems that eligible men in their 70s are in high demand.
Exactly, but post-pandemic there's pretty much nothing left.
This, The OK Cupid data also shows that the correlation between "this person is attractive" and "I would date this person" is much lower for women than for men.
Yes, but if I am are on a dating website and the women consider me to be unattractive, I can't imagine any woman would be willing to find out if I had chemistry or an emotional attraction with her. On the contrary. I would be ruled out immediately
You know what rules out a lot of men? The insistence on meeting immediately to see if there's 'chemistry'. I can promise you there won't be for us middle-aged. We're not thirty anymore, our hormones don't rage like they used to, and while men would probably shag 80% of the women they see, women are pickier and will be at any age. Chemistry doesn't always happen on sight or at first meeting. The two men I've been in love with were not super-attractive initially and I wrote them off as 'just friends' yet I wound up in LTRs with both of them. People who think chemistry happens immediately don't understand how it works and will blow you off when they should have given it time. Swipe left.
''men would probably shag 80% of the women they see''
99% ... I have moral fibre!
yes, the moral fibre of a Kleenex :)
Works for me!
I'm OK with waiting for chemistry and most men would be. BTW, like you, I am older.
I am postulating that women have so many choices on apps that they do not need settle for a man who doesn't induce chemistry right away. Why bother. There is always another man who is better looking just one swipe away. Why waste time on someone who isn't a perfect fit? Apps are 60-75% male. Women have so much choice that it can be overwhelming
The chart shows responses of women.
This is a really good point. But the reality is much of dating takes place via the apps these days, so how women rate men on the apps actually matters a lot. And it should be noted that OkCupid's dating profiles are probably the most robust among the apps. So you are getting a LOT more than just 6 pictures to judge someone from.
It would be interesting to see a list of the way men rate the attractiveness of other men. Any data from Grindr?
My missus says Brad Pitt is more attractive than I am. But I don't fancy him at all. ;o)
While women judge men much more harshly on their looks than men do, there is also much more disagreement in their ratings.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/06/090626153511.htm
"The study, co-authored by Claudia Brumbaugh of Queens College, appears in the June issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
"Men agree a lot more about who they find attractive and unattractive than women agree about who they find attractive and unattractive," says Wood, assistant professor of psychology. "This study shows we can quantify the extent to which men agree about which women are attractive and vice versa."
More than 4,000 participants in the study rated photographs of men and women (ages 18-25) for attractiveness on a 10-point scale ranging from "not at all" to "very." In exchange for their participation, raters were told what characteristics they found attractive compared with the average person. The raters ranged in age from 18 to more than 70.
Before the participants judged the photographs for attractiveness, the members of the research team rated the images for how seductive, confident, thin, sensitive, stylish, curvaceous (women), muscular (men), traditional, masculine/feminine, classy, well-groomed, or upbeat the people looked.
Breaking out these factors helped the researchers figure out what common characteristics appealed most to women and men.
Men's judgments of women's attractiveness were based primarily around physical features and they rated highly those who looked thin and seductive. Most of the men in the study also rated photographs of women who looked confident as more attractive.
As a group, the women rating men showed some preference for thin, muscular subjects, but disagreed on how attractive many men in the study were. Some women gave high attractiveness ratings to the men other women said were not attractive at all."
Yes, good comment. This rings true, I’ve been saying it for years, but I hadn’t seen the research.
This is partly why it’s a numbers game for men. Some women will just plain find you a lot more attractive than the median woman does. I’m married to such a woman.
Both men and women take different attributes into account. Like many men, I prefer heavier women. Skinny is a negative to me. I am fat now, but I was not for most of my life. I have dated women everywhere between fat and too thin, because body size is simply not important to me. There are many women who care or not about size, not to mention those who have different preferences (including many larger or even taller women who have bizarre requirements such as having a man possess thighs in a larger circumference than her own).
Aella did a survey on women rating men's attractiveness that isn't *that* grim. A lot of men in the 4-5/10 category, but at least it's not as many under "least attractive".
https://x.com/doobydoobadooby/status/1878844614016410108
https://aella.substack.com/p/mens-hotness-scale
Yes, I find Aella's data much more persuasive. The data presented in the post simply don't pass the sniff test; most women do, indeed, settle, and outside of the artificial environment of dating sites actually settle pretty easily.
