I used to date mostly tall, lanky guys; until my 5’4” husband charmed me. He was the opposite of my “type” but I reasoned that since my “type” wasn’t working out all that well for me, maybe I should have a new type. We’ve been married for 30 years now.
5. Dating apps incentivize filtering on shallow characteristics like height.
There is an illusion of endless quantity of men, and all you know of a potential match is his photo, stated height, and perhaps one line of text. Women who meet men in real life are much more likely to date short and average height men. (Though typically women won't date a man shorter than herself). If you take the average height of all men married in a given year, it is probably the same height as the average adult male population.
Dating apps aren't marriage apps, they're hook up apps.
But the "endless quantity of men" thing is not an illusion. The men outnumber the women by a lot, so the women can be more selective. That's what's going on.
My impression is that in any given region, at any given time, a large fraction of the datable men are on the apps and a small fraction of the datable women. That's the real inefficiency here.
The "endless quantity of men" do exist until the day when the woman "hits the wall" -- that is, she is forced to realize that she has playgirled away her beauty, and can no longer find a marriage partner that she can accept. This can happen well before menopause, and its sufferer is always the last to realize it.
I would expect that using dating apps makes this problem worse because she can go on looking for one-nighters well past the point that, if physically present at a pickup bar, she would see clues on the faces of men looking at her.
The articles I’ve seen do not talk about absolute numbers much, merely percentages. So this proportion difference might be real. But it might not be. Any good links with data?
It's hard to say for certain because the apps have incentives to hide this information. (For the same reason, I don't think the sort of numbers cited in the OP are very reliable either.) This seems somewhat credible -- https://www.statista.com/statistics/975984/us-bumble-user-ratio-gender/ -- and indicates a 2:1 male-female ratio on Bumble, which is supposed to be one of the more women-friendly ones.
Thx for link, but I’m not going to pay for good stats. Looking for the best for free, and not even looking too hard. More keeping my eyes open, as well as a tab to S. Sailer’s blog.
They're probably both. Having all this data leads people flights of fancy in interpretation.
*** 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. ***
This could mean that 90% of women never swipe guys over 6'.
Or it could mean that 100% of women sometimes swipe guys under 6'.
Given that the cost of swiping is approximately zero, it'd be kind of crazy for both men and women NOT to swipe all the hotties they're presented with. Just because a girl smiles every time Johnny Quarterback (and Davy Point Guard and so forth) walks by doesn't mean that she doesn't also smile at Boy Next Stoor too. IRL, this doesn't mean that she's "expecting" to marry Johnny Quarterback and won't give Boy Next Store the time of day. On the internet, there's a bigger supply of Johnny Quarterbacks, but it's not evident that people actually fall for the "illusion of endless quantity".
She smiles at Johnny Quarterback, because a girl can dream, but she smiles at Boy Next Store because she can see a future with him. Swipes are like a record of every time you smile at someone. I guess it means... something... but trying to read a lot into it seems like folly.
Great comprarison of swiping right to smiling. You make a good point that we don't know the distribution of # swipes per woman, or % of women who *only* swipe right for tall men.
Context from the original post by Torenberg, not quoted by Kling: "Men swipe right on 60% of women, women swipe right on 4.5% of men."
There is a cost to a woman swiping right on a man, because it is good odds he already swiped right on her. There is a cost to receiving many messages from men trying to set up a date.
There's studies that show that men and women don't swipe the same. On dating apps women rate 80% of men as below average attractiveness is just one stat that points out the delusion present in women on dating apps. The response ratio is also abyssmal for men vs women.
6. Young, modern women are substantially more comfortable going without a partner than previous generations. Put in negotiation terms, their BATNA is higher thus they “bargain” more aggressively. “Bargain” in this context means less appetite to compromise on valued characteristics in a partner.
I think this is an important point: we may have reached the point where today's concept of marriage actually destroys value, rather than creating it, for BOTH parties.
Women don't really need men for financial support in the way they did. Today, women have far better market-income opportunities, and marriage has to offer a better deal than those.
To encourage women to marry, therefore, governments - with strong support from women's organizations - have tried to make marriage and "being a wife" more financially attractive. They have transformed family law utterly, from being a deeply inequitable and sexist body of 18th-century law that stripped spouses of basic human and property rights, an institution women had begun to reject, to become... a deeply inequitable and sexist body of 20th-century law that strips spouses of basic human and property rights. Young men, increasingly, sensibly, want nothing to do with it.
So here we are today. Many women demand a higher level of "marriageability" than in the past, because they have other options. Many men don't really want to be marriageable, seeing the legal institution as little more than legally-imposed codependency and financial abuse. And of course, in increasing numbers of cases, financially independent women might be willing to co-parent with a man who is not "breadwinner material" for his other qualities, but they - especially, as women - are not willing to be subjected to the treatment that higher-earning spouses face under family law.
Marriage currently, increasingly, is seen as destroying value by those who might otherwise consider it. If marriage is going to have a future, it's going to need to be pretty heavily re-imagined - soon.
The bias is still there, they just don't have the choice.
