The situation of having a gender imbalance with fundamentally untenable in the long term. For now it does allow women, who have in the past had issues in choosing their partner, more freedom in their selection, but this has historically been a societal and not a demographic thing. As we move towards gender social equality this will stop becoming a “liberation” and turn into a curse for the bottom n% of men. The ratio is what it is right now, but we shouldn’t doom men to an unbalanced field in real life.
I deeply reject the incel rhethoric (not by you but generally) that society must somehow nudge or influence the choices of women such that unattractive men also can find partnership, a demand that is most often presented on the backdrop of a dystopian image of violent hordes of disenfranchised men. In other words, a thinly veiled threat.
It is then often the same people who reject the notion that societal norms have influence over nature. Well then, the only choice would be to exert force on one sex or the other. Indeed it would be the traditional values that were a societal correction to the state of nature, where Pareto‘s law holds even for partnership and some men simply remain unsuccessful. The conclusion should thus be that traditional societies that incels endorse have in fact cheated women out of their natural rights to be with attractive men. The paradoxical demand to go back to a traditional society is, if one accepts nature ruling over society and current revealed preferences of women as they are, nothing short of the admission that women and their wishes are somehow supposed to be worth less.
Otherwise, given these assumptions, one should all but support the development of AI and sex robots for men who are, by nature, not cut out as attractive partners.
But of course I agree that social norms do actually matter a lot, and the paradoxical opinion above is simply misguided.
I am less confident that societal values of attractiveness will actually change quickly enough before we see much more human suffering and this suffering will be understood as evidence for the misguided theory above... So long story short, I personally support the development of companion AIs, intimacy robots and holodecks.
I'm not too familiar with this, but aren't we doing this for women already? (All women are beautiful, plus-sized models, etc.) Why would that be wrong to do for men?
You can say that all you want (and personally I do think everyone deserves to have good self-esteem no matter their body shape), but at the end of the day some people are objectively going to have orders of magnitudes more suitors attracted to them than others are. This is not a value judgment, just an observation.
You can (and I do support) say the same thing for men as well, but that’s not fundamentally going to change anything about the dating market.
Otherwise, we need to deal with the very real suffering of lonely people.
A serious revision of gender roles is the only not-wildly-dystopian fix I can think of, but that's just kicking the can down the road to the question of how and to what do we perform that revision.
As a real life counterexample, there are pretty much no gay incels. That's not because there aren't unattractive gay gays, and there are certainly winners and losers in that dating market and consequent bitterness. But the variety of male types that are considered potentially attractive is much broader.
There is no more undateable men than there is an undateable skin color, especially if we are talking about portions like 20% of a population.
Ask what makes those people undateable and the answer will be rooted in culture.
1. How would you change culture on such a massive scale?
2. Given the poor state of a social safety net in the US, economic problems can very well be a real strain on a relationship, causing practical problems that might not otherwise crop up, killing relationships that might’ve otherwise survived. I think providing a better social safety net would go a long way towards helping solve this problem
3. Money is already generally not a thing shown on Tinder profiles, and yet the Tinder Gino coefficient is much worse than most real-life countries
Economic equality and social safety net are very important overall, but in this aspect there do exist a small paradox where increased economic equality increases social inequality. The causes for that is from what I see a still researched topic with multiple competing theories. The one I suspect is closest is that when economic equality increases, you get more instability in the social hierarchies, resulting in people putting higher value onto cultural cues.
As for the third obstacles, as with race, you don't need to explicit state economic status in order for people to guess it through proxy. Job title, clothing, where people live, all gives cues about money. There is a reason why tanned skin is still seen as an proxy for wealth, and why non-tanned skin was seen as a proxy for wealth back in a time where the majority of people worked as farmers.
If I look at the future and especially at places like China, there are additional tools for culture change which could be used for both good and bad. AI companions and citizen scores could be used to influence a population towards a culture change. A lot of technology is written to influence consumer behavior, and the same technology are already being used to influence political behavior. Influencing culture would not be that far jump, and it could potentially do so at a speed yet unseen outside of war.
Edit: I do agree though there is a huge gap where it's accepted that woman can cheat in basically every way physically possible to look better and it's encouraged but men can't do more than work out or it's ridiculed. It doesn't help that rampant steroid use in Hollywood gives people unrealistic expectations of what's achievable by a guy with a full time job on top of that. I don't think test is needed to beat out the average overweight guy though.
Still couldn’t get laid to save his life. Beating out “the average overweight guy” is far from enough, especially if you’re in nerdy circles.
I've gone through stretches where I was working out, doing pushups every day, etc. In the end it didn't make much difference. I found as the years passed I was able to date progressively more and more beautiful women, often to my great surprise, in the sense that I was tending to think they were 'out of my league' right up to the point we started dating. I'm not a particularly buff or good looking man by the standards presented to us in movies: quite average really. But women really respond to warm, funny confidence, the ability to entertain them and coming across as smart but not intellectually arrogant (probably they use it as a proxy for earnings potential).
I'm now fortunate to be engaged to the most beautiful women I've ever met, who in addition is calm, logical, self-reliant and self employed, funny, sweet and generous. We're head over heels in love. For years I thought it might never happen, because I searched for a long time and dated many girls in a search for love that never seemed to arrive (except once, but it was an unrequited love).
By far, the most important factor in me being able to get this girl was not physical appearance, in fact she told me that she finds buff guys unattractive because she associates it with cold and dumb guys who spend all their time working out, meaning they have nothing to say. What let me get her was years of refining my skills in what women start wanting once they're older than about 25.
Either be ultra wealthy or be a handsom man with a pretty woman if you want a son who wont be disadvantaged in the modern world.
In other words, eugenics except you're only selecting for beauty?
How are women "guaranteed to reproduce"? There are plenty of women who choose not to reproduce, others who actually have standards and don't want to lower them to reproduce with just anyone, and yet others who are asocial, antisocial, or have a variety of psychological issues that make them unlikely to partner up with anyone. Same with men.
"If you are going to have a son, and you know he's not going to be the most handsome guy, don't have a son. Otherwise you're a trash human being pushing a lifetime of suffering on another human due to no fault of his own"
Oh, please. Like physical attractiveness has to be the most important thing in a person's life.
Not to mention that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and there have been plenty of people who were not conventionally attractive and still had worthwhile and fulfilling lives.
You'd probably have aborted Samuel Johnson and Socrates.