That said, the bottom quartile of men really are atrocious and extremely low quality, you have to get to bottom 5 percent of women to get that bad.
Aella's data was only 100 women selected from her audience ("probably disproportionately liberal, white, etc., and reflects the tastes of that type of woman") though. So even if the results are more intuitive (mostly negative ratings, but closer to the midpoint), I think the data is likely much lower quality (I don't see a reference to the OKCupid data, but my recollection was that it was much higher n, and the OKCupid userbase, assuming it was that, should be more representative than Aella's followers). It seems plausible to me that Aella's audience are simply being nicer and more reflective than the OKCupid audience.
Yeah, ignore any of Aella's "data" - it's all absurdly biased. There's a reason she does not work for a reputable organization and is an "independent researcher."
In fairness to Aella, I think many of her surveys, especially the larger sample ones, are much higher (and acceptable) quality; not just, or majority, her twitter followers.
Having lead academic social science research, I think people overstate the difference between the samples of and hers: much social science research is just based on convenience samples, like hers, whether that's unrepresentative online opt-in samples (ubiquitous in psychology), but especially in sex research (and prior to the rise of online crowd-sourcing, much social science and sex research was just on whatever undergrads you had to hand to pay in course credit).
Yeah, there are similar problems in academic research, though not as extreme. In any case her data is limited to a very specific subgroup and is unrepresentative.
A sample of 100 could be acceptable if it is a truly random sample, but reading your comment, it would not appear to be the case, unless one dates in that pool (I most certainly did not before I married a non-white, non-left female).
I don’t think you’re entirely wrong.
But in addition to the point about unflattering pictures, note that the OkCupid users were generally single, and the pool of single men as a whole is much worse than the pool of coupled men. Especially beyond maybe age 30.
Also true of women but the effect is weaker, because as someone else noted the bottom quartile of men is really, really bad. Way worse than the bottom quartile of women.
If you look at the original OkCupid article from 2009 ( Your Looks and Your Inbox ) there are also examples of 4 guys (I think all of them are founders or employees of OkCupid) who were rated as "significantly less than medium attractive" . And one of them, pictured with guitar, definitely wouldn't look out of his place on a modeling stage. So your assumptions are disproved by examples.
Also, why do you think that the singles being less attractive than the coupled is something that applies only to men?
I’m not sure what your first paragraph has to do with my comment, though it’s an interesting tidbit.
I understand the reading comprehension failure in your second paragraph but I think you need to re-read my comment for the answer.
I think a more likely possibility is that a lot of men on the OKCupid audience just had very unflattering pictures of themselves.
That seems surprising. One might expect people to select their most flattering pictures for their dating profile. What is the explanation for it being the reverse?
Many men have literally no flattering photos. One of the reasons why "man with a fish" is such a tinder stereotype is because after catching a fish is one of the rare times men get their photo taken in good lighting
This morning I was presented with a man whose first photo suggested 'Serial killer'. I'm sure he wasn't, but still. Even when he smiled he looked horrible. What he needed to do was get his eyebrows re-shaped, they were the kind that makes one look naturally evil (ex: Luigi Mangione, who now no longer looks like a terrorist).
Or women are just extremely picky...
They might pick what they think is their most flattering picture but that doesn’t mean it’s not really low effort. IIRC OkCupid was free. I never looked at men on dating sites but lots of women had e.g. selfies that they took in a mirror, which is less flattering than the style of any of Aella’s pictures.
I expect the average man put less effort into his dating profile picture than the average woman because men put less thought into their appearance than women in general.
It's funny: Many men send dick pics because they can't understand why women don't like them; they'd *LOVE* it if women send them vadge pics! Yet they never think, "I'm motivated by a good-looking, groomed, stylishly dressed woman, maybe they're attracted to the same in men!"
