It may be more possible to argue against this sort of post than you think. Let’s start by trying to identify its central point, using quotes.
Men (especially when younger) slightly prefer shorter-term casual relationships and vice versa, but overall the differences are just not that big.
Claim 1: Survey results show that relationship orientation (RO) differences exist between men and women, but these differences are small.
There do exist real differences in mating psychology between men and women but they don’t imply mutually hostile needs. A lot of differences are complimentary...
Claim 2: RO differences between men and women do not imply intersexual competition.
Western society mostly has norms and laws (e.g. economic freedom for women, decriminalizing infidelity, outlawing polygamy) that reduce intersexual conflict while potentially increasing intrasexual competition...
Claim 3: Norms and laws mainly reduce intersexual competition (stronger assertion). They may also increase intrasexual competition (weaker assertion).
Almost everyone else would do better not by trying to trick or coerce what they selfishly want out of reluctant members of the opposite sex, but by finding those of the other sex who want to give it to them...
Claim 4: Intersexual trickery and coercion is a worse tactic than finding an RO-compatible partner.
Dating selflessly is often unfair, painful, high variance, and much harder than it used to be. There are many reasons why people fail, although a lot of them are individually fixable and not a result of the “top 20%” stealing all your partners.
Claim 5: Dating nevertheless involves a lot of suffering, and has become more difficult over time.
There are two assumptions we could make about relationship orientation. If RO is rigid, people prefer dating nobody to dating a partner of incompatible RO. If RO is relaxed, people will accept a partner of incompatible RO.
I don’t have access to the data in Jacob’s survey, but it looks like the approximate proportions are:
“Not Looking:” 2:1 female:male
“Sex/play only:” 2:1 male:female
“Casual dating:” 5:4 male:female
“Serious relationship:” 10:9 male:female
Since people in the “not looking” category automatically succeed in actualizing their RO, and all other categories are male-skewed, it is men who will consistently fail to find partners under the “rigid RO” model. “Sex/play” looks like about 5% of men, “casual dating” like it’s about 30% of men, and “serious relationship” like it’s about 50%. Using the eyeballed ratios I gave above, that means that 2.5% of men seek and fail to find “sex/play” relationships, 6% seek and fail to find casual dating relationships, and about 5% seek and fail to find serious relationships, for a total of about 13.5% of men who cannot find the type of relationship they want due to a dating pool of incompatible size.
I lean against the notion of people having “positive rights,” but relationships and jobs are two important categories for people’s sense of wellbeing. For context, a 14% unemployment rate in the US has been observed in 1937 (2 years before the end of the Great Depression), 1940 (1 year after the end of the Great Depression), and has consistently been under 10% since then, although there have been brief periods within a given year in which the unemployment rate spiked up, such as April 2020 (COVID lockdowns).
So if we think that 13.5% complete, numerical inability to find a compatible relationship is roughly as bad as being an unemployed job-seeker, then, exclusively examining RO and ignoring any questions of how “good” the RO-compatible is, it’s about as bad for men as we saw in moderately bad years of the Great Depression.
Men who cannot find a partner have two options. One is to not have a partner at all, and the other is to relax their constraints and accept partners from an incompatible RO. However, this will still leave about 10% of men unable to find any partner at all—as bad as the worst years for unemployment since 1941.
There’s a crucial caveat to this analysis. Men in the “sex/play” and “casual dating” categories may not actually want or need a partner on 100% of days. If “sex/play” men can tolerate having that experience only on 50% of the days that women in that category do, then they’ll have their needs met. Men in the “casual dating” category” need to tolerate only a relatively modest imbalance. It’s really the 5% of men who want serious relationships and simply cannot find one who will truly be SOL—a rate that we tend to see as quite tolerable when it comes to unemployment.
However, this doesn’t account for other forms of potential rigid orientations, such as monogamy vs. polyamory. Let’s generalize.
Imagine we have 100 men and 100 women. 60 of the 100 men and 40 of 100 women want a serious relationship; the rest want a casual relationship. Let’s say that a preference for monogamy vs. polyamory is independent of gender and serious vs. casual preference, with 2⁄3 of men and 3⁄4 of women preferring monogamy.
Then 40 of the 60 men and 30 of the 40 women in the “serious relationship” category want monogamy, as do 27 of the men and 45 of the women in the “casual” category. The remainder (20 men and 10 women in the “serious relationship” category, and 13 men and 15 women in the “casual relationship” category) want a polyamorous relationship.
Before we considered polyamory vs. monogamy, a total of 40 people (20 serious men and 20 casual women) couldn’t find a compatible relationship. Once we add in this second constraint, that number increases to 42 people. If we continue adding further rigid constraints, we have fewer and fewer people able to find a compatible relationship.
We also need to take into account gender ratios, which may exacerbate or cancel out these incompatibilities. For example, a town with more women than men will tend to cancel out some of the relationship-seeking disparities we see in Jacob’s survey data. A town with more men than women, of course, will see even worse problems.
Jacob’s analysis in another post where he estimates the impact of gender imbalance on the “quality” of one’s partner also seems incomplete to me, because it doesn’t account for the common notion that men and women are not, generally, “equal” in terms of the distribution of mate quality. It may be correct as far as rank order goes, but we may care about an absolute rather than ordinal match.