You have to pay for height and the price is paid in the currency of access to sexual value. If you aren't very young and very attractive, childless, no baggage, and a tiger in bed willing to put out on the first date, then you can't afford what's on the top shelf and you've got to set you're sights lower, as it were. Women who self-select to use those ltr dating apps tend to be older, plainer women, maybe divorced mothers with kids, and looking to settle down, and they have to swallow the harsh trade off and accept a selection of men who can be had on their limited budget. The apps don't turn women into idiots, they turn women into their true selves. Inside Dr. Jekyll is Mr. Hyde.
Welcome to the free market of female sexual autonomy. There are winners and losers. The thrill of victory and the agony of defeat. You can sympathize with the losers, or celebrate and glorify the winners, as we do in sports and most highly competitive, economically scalable, winners-take-most tournament markets where steep pyramids and power law hierarchies always naturally pop up. Creative Destruction and Misery and Unfulfillment are flip sides of the same coin.
This is one of those interesting areas where even free-market-favoring econ types suddenly flip position on many typical disagreements and express patterns of rhetoric and concern that code very hard left. If you start with the goal of trying to match as many men and women as possible to one long-term mate early in life, then certainly recent trends point to a catastrophic and huge 'market failure' (actually it's the analogous 'social failure'), which is the traditional justification for some kind of major and sustained regulatory intervention.
The choice is between biting the bullet and giving up on the goal of "most-get-matched" as being something important enough to justify forcing significant changes in the current state of affairs, on the one hand, or literally calling for the "redistribution of the means of reproduction" by means of strict regulations constraining sexual autonomy, on the other. The latter choice was the one seen for most of human history since the dawn of civilization as an obvious necessity for, and the only regime compatible with, a civilized social order.
That would also require constraints on entertainment content. Almost every Disney Princess Movie works by leveraging the instinctive appeal to females of all ages of the idea of the coming-of-age-rebellion of the nubile debutante who, with the help of supernatural powers, magic, and/or witchcraft, circumvents her social and material limits and the imposed restrictions on her autonomy.
Until recently the specific autonomy involved was sexual in nature, and to the story's conclusion included the obvious bonus of snatching an upper class super-alpha male or lower-class alpha bad-boy-with-a-heart-of-gold in the process. But since it is no longer PC and 47th-wave-feminism-certified to portray that as either a prime motivation or victory condition, and not even "falling in love as a fortunate and unintended incidental benefit of the main motive" anymore, more recent scripts sacrifice some popularity and box office success by settling for something more along the lines of a "Joan of Arc saves the day" heroine plotline. These just get closer and closer to traditional boy quest stories, just sometimes with the added trope of rebellion at an undesired arranged marriage.
The extreme case is one in which only the gender is flipped in a story that would work better and would have in the past been presented as boy-quest. That's why Aladdin, though supposedly a story about Aladdin, is really "Aladdin and Jasmine", i.e., a princess movie, while Moana is not, because Moana, while technically a princess as daughter of the chief, might as well have been a prince insofar as the rest of the story is concerned.
The trouble is, by leveraging the pleasure of experiencing stories which appeal to, pre-civilized sexual instincts, mass-audience story-tellers are engaging, whether intentionally or inadvertently, in the equivalent of mass brainwashing and indoctrination that reconfigures the ranking in the moral order into one of "female sexual autonomy supremacy". Even if it was possible short of imposing a sharia theocracy, there is just no possibility of squeezing the sexual marketplace social failure toothpaste back in the tube when that 800-pound gorilla is using all his weight to squeeze it back out.
If it were a true free market then money would be allowed to change hands in it. I would expect the number of men who could participate would then increase dramatically.
As it stands, the apps that attract the most men are those like Ashley Madison, which after its data breach was discovered to be largely a fraud -- 90% of its female members were revealed to be 'bot accounts.
Sep 24, 2023·edited Sep 24, 2023Liked by Arnold Kling
This was in the movie A Beautiful Mind as an example of the applicability of game theory. In the movie the sex roles were reversed. An attractive women and her 4 less attractive friends enter a bar. The dominate strategy is for the four men to not pursue the most attractive woman but instead to attempt to woo her less attractive friends. We are not intuitive statisticians but also not intuitive game theorists. Women need to more closely read Jane Austen - the foremost relationship game theorist of her and probable this era.
The analogy doesn't extend to online dating. The major constraints that could in theory (not in practice) lead to a most-match-with-a-mate Nash equilibrium are features of the material world, not the digital world. Today people live more of their mental, psychological, and emotional existence in the digital world than in the flesh-and-blood material world, and as such the virtual is now more real to them than reality, where they feel increasingly awkward and uncomfortable. Most people over 40 have trouble appreciating this fact about younger generations and certainly aren't ready to grasp the major implications for our brave new world that has such people in it.
In the old dating scene in which people met -get this- in real life in the real world, one's scale of approach was very limited. First you could only hit on the girls who came to the same place at the same time. And then, unless you are a super elite level set opener, you could only hit on them one at a time. Furthermore, because your approach would likely be observed by everyone else among both your targets and competitors who will all talk about it, you would have a very hard time pulling off a successful rebound attempt on a second choice.
But it's -completely- different online.
You can scale your number of approaches to the very limits of your talent and energy. Instead of the very small number of targets at close proximity in space and time and who have readied themselves for possibility of being approached, you can now target a decent percentage of an entire local region's population! They don't have to be made-up, dressed, psychologically 'on', or whatever, their profiles are there 24/7. You can approach any of them at any time, and approach them all practically simultaneously!
