So maybe its a good thing
Seems a much better approach is to advocate for men exercising their agency and building relationships. I don’t see how dating is more a competition today than it has been historically?
Especially if you have a high level of education there seem to be a lot more women than men and intelligence equally inhibits many of them to find fitting dates. Sure, if you do online dating, better have a good resumé and some good photos.
The reality of the situation is that the dating marketplace is wildly dysfunctional now [1] [2] [3], and with women empowered and educated, they don't date down like men do [4] (women want high status, high earning men, men want younger, attractive women who can provide kids, very broadly speaking; there are only so many high status, high earning men). So, you have an entire cohort of men, through no fault of their own, who don't want to compete in a Sisyphean effort to attract a potential partner because the odds are very high they will not meet a potentially unrealistic bar [5] [6]. Shouldn't they at least get some enjoyment out of this existence if they weren't lucky to have been born a few decades earlier?
Subthread where I talk about this ~2 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32430248 | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32429544 (thread "The rise of lonely, single men")
[1] https://medium.com/@worstonlinedater/tinder-experiments-ii-g... ("Tinder Experiments II: Guys, unless you are really hot you are probably better off not wasting your time on Tinder — a quantitative socio-economic study")
[2] https://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/why-women-lose-the-dating-g... ("Why women lose the dating game")
[3] https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2021/10/05/rising-... ("Rising Share of U.S. Adults Are Living Without a Spouse or Partner")
[4] https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/nov/10/dating-... ("The dating gap: why the odds are stacked against female graduates finding a like-minded man")
[5] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/09/20/americans-s... ("Americans see men as the financial providers, even as women’s contributions grow")
[6] https://www.americansurveycenter.org/research/from-swiping-t... ("From Swiping to Sexting: The Enduring Gender Divide in American Dating and Relationships")
(TLDR: Macroeconomics and unrealistic expectations are causing a relationship market collapse, let people enjoy what they want vs screaming into the void about that which cannot be changed)
AI is dangerous here IMHO because it's going to disconnect people even more from the possibility of having a meaningful connection/relationship with another human.
People no longer like any kind of friction when it comes to interacting with other people.
> It was determined that the bottom 80% of men (in terms of attractiveness) are competing for the bottom 22% of women and the top 78% of women are competing for the top 20% of men.
This fails one of my heuristics for valid statistics: things that don’t deserve to be exactly equal are exactly equal.
We're supposed to believe that the women can be partitioned into groups A (bottom 22%) and B (top 78%). (I'll assume that this is well defined for the sake of argument.) And this study showed that the bottom 80% of men are competing for group A and that group B is competing for the top 20% of men? That is, group B is competing for exactly the set of men that, themselves, arent' competing for group A? That's a remarkable claim!
although it might currently masquerade as a cultural thing or a factor of the gender identity, men dated down out of necessity, by population alone.
find the study to corroborate that, this is the first generation where the middle on the higher rungs and the upper middle class actually has enough women in it to date and thats whats happening
entire dynasties of women that thought they could offer their presence alone, and finding out they only have choices with socioeconomic equals instead of higher
lower socioeconomic status groups of women are so vocal about their sex work or balking at questions of “what do they bring to the table” because they thought being available sexually and pleasant would open up a different path, but are just entertainment options. they basically have to be louder because they don’t know what’s going on, notably, this groups considers themselves empowered too, at least self identify as such.
Similarly, there are services that chat with people who contact your OnlyFans. The customer is again the women.
I expect, at least initially, that same pattern will repeat.
Pornography absolutely reframes expectations and impacts behaviors. To what extent, that is a fair debate.
So, they experimented by trying new things, correct? Which, by definition, is a change (i.e., a distortion) in their sexual behavior.
If you try to read the "distortion" as being a non-judgmental "change", which was my intent, it may feel less triggering.
This, in turn, MAY have distorted behavior.
> “I think porn is a disgrace. I used to watch a lot of porn, to be honest. I started watching porn when I was, like, 11,” the “Bad Guy” singer said, saying it helped her feel as if she were cool and “one of the guys.”
> “I think it really destroyed my brain and I feel incredibly devastated that I was exposed to so much porn,” she added, saying she suffered nightmares because some of the content she watched was so violent and abusive...
> “The first few times I, you know, had sex, I was not saying no to things that were not good. It was because I thought that’s what I was supposed to be attracted to,” she said.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/12/15/entertainment/billie-eilish-p...