A blame-based narrative seems inappropriate for considering this issue. This is a problem of the distribution of rigid preferences in the population for a pie that cannot be made bigger. Note also that it’s possible to argue against this post without resorting to any particularly CW/taboo topics or tone.
I wonder if Georgism might offer some sort of lens on this, since it also is meant to analyze and deal with problems of another critical resource that has a fixed supply?
It may be more possible to argue against this sort of post than you think. Let’s start by trying to identify its central point, using quotes.
Claim 1: Survey results show that relationship orientation (RO) differences exist between men and women, but these differences are small.
Claim 2: RO differences between men and women do not imply intersexual competition.
Claim 3: Norms and laws mainly reduce intersexual competition (stronger assertion). They may also increase intrasexual competition (weaker assertion).
Claim 4: Intersexual trickery and coercion is a worse tactic than finding an RO-compatible partner.
Claim 5: Dating nevertheless involves a lot of suffering, and has become more difficult over time.
There are two assumptions we could make about relationship orientation. If RO is rigid, people prefer dating nobody to dating a partner of incompatible RO. If RO is relaxed, people will accept a partner of incompatible RO.
I don’t have access to the data in Jacob’s survey, but it looks like the approximate proportions are:
“Not Looking:” 2:1 female:male
“Sex/play only:” 2:1 male:female
“Casual dating:” 5:4 male:female
“Serious relationship:” 10:9 male:female
Since people in the “not looking” category automatically succeed in actualizing their RO, and all other categories are male-skewed, it is men who will consistently fail to find partners under the “rigid RO” model. “Sex/play” looks like about 5% of men, “casual dating” like it’s about 30% of men, and “serious relationship” like it’s about 50%. Using the eyeballed ratios I gave above, that means that 2.5% of men seek and fail to find “sex/play” relationships, 6% seek and fail to find casual dating relationships, and about 5% seek and fail to find serious relationships, for a total of about 13.5% of men who cannot find the type of relationship they want due to a dating pool of incompatible size.
I lean against the notion of people having “positive rights,” but relationships and jobs are two important categories for people’s sense of wellbeing. For context, a 14% unemployment rate in the US has been observed in 1937 (2 years before the end of the Great Depression), 1940 (1 year after the end of the Great Depression), and has consistently been under 10% since then, although there have been brief periods within a given year in which the unemployment rate spiked up, such as April 2020 (COVID lockdowns).
So if we think that 13.5% complete, numerical inability to find a compatible relationship is roughly as bad as being an unemployed job-seeker, then, exclusively examining RO and ignoring any questions of how “good” the RO-compatible is, it’s about as bad for men as we saw in moderately bad years of the Great Depression.
Men who cannot find a partner have two options. One is to not have a partner at all, and the other is to relax their constraints and accept partners from an incompatible RO. However, this will still leave about 10% of men unable to find any partner at all—as bad as the worst years for unemployment since 1941.
There’s a crucial caveat to this analysis. Men in the “sex/play” and “casual dating” categories may not actually want or need a partner on 100% of days. If “sex/play” men can tolerate having that experience only on 50% of the days that women in that category do, then they’ll have their needs met. Men in the “casual dating” category” need to tolerate only a relatively modest imbalance. It’s really the 5% of men who want serious relationships and simply cannot find one who will truly be SOL—a rate that we tend to see as quite tolerable when it comes to unemployment.
However, this doesn’t account for other forms of potential rigid orientations, such as monogamy vs. polyamory. Let’s generalize.
Imagine we have 100 men and 100 women. 60 of the 100 men and 40 of 100 women want a serious relationship; the rest want a casual relationship. Let’s say that a preference for monogamy vs. polyamory is independent of gender and serious vs. casual preference, with 2⁄3 of men and 3⁄4 of women preferring monogamy.
Then 40 of the 60 men and 30 of the 40 women in the “serious relationship” category want monogamy, as do 27 of the men and 45 of the women in the “casual” category. The remainder (20 men and 10 women in the “serious relationship” category, and 13 men and 15 women in the “casual relationship” category) want a polyamorous relationship.
Before we considered polyamory vs. monogamy, a total of 40 people (20 serious men and 20 casual women) couldn’t find a compatible relationship. Once we add in this second constraint, that number increases to 42 people. If we continue adding further rigid constraints, we have fewer and fewer people able to find a compatible relationship.
We also need to take into account gender ratios, which may exacerbate or cancel out these incompatibilities. For example, a town with more women than men will tend to cancel out some of the relationship-seeking disparities we see in Jacob’s survey data. A town with more men than women, of course, will see even worse problems.
Jacob’s analysis in another post where he estimates the impact of gender imbalance on the “quality” of one’s partner also seems incomplete to me, because it doesn’t account for the common notion that men and women are not, generally, “equal” in terms of the distribution of mate quality. It may be correct as far as rank order goes, but we may care about an absolute rather than ordinal match.
A blame-based narrative seems inappropriate for considering this issue. This is a problem of the distribution of rigid preferences in the population for a pie that cannot be made bigger. Note also that it’s possible to argue against this post without resorting to any particularly CW/taboo topics or tone.
I wonder if Georgism might offer some sort of lens on this, since it also is meant to analyze and deal with problems of another critical resource that has a fixed supply?