And it's all """private""" (well, not to the dating app company and the private consultants to whom they provide the real insights about what does and doesn't 'work'). That is, it creates in both approacher and target a sense of privacy and secrecy without any social pressure resulting from who might be watching and how they might judge us.
So, in the scene from a beautiful mind, every single girl is -secretly- getting his on by every single guy, all simultaneously, and, while everyone strongly suspects that to be what's going on, the facts are plausibly deniable and it's rude and risky to probe.
In this very different situation, the script flips, because it doesn't matter which girls the guys try to go after, the guys' choices and preferences are irrelevant. Instead, it now becomes possible for every single girl to choose the same alpha in the modern hypergamous lek mating pattern, without knowing for sure that he's seeing the other four too. And the top alpha will be quite happy with this state of affairs. And human nature is such that no one is going to do anything out of sympathy for loser males.
What that means is that the situation is sufficiently stable to switch from a "most-match-with-a-mate" equilibrium to "winners take most" equilibrium. Nash wept.
Would a solution then be to have a dating app release in aggregate statistics about users behavior or even just the men given that women suffer greater from reputational injury. You build a reputational profile of the men on the site relative to the average user. Or the site handicaps the men, as is done in horse racing, to a point where every man has a equal probability of "winning". Think Jane Austen meets Ada Lovelace . The site can reveal to the women each man's weight and perhaps her own handicap can be revealed to her too. The more heavily weighted a man is the greater the prize and the more difficult to win. A woman can choose to ignore this value but now at her peril. It doesn't solve the problem of men using multiple sites but if this is an app women use men will go their too.
It's not clear what you mean by 'solution', but if you mean that the app would successfully impose the equivalent of the real-world's practical limitations on scaling, then no, nothing like that proposal would come anywhere close to a solution.
That's for lots of reasons, but one stands out if there is competition among rival dating apps, the regulatory "race to the bottom". You ever watch how they handle admission to a popular nightclub? See, everyone wants to go to where the alphas, hotties, and cool people are hanging out. And those people want to be able to fully capitalize on their status and attractiveness, and to be given VIP perks too! They don't want hassles, handicaps, limits, etc. They'll balk and they'll bolt to a less 'regulated' scene.
And everyone else who wants to be around them will dance right out the door with them. And then the next tranche, and the next, in a giant status-ordered conga line. And even if you weren't exactly attracted to the group that went elsewhere, the average quality of the people who haven't left yet keeps declining and your instincts are going to go into overdrive to generate a powerful impulse to flee from the risk of being associated with those socially radioactive losers.
Bart Kosko pointed out that this scene gets the idea of the Nash Equilibrium wrong. A more cunning man than Nash would defect to pursue the blond after his fellows had each turned to one of her friends.
Dating apps are inhuman and I count my lucky stars I met my husband the old fashioned way (via underage sneaking into a goth themed night club).
I should think there are advantages to marrying a shorter chap, one being that he sees a more flattering angle of you. My husband is tall, and I'm eternally anxious about how massive my forehead must look to him. Like a furrowed moon rising in the night. Ah well.
Men greatly outnumber women on the apps. It's entirely possible that the number of men over six feet is two or three times the total number of women, especially if you restrict to "datable" people. So any given tall man will not receive that many likes from women, even though short men receive approximately zero.
So perhaps women can be selective on this front without much reducing their chances of a relationship.
Try reversing it then. Assume the men greatly outnumber the women, and then ask the men about their preferences and swiping behavior in relation to a woman's age or weight. It's going to look similar, and so the sex ratio is just not a big factor skewing the results away from true preferences.
My rough heuristic is that the closer behavior is to the four Fs of evolution (fighting, fleeing, feeding and f*cking), the more the behavior is hard-coded and consequently inelastic.
The way I understand the evolutionary psychology is physical appearance is not the number one criteria for women, see Geoffrey Miller and Tucker Max's book "Mate". It's like number three or something. For example, if you are assertive, kind, and have a good job--a proxy for being a good provider and father-- you will do well.
Yeah, much of the complaints about female sexuality seem to be exclusive due to the design of the apps. At least from personal experience, the guys who have the most dating success irl don't seem to be very far from average attractiveness.
Exactly. Which is why the average guy who wants to date more should be trying to meet women in person through their friend group or some co-ed group activity, not improving their online dating profile.
Nope. Imagine telling The Old Man and The Sea "Oh, no luck again Santiago? You should try fishing in the Dead Sea."
If you want to catch a fish, you don't have the luxury of picking the spot, you gotta go where they're swimming. And they are swimming online.
Look up one of those "how couples met" charts.
After WWII, besides "Friends" (which I'll get back to), the major ways couples met was via social network or mingling institutions: Family, School (often high school), Neighbors, Church. Today, those have all fallen to the point where even combined they only represent a small percentage of meetings.
Now, people have long met through friends, but it helps to have the right friends who know lots of other potential matches for you. 1975-1995 was peak for both "Through Friends" and "At Work", and combined they accounted for over half of meetings as far back as 40 years ago. This was the same period when "at a bar" became a significant source of couple meetings.
But while bar meetings still happen a lot (though in a different manner to that of the 70s, 80s, and 90s), at-work and through-friends couldn't last.