Aella adjusted the raw data, so her post can't be used as evidence for this:
"I normalized the results, cause it’s hard to get an average of ‘1’ if the lowest possible ranking is 1, so by default the lowest ranking was pulled down to 1, and the highest to 10, stretching all the men evenly across this spectrum."
EDIT: Maybe I misunderstood, and that normalization was only for that one section, and not for the histogram?
If you only have the preview, I don't think it shows the non-normalized histogram, but that's why I included the tweet that does include it
When you say that the bottom quartile of men are as bad as the bottom 5 percent of women, are you speaking only of appearance, or of overall "quality?" Either way, that seems wrong. What is the basis of this claim?
See, this is where women's mate preferences are off the rails. At a point if you're snobby picking for specific characteristics and traits and features to see which gives you "the tingles", you've already lost the plot on building a relationship and are window shopping with your womb like a consumer who just got their first paycheck.
Men choose women based on who's face they could put up with on a daily basis and a romp, and that's the ONLY reason most women are mids.
If men only went after the women who give them "the tingles", 90% of women won't pass the sniff test.
Overall quality; for amount of effort put into appearance, the 5/25 rule is if anything generous to men.
Men are way, way more likely to be violent, criminals, addicted to drugs, gamblers, to be rude, to talk over others in conversation, to not maintain basic hygiene, to not maintain basic cleanliness, less likely to be able to cook, to take care of themselves domestically more generally, more likely to shirk on childcare and domestic work, and the earnings advantage of men disappears at lower income levels. In a huge range of negative traits, I am confident that you need to go way deeper into the left tail on women to be "equally bad" as the bottom quartile man.
If we only consider appearance, I think you are way off. The bottom 5% of women in appearance are all extremely fat and ugly, like over 300 pounds. No amount of "effort put into appearance" will compensate for this. In general, most "effort put into appearance" (aside from the effort required to not be fat) is superfluous. The 25th-percentile man is almost infinitely better looking than the 5th-percentile woman.
Regarding overall quality, it is true that the very worst men are worse than the very worst women, mostly because they are more violent. But I think you are not being fair to men in this comparison. For example, the 5th-percentile woman is a drug addict, but the 25th-percentile man is not. I'm not sure where you get the idea that men are more rude or more likely to talk over others in conversation; that seems wrong. In general, it seems like you tried to think of ways that men are worse than women, but you didn't try to think of any ways that women are worse than men (you could start with staggering levels of mental illness).
I genuinely tried to find a source that looked at interruptions or speaking over people and couldn't find any that didn't find that men were way more likely to do so.
Many sources, but the formal and informal largely aligned.
https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=13422
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7811176/
And so on and so forth.
I agree that the bottom quartile man is not addicted to drugs AND a problem gambler AND violent AND a slob AND useless around the house AND inconsiderate, but I do think there's a pretty good chance he's at least one of the above!
Both, based on the mass of mediocrity I've been swiping left on for the past month.
Why would as many as 25% of "bottom tier" men be as bad as only 5% of women? Because of your worship of the ***t, or could there be another reason?
Exactly. We continue to go to dentist, hairdresser, and take care of ourselves into old age. Single seem to check out of general maintenance if they don’t have a primary carer, mother or wife. Shame. We will never even meet them unless they clean up their act and learn to take a decent selfie.
Still trying to avoid laying blame on women
Women have plenty of problems. But ultimately, I’m a man, and I care about what I can do differently. Whining about women all day will get me absolutely nowhere. Life isn’t fair, all you can do is play the hand you’re dealt.
You are right. Women need to start should putting more pressure on men to improve their appearances.
Ever hear of finding the diamond in the rough/rough diamond?!
> It will work out eventually
For an opponent of social desirability bias, it's surprising for you to embrace a "pretty lie". https://www.econlib.org/monopolize-the-pretty-lies/ For some people, it won't.
Agree with this. It seems like Bryan is reading off and old script where the overwhelmingly vast majority of people get married. That's becoming less and less true every year.
That link is deeply misguided. The purpose of free speech was never utilitarian. It was intended to simply allow people to enjoy the rights they already had in the new world. We do not want to live in a society that throws people in jail for unpopular opinions, no matter how offensive. Furthermore, many accepted rights today were unpopular vulgarity in the past (LGBT rights is an obvious example).
