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What I’ve long wondered is how women react in the real world now that they have all the power on dating apps. Why would they try to find a date in any other way

• chillacy 9y ago
  That's historically the case: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/sep/24/women-men-dna-human-gene-pool https://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/sep/24/women-men-dn... The other implication of polygamy is that a lot of men simply didn't have a chance to pass on their genes at all.
  • paulddraper 9y ago
    Related to this, as a bit of cause and a bit of effect, is that std deviation intelligence/posperity/success is significantly wider for males. Mentally ill people and geniuses are overwhelmingly male.
    • dhimes 9y ago
      Could that just be an observational effect? That it's maybe been historically easier for mentally ill women to hide at home, and for genius women to not be discovered? I realize I'm asking a question we can't answer at the moment, but I bring it up because we've "recently" (I'm old) learned that girls can struggle in school just like boys, but their problems go undetected because they behave in class and teachers are less likely to look for problems. The crisis has always been the 7th grade boy who can't read- it turns out there are a lot of 7th grade girls who can't read either, but they were undiagnosed.
      • paulddraper 9y ago
        Doubtful. It's pretty well established that alcoholism, autism, psychopathy, and to some extent downs syndrome predominantly affect men. (And counterexample: depression is twice as common among women.)
        • watwut 9y ago
          Alcoholism rates change over time. And the gap between men and women was getting smaller.
      • StellarTabi 9y ago
        Heck, even today, I've noticed a lot of people don't know women can have austism/aspergers.
  • AnIdiotOnTheNet 9y ago
    I sometimes wonder if a big reason why monogamous marriage exists as a concept in human society is as a strategy for mitigating violent upheaval. By using cultural pressure to force single-partner relationships (at least on the surface), you no longer had a large group of sexually frustrated men with nothing to lose looking around and wondering how to get a piece of what the elite have that they don't.
    • a_f 9y ago
      I personally belive this to be the case. I cam across an interesting article here on HN posted about the link between polygamy and upheaval in the Economist https://www.economist.com/news/christmas-specials/21732695-plural-marriage-bred-inequality-begets-violence-link-between-polygamy-and-war https://www.economist.com/news/christmas-specials/21732695-p... . Whilst its not evidence, it certainly makes the case.
    • aphextron 9y ago
      A lot of what we think of as “marriage” comes from the entirety of human history where women were bought and sold as bargaining chips in their male family member’s lives. They were used to ensure inheritance, line of succession, and to cement business relationships. Not until just the past couple centuries in western society has there even been a concept of marrying for romantic love.
      • grrmx1 9y ago
        Behavior you describe is traditionally attributed to the upper classes of pre-modern nobility. At least that's how popular imagination paints it (see Game of Thrones). I am not so sure this was modus operandi for commoners when it came to marriage. Caste-bound poor village dwellers, with few prospects and no family wealth to maintain, I imagine married for love more often than not.
        • watwut 9y ago
          Poor village workers had to work physically and strength mattered a lot. Also, you paid taxes per household making it very hard for single women to make it. E.g. girl has to marry cause living without man is super hard. You dated two weeks at 15 and then announced marriage and then it was for live.
• tajen 9y ago
  No, it’s rather devastating for female sanity. It gives them the illusion of choice, and many women build false expectations, feeling that they could settle with any of those Don Juans, which is false. When they hit the wall at 30, they start noticing that the top 10% men keep dating the younger ones, and they’ll never be able to settle with a Perfect Man anymore. Enters depression and weight gain and they settle with a second-class, a man that is not beautiful but at least is willing to do anything possible to provide to her, give her children and make her happy. But they internally despise the fact that he’ll never match the men of her 20ies. Among the 55% not divorcing, a lot (30% depending on the calculation) of couples don’t have sex and/or beat each other. Perhaps 10% comes to peace with loving the husband they actually matched with. Tinder and the illusion of choice during the 20ies is devastating to female mental health, and to family balance. Plus men who marry will get the girl at 30 and will never have known her during her prime beauty.
  • Xuper 9y ago
    Hey, calm down! Only one piece of truth per day is allowed!
  • orcdork 9y ago
    What a bunch of redpill bullshit.
    • csa 9y ago
      While I disagree with a lot of the specifics of what tajen said, I can definitely say that I have a lot of female friends and acquaintances who conflate “men they can casually date due to dating apps” with “men they have a chance of marrying”. They always wonder why they seem to get ghosted or why their dream guy ends up “cheating” on them. It’s not really a mystery from my point of view.
      • magic_beans 9y ago
        Birds of a feather...
      • 9y ago
• cm2187 9y ago
  Particularly given that in the current environment any form of flirting can be treated as sexual harassment and have dire consequences for the party taking the initiative.
  • nkrisc 9y ago
    If you think that flirting can be mistaken as sexual harassment then that tells me you have no idea how to flirt.