We all know what happened to trying to meet people at work. Ugh.
But it might surprise people to learn that "through friends" has been falling like a rock for 25 years. That's because that 1975-1995 "peak through friends" world was a place where - get this - friends met up in groups in person in the real world all the time. Whoa! The rate at which that happens today is -nothing- compared to the rate it used to. I was there, Gandalf! Getting together today is for the serious, focused "smaller, older, deeper" crowd.
And today, "At Bar or Online" started "going parabolic" around 2000 and now together are the origin of the vast majority of romantic relationships. Some reports put the percentage over ninety! This is self-sustaining, because you gotta go where everyone else is going, and it's common knowledge that everyone is online, so everyone gets locked into the new focal point forever.
See the more interesting question to me is why more men, especially men in college, don't do this. And I don't have very many good answers. Candidates include social media and civil rights laws, but I personally aren't swayed by either.
1)Fear of rejection--I know from experience, and am thankfully happily married now. 2)No one taught them any of this so they are just going by what their peers are doing. They often learn the wrong lessons--like tall guy who is playfully mean can get away with it because he's tall and good looking.
What if dating apps are for reflections of our worth and aspirational tools to up that sense of worth and confidence, not for finding a mate. All through history the evolved way to find a mate was to encounter an interesting and appealing person, in person.
As the dating app market evolves, one reads more about "niche" apps that either explicitly specialize in people looking for LTR commitments or for more casual flings. I wonder if these have less skewed dynamics. One of the best points Torenberg makes is that the conflation of intentions on these apps is bad for everyone.
At the other end of the spectrum, I think it would be useful to have more ways that people potentially attracted to each other can become friends first, and to normalize asking out friends and taking rejection gracefully. My social circle may be both "out of date" and unrepresentative here, but it contains an awful lot of happy couples (my own marriage included) who were friends first, as well as plenty of people who asked each other out, fot turned down, and remained friends. And it seems to me that the emotional dynamics of doing things this way encourage less superficiality and more humane connection. In any case we could use more encouragement of friends-making to address the general loneliness problem, which goes beyond the decline of sex and marriage.
Generally, men don't care that much about a woman's height, but I've heard of one exception: Exclusive lower Manhattan dance clubs frequented by Wall Street bros and fashion models. Door men sometimes turn away beautiful short women to get across the message that this club is for fashion models and not real women. The Masters of the Universe compete with each other to show they can have a 5'11" fashion model on their arms, not some 5'4" head cheerleader-homecoming queen-type loser.
It's seems extremely negative sum, but people in Manhattan often enjoy thinking up seemingly pointless competitions.
Doesn't this make short men who choose to use dating apps instead of networks the idiots? They may as well get mad they're not finding any women on Grindr.
I'm not sure where that 90% statistic comes from. The numbers I've seen before were that women who filter on height (which is just a fraction of all women using the apps), mostly filter for >6 feet tall.
Most women do not actually put in a height filter. So in that statistic you only get the minority of women who think this is a critical trait.
Short man syndrome? Tiny little men like Macron and Sunak are the most dangerous evil little pricks in the world. Steer clear of all short men, they are angry little murderers!
I can find no source for the claim that '90% of swipes by women are for men over 6'0".' I asked for a source on Erik Torenber's substack and he has not yet provided one.
The closest I can find is a tweet stating, 'On the Bumble dating app, 90% of women pursue 6% of men, in terms of height.' According to that tweet, 30% of women on Bumble who set height filters include men who are 5'10" or taller. Let's not perpetuate new online dating folklore with unfounded claims. Only about 14% of men in the USA are over 6' tall. If men over 6' are receiving 90% of swipes, then the situation is worse than the claim that 20% of men receive 80% of the likes.
I remember reading somewhere: Men will date women they would not marry and will have sex with women they would not date. Women will marry men they would not date and will date men they would not have sex with.
I assume that a women's *dating* strategy is substantially different from their *husband hunting* strategy, and not surprisingly, it filters men a lot more strictly. In particular, the current sexual economy puts people into a long stretch of early adulthood when their mating instincts are activated but before the point where they can accurately judge the future career (worth) of a potential mate.
Back in the 1800s, you graduated from 8th grade and were precipitated into adulthood (job, marriage) immediately, so your only partner-hunting was targeted to finding a spouse. Now, a woman can easily become sexually self-governing at 17 as a college freshman, but she may be nearing 30, working as an associate lawyer at Dewey, Cheatham, and Howe, before it becomes clear which male associate lawyers will make partnership. She may have as much as 10 years to cool her heels and occupy herself with the men she finds most sexually attractive.
I used to date mostly tall, lanky guys; until my 5’4” husband charmed me. He was the opposite of my “type” but I reasoned that since my “type” wasn’t working out all that well for me, maybe I should have a new type. We’ve been married for 30 years now.
5. Dating apps incentivize filtering on shallow characteristics like height.
There is an illusion of endless quantity of men, and all you know of a potential match is his photo, stated height, and perhaps one line of text. Women who meet men in real life are much more likely to date short and average height men. (Though typically women won't date a man shorter than herself). If you take the average height of all men married in a given year, it is probably the same height as the average adult male population.
Dating apps aren't marriage apps, they're hook up apps.