The largest problem in the US today is not that we have too many rights, but rather that our rights have been massively restricted via powerful interest groups (universities, corporations, non-profits,...). No one in the US imagined that non-profits and universities would ever grow so large, and deviate so far from their missions. We probably need a an upper bound on non-profit assets and revenue, above which corporate taxation applies.
Luckily, for corporations the free market is a very effective governing body.
I think this misses an important point:
Looks are not that important to women!
So this graph doesn't measure men's "holistic" attractiveness. It only says that most guys can't get by on looks alone. But there are several other ways to be very attractive to women!
That would be like saying "i don't really care about his looks but I definitely hate it".
if your claim was correct, women would tend to rate men as averagely attractive, not as a little attractive.
Looks is all you have to go by on a dating app. Nobody reads the biographies of ugly people
It’s in the woman’s interest to loudly and publicly proclaim the “ick” factor when she is approached by a man she doesn’t find attractive.
The woman needs to make it clear to her social circle, to herself, and to other men, that she is out of the low status guy’s league, lest his interest end up suggesting she’s not as attractive and high status as she makes herself out to be. The best way to do this is to label the guy a “creep” or “out of touch”, so his advances don’t suggest anything about her status as much as they do about his delusions.
Or maybe evolution is telling us something; the 19th century romantic novel, aggravated by Disney musical in the 20th century, where two young people meet and fall in love because they're the best of the best for each other (prince and princess), is a rare anomaly.
Maybe it's natural that half of men never reproduce (because historically they've always been cannon fodder) unless they kidnap women; maybe it's healthy for rich men to accumulate several women and for them to accept it (many already do so as lovers in an informal way, cause monogamy prohibits them from being wives).
Maybe evolution tells us: "Young men, don't look for a wife, sublimate your high libido in building and/or destroying the world around you, and as Achilles said, you die gloriously or old in your cot surrounded by offspring." And perhaps evolution is telling us: "Young women, don't idealize young men. Don't you see? In the end, none of them are that good. Save yourself to attract a man who has already accumulated power and your children will grow up safe."
Thanks. For more examples, please see https://controlc.com/b3843b5a
Excerpts:
- "90% of swipes by women are for men over 6’0, which does not reflect the importance women place on height in the real world. …What we see with algorithmic online dating isn't a mechanism to assign the perfect match to each person of the opposite sex. Instead, we've created a machine where the top 20% of men mate with many different partners and the top 80% women try to get the top 20% of men to date and ultimately marry them (and not just have sex with them)." Arnold Kling, 24 Sep 23, https://archive.ph/MKrpq
- "Men swipe right on 60% of women, women swipe right on 4.5% of men. The bottom 80% of men are competing for the bottom 22% of women and the top 78% of women are competing for the top 20% of men. A guy with average attractiveness can only expect to be liked by slightly less than 1% of females. This means one “like” for every 115 women that see his profile." Erik Torenberg, 23 Sep 23, https://archive.ph/Ps8pI
- “Most single men on dating apps struggle to even get “likes” from women. Only a tiny minority of men receive a preponderance of matches, and that this disparity was comparable in scale to the income inequality of South Africa under apartheid. In contrast, the match disparity among females was similar to the magnitude of economic inequality found in Western Europe.” Attraction Inequality and the Dating Economy, Quillette, 12 Mar 19, https://archive.is/EvIj5
- "Women Say 80% of Men Are “Below Average. Are women’s standards just too high? A study by dating app OkCupid found that women find 80% of men unattractive or 'below average.'", Medium, 9 Sep 22, https://archive.is/SvBrV /
I think the 20% number is far too high. I bet it is more like 3%. I remember reading two different papers long ago, one in Europe and one in Africa. The former was interesting in that more women were sexually active than men, but all the women were sharing very few men. The African study was about AIDS, but it had a lot on how prostitutes spread disease, but also how many poor women had transactional relationships with men (they stayed in their home, or the men would live in their home and pay their bills while they were working far from, then return to their wives back in the villages).