But the "endless quantity of men" thing is not an illusion. The men outnumber the women by a lot, so the women can be more selective. That's what's going on.
My impression is that in any given region, at any given time, a large fraction of the datable men are on the apps and a small fraction of the datable women. That's the real inefficiency here.
The "endless quantity of men" do exist until the day when the woman "hits the wall" -- that is, she is forced to realize that she has playgirled away her beauty, and can no longer find a marriage partner that she can accept. This can happen well before menopause, and its sufferer is always the last to realize it.
I would expect that using dating apps makes this problem worse because she can go on looking for one-nighters well past the point that, if physically present at a pickup bar, she would see clues on the faces of men looking at her.
The articles I’ve seen do not talk about absolute numbers much, merely percentages. So this proportion difference might be real. But it might not be. Any good links with data?
It's hard to say for certain because the apps have incentives to hide this information. (For the same reason, I don't think the sort of numbers cited in the OP are very reliable either.) This seems somewhat credible -- https://www.statista.com/statistics/975984/us-bumble-user-ratio-gender/ -- and indicates a 2:1 male-female ratio on Bumble, which is supposed to be one of the more women-friendly ones.
Thx for link, but I’m not going to pay for good stats. Looking for the best for free, and not even looking too hard. More keeping my eyes open, as well as a tab to S. Sailer’s blog.
They're probably both. Having all this data leads people flights of fancy in interpretation.
*** 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. ***
This could mean that 90% of women never swipe guys over 6'.
Or it could mean that 100% of women sometimes swipe guys under 6'.
Given that the cost of swiping is approximately zero, it'd be kind of crazy for both men and women NOT to swipe all the hotties they're presented with. Just because a girl smiles every time Johnny Quarterback (and Davy Point Guard and so forth) walks by doesn't mean that she doesn't also smile at Boy Next Stoor too. IRL, this doesn't mean that she's "expecting" to marry Johnny Quarterback and won't give Boy Next Store the time of day. On the internet, there's a bigger supply of Johnny Quarterbacks, but it's not evident that people actually fall for the "illusion of endless quantity".
She smiles at Johnny Quarterback, because a girl can dream, but she smiles at Boy Next Store because she can see a future with him. Swipes are like a record of every time you smile at someone. I guess it means... something... but trying to read a lot into it seems like folly.
Great comprarison of swiping right to smiling. You make a good point that we don't know the distribution of # swipes per woman, or % of women who *only* swipe right for tall men.
Context from the original post by Torenberg, not quoted by Kling: "Men swipe right on 60% of women, women swipe right on 4.5% of men."
There is a cost to a woman swiping right on a man, because it is good odds he already swiped right on her. There is a cost to receiving many messages from men trying to set up a date.
There's studies that show that men and women don't swipe the same. On dating apps women rate 80% of men as below average attractiveness is just one stat that points out the delusion present in women on dating apps. The response ratio is also abyssmal for men vs women.
6. Young, modern women are substantially more comfortable going without a partner than previous generations. Put in negotiation terms, their BATNA is higher thus they “bargain” more aggressively. “Bargain” in this context means less appetite to compromise on valued characteristics in a partner.
I think this is an important point: we may have reached the point where today's concept of marriage actually destroys value, rather than creating it, for BOTH parties.
Women don't really need men for financial support in the way they did. Today, women have far better market-income opportunities, and marriage has to offer a better deal than those.
To encourage women to marry, therefore, governments - with strong support from women's organizations - have tried to make marriage and "being a wife" more financially attractive. They have transformed family law utterly, from being a deeply inequitable and sexist body of 18th-century law that stripped spouses of basic human and property rights, an institution women had begun to reject, to become... a deeply inequitable and sexist body of 20th-century law that strips spouses of basic human and property rights. Young men, increasingly, sensibly, want nothing to do with it.
So here we are today. Many women demand a higher level of "marriageability" than in the past, because they have other options. Many men don't really want to be marriageable, seeing the legal institution as little more than legally-imposed codependency and financial abuse. And of course, in increasing numbers of cases, financially independent women might be willing to co-parent with a man who is not "breadwinner material" for his other qualities, but they - especially, as women - are not willing to be subjected to the treatment that higher-earning spouses face under family law.
Marriage currently, increasingly, is seen as destroying value by those who might otherwise consider it. If marriage is going to have a future, it's going to need to be pretty heavily re-imagined - soon.
Agreed, but I think there are some apps that are the opposite of Tinder and are more geared towards finding a long-term relationship.
I'm guessing the long term relationship apps have less of a height bias
The bias is still there, they just don't have the choice.
You have to pay for height and the price is paid in the currency of access to sexual value. If you aren't very young and very attractive, childless, no baggage, and a tiger in bed willing to put out on the first date, then you can't afford what's on the top shelf and you've got to set you're sights lower, as it were. Women who self-select to use those ltr dating apps tend to be older, plainer women, maybe divorced mothers with kids, and looking to settle down, and they have to swallow the harsh trade off and accept a selection of men who can be had on their limited budget. The apps don't turn women into idiots, they turn women into their true selves. Inside Dr. Jekyll is Mr. Hyde.
Ya same. I wonder how this fits into the trends of lower fertility and marriage rates.
These dating apps sound like recipes for abject misery and unfulfillment all around.