What I found fascinating was that the poor communities had more equal relationships, while the wealthy European country had a situation where all the women were shared by a few high-status men. I have never been able to find those papers again.
Yes this is based on an initial impression from women’s perception of status where they are being driven by their evolutionary heritage to acquire resources by having their choices to mate.
However if you accounted for men’s attraction to a woman’s personality outside of her sexual appeal, the graphs would be so skewed against women.
That’s why the modern woman has discovered they can spread themselves on tinder etc but can’t find someone to sincerely invest in them long-term.
>if you accounted for men's attraction to a woman's personality
This is meaningless. There is no separating the two in romantic or sexual relationships. If a man is interested in a woman sexually, the woman would have to go out of her way to make him dislike her personally. Likewise, if a man does not initially find a woman attractive, but ends up hanging out with her and getting to know her anyway; then the more he ends up liking her personally, the higher the likelihood he will end up liking her romantically.
Life isn't Dungeons & Dragons. There's no balance here. The vast majority of men are not physically attractive enough to seduce women by their looks alone. We should be accepting of this, and make some effort to create and restore spaces for courtship that don't leave the vast majority out in the cold.
Those men who attract the women whose personality they don't find attractive will just pump 'n' dump .
A man who finds a woman attractive will by default like her personality. And the more attractive she is, the worse behavior she can get away with before crushing her seductee's faith. Gal Gadot would have to cheat on me with my own father for me to dislike her personality.
But in the modern era where we humans are able to think for ourselves instead of being slaves to evolution, as you correctly pointed out, why not simply hire a woman for the night instead?
It is wayyyyyyyyyyyy cheaper, comes with minimal downsides if you practice safety precautions, and is legal in many countries.
The rule of thumb is that for women, boats and airplanes, you should typically charter them instead of purchasing them since the rental cost is much more economical.
I am not saying your advice is terrible. But it is sorta like giving advice on how to get the best lease rates* on a brand-new car, when that is not the recommended method of having a car to begin with.
*the recent low lease rates on EVs being the exception
I think you fundamentally misunderstand evolution. It is baked in. We do not "think" about it. There may be a few people who go against their feelings and cultivate a different view against their natural one, but it is extremely rare and rather difficult. Many who have such as strong will are more likely to use it in more productive efforts, be they economic, political or spiritual.
That is literally what I said in my post above.
Nah. We can all strive to be better in all aspects.
Everyone always forgets the second half of this stat, which found that women were willing to date an “average” man (which due to their distorted perceptions really meant a top 20% man) while men were only willing to date a top 20% woman (which actually meant top 20%, because their perceptions were accurate). But both men and women were only willing to date the best of the opposite sex.
>while men were only willing to date a top 20% woman
Gonna need a source on that one. This strongly doesn't pass the sniff test.
Bullshit
Could you quote where the source said that?
Should we just ignore that women view most men as unattractive? Women's standards are becoming ridiculous.
That's not true at all
This is 2009 data pre-smart phone era when dating sites were actual sites.
How representative were the male and female populations? Haven't these sites typically been far more skewed to have more males and likely males who, especially back then when there was more of a stigma to using dating sites, were more 'desperate' and lacked social skills to find women in real life?
https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2023/01/the-distribution-of-attractiveness/
Yes, makeup matters. Not just in hiding flaws but a woman who wears makeup is conscientious of her appearance. As the article points out, what hurts many men is they make no effort to improve their appearance.
It would be a interesting research challenge to take 100 men and test their success with women based on how they dress. I'm thinking that men who dress well do much better gaining the positive attention of women.
You are correct and most men will do any and everything *except* improve their appearance.
They go to the gym all the time, they take showers, they wash their clothes, they comb their hair in the morning and for some reason this bare minimum -- this piece of cardboard -- is supposed to be sexually attractive. Men really *do* need make up, they *do* need form fitting and suggestive clothing that shows off their arms, abs, and thigh muscles etc..., they do need to shave, and they *do* need plastic surgery the majority of the time.
Don't care to be attractive. They wonder "how can I be physically either unattractive or unremarkable and attract women to myself at the same time?"
They want to tie their identity to this bland and boring "masculine" aesthetic when it is clear that all of the most attractive men... every man that has ever inspired a "mania" among women and girls has been, to an unmistakeable degree, aesthetically androgynous.
Women would have never swooned over Elvis, Bowie, Michael Jackson, Prince, any Oldie star, or rocker, or boy band, or KPOP star if they were these overly large disgusting, caveman looking troll things that *men* think are attractive and therefore aspire to be.
You may be projecting your own preferences here a little--men often report doing better after going to the gym. The average guy isn't going to be Bowie no matter how hard he tries.
Literally shave, eat in basic moderation, do your hair, and wear makeup. It takes far less effort than bulking up.
Women in the real world would find a man wearing makeup to be try hard and very unappealing.
OK, but that won't make you Bowie or Prince. And it's hardly an either-or thing.
You claim that these men are popular among women because of their looks while it's extremely possible that they are adored by women because of their fame and wealth.
And the assertion that most men need plastic surgery is just funny
These men are/were uniquely sought after when there were tons of other men with fame and wealth in the same fields as well as every other.
I would like you to explain hybristophilia. That is the term used to decribe women who are attracted to men in prison.
The amount of women subject to this phenomenon are infinitely fewer than the women who are willing to chase beautiful, lithe, clean shaven men with makeup on down the street.
....provided that said men have money and power.
Women invest more into looking good because men value good looks more than women.
If a man dresses better, that will indeed gain the positive attention of women, as a signal of his higher status.
No, women are attracted to men with money and power. Have you seen the Tinder findings? 80% of women are attracted top the top 20% of men. The other 80% of men are invisible to them.
On Tinder, women absolutely dgaf about money and power. Tinder is all about looks and women only want the hottest guys
But why do more men not dress better and spend more money on their looks? Do men have a non-verbal pact not to outdo each other? Women seem inclined to compete against each other.
In certain localities of the USA plastic surgery is a huge business and such business is clearly targeted at women. Women are clearly more likely to spend money on such surgery. Why is this?
Do women not understand that that if they could get together and stop competing with each other they could save a lot of time and money?
Because men compete with each other mostly for dominance and resources, which outweighs the importance of physical attractiveness. Women place SOME importance on physical attractiveness, but not as much.
Women may have evolved to compete through appearance because men are more visually oriented in mate selection.
As for you last question, I recommend reading up on Game Theory. Women’s competition over appearance persists because the individual incentives to defect from collective action are very strong, and coordination problem is very large.
Because men’s physical attractiveness is much less controllable than women’s.
If we could get laid by putting on makeup and waxing our bodies, it would be 100billion dollar industry for men by now.
The physical traits that women value in men and appeal to their gaze are more genetic. Height, body frame, facial bone structure, head shape, eyes, penis size, hairline, forehead, facial thirds, and so on.
The reason society doesn’t acknowledge this is because of this underlying subtle hatred of men.
I don't dress/look better in large part because I don't know how.
I honestly can't tell good clothing/looks from bad with any certainty, so it's really hard to improve these things.
Of course, something I could do is hire experts to dress/groom me, but I don't have that level of ambition.
That's because the fashion industry today is, by and large, run by people who hate straight men. I recommend looking into the past, photos and magazine articles from before 1960. Some of the specifics won't translate (e.g., not too many guys were suspenders today), but the general ideas will.
It's a skill like any other, and mastering a few basic concepts (like what is a good fit) gets you a long way. If you want to learn and improve, there are hundreds of hours of tutorials just on YouTube.
“Evolution loves death more than it loves you or me. This is easy to write, easy to read, and hard to believe.”
Annie Dillard
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
The thinking “people should just change” is a silly proposition. Millions of people aren’t changing their innate natures lol.
This is the result in the breakdown of monogamy in liberal societies. You either have monogamy (and women settling) or you have this, which is a reflection of polygynous attraction. Human society can’t exist without monogamy.
Polygynous societies are violent and polygynous male animals kill each other for mates. The future is South Sudan or extinction with crashing fertility rates. Good luck men.