Welcome to the free market of female sexual autonomy. There are winners and losers. The thrill of victory and the agony of defeat. You can sympathize with the losers, or celebrate and glorify the winners, as we do in sports and most highly competitive, economically scalable, winners-take-most tournament markets where steep pyramids and power law hierarchies always naturally pop up. Creative Destruction and Misery and Unfulfillment are flip sides of the same coin.
This is one of those interesting areas where even free-market-favoring econ types suddenly flip position on many typical disagreements and express patterns of rhetoric and concern that code very hard left. If you start with the goal of trying to match as many men and women as possible to one long-term mate early in life, then certainly recent trends point to a catastrophic and huge 'market failure' (actually it's the analogous 'social failure'), which is the traditional justification for some kind of major and sustained regulatory intervention.
The choice is between biting the bullet and giving up on the goal of "most-get-matched" as being something important enough to justify forcing significant changes in the current state of affairs, on the one hand, or literally calling for the "redistribution of the means of reproduction" by means of strict regulations constraining sexual autonomy, on the other. The latter choice was the one seen for most of human history since the dawn of civilization as an obvious necessity for, and the only regime compatible with, a civilized social order.
That would also require constraints on entertainment content. Almost every Disney Princess Movie works by leveraging the instinctive appeal to females of all ages of the idea of the coming-of-age-rebellion of the nubile debutante who, with the help of supernatural powers, magic, and/or witchcraft, circumvents her social and material limits and the imposed restrictions on her autonomy.
Until recently the specific autonomy involved was sexual in nature, and to the story's conclusion included the obvious bonus of snatching an upper class super-alpha male or lower-class alpha bad-boy-with-a-heart-of-gold in the process. But since it is no longer PC and 47th-wave-feminism-certified to portray that as either a prime motivation or victory condition, and not even "falling in love as a fortunate and unintended incidental benefit of the main motive" anymore, more recent scripts sacrifice some popularity and box office success by settling for something more along the lines of a "Joan of Arc saves the day" heroine plotline. These just get closer and closer to traditional boy quest stories, just sometimes with the added trope of rebellion at an undesired arranged marriage.
The extreme case is one in which only the gender is flipped in a story that would work better and would have in the past been presented as boy-quest. That's why Aladdin, though supposedly a story about Aladdin, is really "Aladdin and Jasmine", i.e., a princess movie, while Moana is not, because Moana, while technically a princess as daughter of the chief, might as well have been a prince insofar as the rest of the story is concerned.
The trouble is, by leveraging the pleasure of experiencing stories which appeal to, pre-civilized sexual instincts, mass-audience story-tellers are engaging, whether intentionally or inadvertently, in the equivalent of mass brainwashing and indoctrination that reconfigures the ranking in the moral order into one of "female sexual autonomy supremacy". Even if it was possible short of imposing a sharia theocracy, there is just no possibility of squeezing the sexual marketplace social failure toothpaste back in the tube when that 800-pound gorilla is using all his weight to squeeze it back out.
If it were a true free market then money would be allowed to change hands in it. I would expect the number of men who could participate would then increase dramatically.
As it stands, the apps that attract the most men are those like Ashley Madison, which after its data breach was discovered to be largely a fraud -- 90% of its female members were revealed to be 'bot accounts.
"Cause I don't care too much for money
Money can't buy me love."
Somebody please feed that last sentence to Stable Diffusion.
Sort of like social media in general?
This was in the movie A Beautiful Mind as an example of the applicability of game theory. In the movie the sex roles were reversed. An attractive women and her 4 less attractive friends enter a bar. The dominate strategy is for the four men to not pursue the most attractive woman but instead to attempt to woo her less attractive friends. We are not intuitive statisticians but also not intuitive game theorists. Women need to more closely read Jane Austen - the foremost relationship game theorist of her and probable this era.
The analogy doesn't extend to online dating. The major constraints that could in theory (not in practice) lead to a most-match-with-a-mate Nash equilibrium are features of the material world, not the digital world. Today people live more of their mental, psychological, and emotional existence in the digital world than in the flesh-and-blood material world, and as such the virtual is now more real to them than reality, where they feel increasingly awkward and uncomfortable. Most people over 40 have trouble appreciating this fact about younger generations and certainly aren't ready to grasp the major implications for our brave new world that has such people in it.
In the old dating scene in which people met -get this- in real life in the real world, one's scale of approach was very limited. First you could only hit on the girls who came to the same place at the same time. And then, unless you are a super elite level set opener, you could only hit on them one at a time. Furthermore, because your approach would likely be observed by everyone else among both your targets and competitors who will all talk about it, you would have a very hard time pulling off a successful rebound attempt on a second choice.
But it's -completely- different online.
You can scale your number of approaches to the very limits of your talent and energy. Instead of the very small number of targets at close proximity in space and time and who have readied themselves for possibility of being approached, you can now target a decent percentage of an entire local region's population! They don't have to be made-up, dressed, psychologically 'on', or whatever, their profiles are there 24/7. You can approach any of them at any time, and approach them all practically simultaneously!
And it's all """private""" (well, not to the dating app company and the private consultants to whom they provide the real insights about what does and doesn't 'work'). That is, it creates in both approacher and target a sense of privacy and secrecy without any social pressure resulting from who might be watching and how they might judge us.
So, in the scene from a beautiful mind, every single girl is -secretly- getting his on by every single guy, all simultaneously, and, while everyone strongly suspects that to be what's going on, the facts are plausibly deniable and it's rude and risky to probe.
In this very different situation, the script flips, because it doesn't matter which girls the guys try to go after, the guys' choices and preferences are irrelevant. Instead, it now becomes possible for every single girl to choose the same alpha in the modern hypergamous lek mating pattern, without knowing for sure that he's seeing the other four too. And the top alpha will be quite happy with this state of affairs. And human nature is such that no one is going to do anything out of sympathy for loser males.
What that means is that the situation is sufficiently stable to switch from a "most-match-with-a-mate" equilibrium to "winners take most" equilibrium. Nash wept.
Would a solution then be to have a dating app release in aggregate statistics about users behavior or even just the men given that women suffer greater from reputational injury. You build a reputational profile of the men on the site relative to the average user. Or the site handicaps the men, as is done in horse racing, to a point where every man has a equal probability of "winning". Think Jane Austen meets Ada Lovelace . The site can reveal to the women each man's weight and perhaps her own handicap can be revealed to her too. The more heavily weighted a man is the greater the prize and the more difficult to win. A woman can choose to ignore this value but now at her peril. It doesn't solve the problem of men using multiple sites but if this is an app women use men will go their too.
It's not clear what you mean by 'solution', but if you mean that the app would successfully impose the equivalent of the real-world's practical limitations on scaling, then no, nothing like that proposal would come anywhere close to a solution.
That's for lots of reasons, but one stands out if there is competition among rival dating apps, the regulatory "race to the bottom". You ever watch how they handle admission to a popular nightclub? See, everyone wants to go to where the alphas, hotties, and cool people are hanging out. And those people want to be able to fully capitalize on their status and attractiveness, and to be given VIP perks too! They don't want hassles, handicaps, limits, etc. They'll balk and they'll bolt to a less 'regulated' scene.
And everyone else who wants to be around them will dance right out the door with them. And then the next tranche, and the next, in a giant status-ordered conga line. And even if you weren't exactly attracted to the group that went elsewhere, the average quality of the people who haven't left yet keeps declining and your instincts are going to go into overdrive to generate a powerful impulse to flee from the risk of being associated with those socially radioactive losers.
Bart Kosko pointed out that this scene gets the idea of the Nash Equilibrium wrong. A more cunning man than Nash would defect to pursue the blond after his fellows had each turned to one of her friends.
https://sipi.usc.edu/~kosko/oped_4.pdf
As I was reading Kling's essay, one of my thoughts was, "Not enough women today have read Jane Austen."
Dating apps are inhuman and I count my lucky stars I met my husband the old fashioned way (via underage sneaking into a goth themed night club).
I should think there are advantages to marrying a shorter chap, one being that he sees a more flattering angle of you. My husband is tall, and I'm eternally anxious about how massive my forehead must look to him. Like a furrowed moon rising in the night. Ah well.
related:
- Insights from 2,961 First Dates: https://dkras.substack.com/p/sex-differences-attractiveness-and
- On the Future of Dating: https://dkras.substack.com/p/thoughts-on-the-future-of-dating
See also https://arnoldkling.substack.com/p/the-mutual-friend
Men greatly outnumber women on the apps. It's entirely possible that the number of men over six feet is two or three times the total number of women, especially if you restrict to "datable" people. So any given tall man will not receive that many likes from women, even though short men receive approximately zero.
So perhaps women can be selective on this front without much reducing their chances of a relationship.
Try reversing it then. Assume the men greatly outnumber the women, and then ask the men about their preferences and swiping behavior in relation to a woman's age or weight. It's going to look similar, and so the sex ratio is just not a big factor skewing the results away from true preferences.
You mean the outnumbered men would then be equally selective when it comes to the women's appearance? I certainly agree.
My rough heuristic is that the closer behavior is to the four Fs of evolution (fighting, fleeing, feeding and f*cking), the more the behavior is hard-coded and consequently inelastic.
The way I understand the evolutionary psychology is physical appearance is not the number one criteria for women, see Geoffrey Miller and Tucker Max's book "Mate". It's like number three or something. For example, if you are assertive, kind, and have a good job--a proxy for being a good provider and father-- you will do well.
Yeah, much of the complaints about female sexuality seem to be exclusive due to the design of the apps. At least from personal experience, the guys who have the most dating success irl don't seem to be very far from average attractiveness.
Exactly. Which is why the average guy who wants to date more should be trying to meet women in person through their friend group or some co-ed group activity, not improving their online dating profile.
Nope. Imagine telling The Old Man and The Sea "Oh, no luck again Santiago? You should try fishing in the Dead Sea."
If you want to catch a fish, you don't have the luxury of picking the spot, you gotta go where they're swimming. And they are swimming online.
Look up one of those "how couples met" charts.
After WWII, besides "Friends" (which I'll get back to), the major ways couples met was via social network or mingling institutions: Family, School (often high school), Neighbors, Church. Today, those have all fallen to the point where even combined they only represent a small percentage of meetings.
Now, people have long met through friends, but it helps to have the right friends who know lots of other potential matches for you. 1975-1995 was peak for both "Through Friends" and "At Work", and combined they accounted for over half of meetings as far back as 40 years ago. This was the same period when "at a bar" became a significant source of couple meetings.
But while bar meetings still happen a lot (though in a different manner to that of the 70s, 80s, and 90s), at-work and through-friends couldn't last.
We all know what happened to trying to meet people at work. Ugh.
But it might surprise people to learn that "through friends" has been falling like a rock for 25 years. That's because that 1975-1995 "peak through friends" world was a place where - get this - friends met up in groups in person in the real world all the time. Whoa! The rate at which that happens today is -nothing- compared to the rate it used to. I was there, Gandalf! Getting together today is for the serious, focused "smaller, older, deeper" crowd.
And today, "At Bar or Online" started "going parabolic" around 2000 and now together are the origin of the vast majority of romantic relationships. Some reports put the percentage over ninety! This is self-sustaining, because you gotta go where everyone else is going, and it's common knowledge that everyone is online, so everyone gets locked into the new focal point forever.
Appreciate the detailed reply, but I don't think social science evidence etc. is the proper lens for this. And that's true of a lot of the comments.
What's a better lens than evidence?
See the more interesting question to me is why more men, especially men in college, don't do this. And I don't have very many good answers. Candidates include social media and civil rights laws, but I personally aren't swayed by either.
1)Fear of rejection--I know from experience, and am thankfully happily married now. 2)No one taught them any of this so they are just going by what their peers are doing. They often learn the wrong lessons--like tall guy who is playfully mean can get away with it because he's tall and good looking.
Assertive and having a good job seem to be 2 or those 4 Fs to my way of thinking about it.
Yes, but I don't agree with Brian's premise about these behaviors being hard coded and therefore mostly inelastic.
What if dating apps are for reflections of our worth and aspirational tools to up that sense of worth and confidence, not for finding a mate. All through history the evolved way to find a mate was to encounter an interesting and appealing person, in person.
As the dating app market evolves, one reads more about "niche" apps that either explicitly specialize in people looking for LTR commitments or for more casual flings. I wonder if these have less skewed dynamics. One of the best points Torenberg makes is that the conflation of intentions on these apps is bad for everyone.
At the other end of the spectrum, I think it would be useful to have more ways that people potentially attracted to each other can become friends first, and to normalize asking out friends and taking rejection gracefully. My social circle may be both "out of date" and unrepresentative here, but it contains an awful lot of happy couples (my own marriage included) who were friends first, as well as plenty of people who asked each other out, fot turned down, and remained friends. And it seems to me that the emotional dynamics of doing things this way encourage less superficiality and more humane connection. In any case we could use more encouragement of friends-making to address the general loneliness problem, which goes beyond the decline of sex and marriage.
Generally, men don't care that much about a woman's height, but I've heard of one exception: Exclusive lower Manhattan dance clubs frequented by Wall Street bros and fashion models. Door men sometimes turn away beautiful short women to get across the message that this club is for fashion models and not real women. The Masters of the Universe compete with each other to show they can have a 5'11" fashion model on their arms, not some 5'4" head cheerleader-homecoming queen-type loser.
It's seems extremely negative sum, but people in Manhattan often enjoy thinking up seemingly pointless competitions.
Doesn't this make short men who choose to use dating apps instead of networks the idiots? They may as well get mad they're not finding any women on Grindr.
I'm not sure where that 90% statistic comes from. The numbers I've seen before were that women who filter on height (which is just a fraction of all women using the apps), mostly filter for >6 feet tall.
Most women do not actually put in a height filter. So in that statistic you only get the minority of women who think this is a critical trait.
Short man syndrome? Tiny little men like Macron and Sunak are the most dangerous evil little pricks in the world. Steer clear of all short men, they are angry little murderers!
I can find no source for the claim that '90% of swipes by women are for men over 6'0".' I asked for a source on Erik Torenber's substack and he has not yet provided one.
The closest I can find is a tweet stating, 'On the Bumble dating app, 90% of women pursue 6% of men, in terms of height.' According to that tweet, 30% of women on Bumble who set height filters include men who are 5'10" or taller. Let's not perpetuate new online dating folklore with unfounded claims. Only about 14% of men in the USA are over 6' tall. If men over 6' are receiving 90% of swipes, then the situation is worse than the claim that 20% of men receive 80% of the likes.
https://twitter.com/eftegarie/status/1501202280120729603
I remember reading somewhere: Men will date women they would not marry and will have sex with women they would not date. Women will marry men they would not date and will date men they would not have sex with.
I assume that a women's *dating* strategy is substantially different from their *husband hunting* strategy, and not surprisingly, it filters men a lot more strictly. In particular, the current sexual economy puts people into a long stretch of early adulthood when their mating instincts are activated but before the point where they can accurately judge the future career (worth) of a potential mate.
Back in the 1800s, you graduated from 8th grade and were precipitated into adulthood (job, marriage) immediately, so your only partner-hunting was targeted to finding a spouse. Now, a woman can easily become sexually self-governing at 17 as a college freshman, but she may be nearing 30, working as an associate lawyer at Dewey, Cheatham, and Howe, before it becomes clear which male associate lawyers will make partnership. She may have as much as 10 years to cool her heels and occupy herself with the men she finds most sexually attractive.