    • nojvek 9y ago
      Any sort of flirting in a workplace can backfire on your face. Just takes one person to take it the wrong way and you’re shown the door. That’s why there is a famous saying “Don’t shit where you eat”. Workplace relationships seldom end well.
      • _jal 9y ago
        Well, yeah, context is a thing. Flirting in criminal court and at funerals are also probably bad ideas.
      • nkrisc 9y ago
        Well, yes, you're right. Knowing when it's ok to flirt is part of knowing how to flirt. I'm not sure what your point is beyond the obvious: people go to work to get paid, not to find dates. Flirt elsewhere.
    • StellarTabi 9y ago
      It is harassment when 30 random guys are constantly piling on unwanted flirt after unwanted flirt.
      • freeflight 9y ago
        It's not like these 30 random guys have organized themselves to make their approaches as harassing as possible. These 30 don't and can't know if you've been approached before or how often. Intent matters a whole lot and their intent is not to harass you but rather to reach out and probe for your potential interest. Accusing people of harassment, for simply trying to approach you, is imho a seriously crappy thing to do and very unreasonable.
• pizza234 9y ago
  > What I’ve long wondered is how women react in the real world now that they have all the power on dating apps Women always had that specific kind of power in real world. When/if you go to a party, observe the people who are alone, standing against a wall; they're invariably men, without absolutely no exception. This says everything about power. Having said that, bear in mind that this kind of power is only a (arguably small) part of relationships between the sexes. It says a lot, but it's still a (small) part. > Why would they try to find a date in any other way? Because the dating medium strongly correlates with the interest of the people involved. Not everybody's looking for the Tinder type of relationship. "Before Tinder", one would just go to a nightclub. It's exactly the same experience; and for the same reason, not everybody goes to nightclubs.
  • dhimes 9y ago
    It took me half a lifetime to realize this, but you are correct. It's the man's job to try, and it's the woman's job to choose. It's honestly changed the way I think about relationships.
    • CiPHPerCoder 9y ago
      > It's the man's job to try, and it's the woman's job to choose. Is that a descriptive or prescriptive statement? Or put another way: Are you observing and remarking on cultural norms, or stating "This is how things should be?" I only ask because when someone says "It's X's job to [whatever]" the connotation is "X should [whatever]" but the context surrounding this made it ambiguous.
      • maroonblazer 9y ago
        Not the parent but it's definitely descriptive. Should it be that way? The answer likely depends on whether you're a man or a woman. From the male's POV changing the game benefits us since there's less work to do. If you're a woman then it's the opposite and a net negative. This sexual dynamic evolved for a reason, so changing it seems like the epitome of an uphill battle.
• l1ska 9y ago
  Perhaps experience for finding dates through dating apps is similar to finding dates in night clubs. I wonder , if percieved level of anonymity (chances are you will not run into that person in your daily life) and appearance of abundance (if this person is not ideal, we are quick to move on), makes one less accountable (hence prominence of ghosting). Apps give perception that you get to know the person before going on a date, setting it apart from meeting a random person in a nightclub and appealing to women. But the flip side is that those dates don't carry the same level of obligation to another human being as meeting a date though friends/school/work would have, hence carry potential for highly unpleasant experience for women. So, perhaps it's not about elite group of men, but about level of risk taking that makes women uncomfortable.
• logfromblammo 9y ago
  I recall seeing in the movie A Beautiful Mind a scene where a group of colluding men improved their dating outcomes by instituting and honoring one rule: "nobody goes for the best one". Nash demonstrated his game theory concept, and it worked the exposition into the screenplay without going too deeply into the math. So females should probably collude to enforce dating-monogamy, to encourage males to clearly commit or reject. Polygamy works only when females judge 1/Nth of the attention of the best males to be worth more than 100% of a lesser male. Polyandry doesn't work well, because the males have negative incentive to participate--why compete over one woman when those men could just compete on the same terms for all women? I can envision a system wherein all the women establish a ranking of their top prospects, and an algorithm deconflicts their preferences, such that only one woman can contact a given man through the system at one time, until one or the other publicly repudiates the match. If a woman expresses her preference for only alphas, she may be in a situation where she cannot contact any of them, because they're all "busy" at the time. If she tags a bunch of betas--or even omegas--she might be able to date several of them concurrently. It forces the males to judge based on "good enough for me, or not" rather than "better or worse than potential alternatives". The women would always be dating "the best available that does not compete with the other women". It's just not realistic to implement a symmetric experience on dating apps.
  • pps43 9y ago
    The system you envision is Gale–Shapley algorithm for solving the stable marriage problem, but with roles reversed.
    • boojing 9y ago
      A modified version of the algorithm is used in the US for matching graduating medical students with hospital positions. It's interesting topic ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Match_Day_(medicine) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Match_Day_(medicine) )
    • logfromblammo 9y ago
      Almost, but not quite. For one, the male class is not given any opportunity to rank females, as it is presumed that most males would attempt to game their own preference rankings to maximize their chances at getting a match. Secondly, the classes are not closed, and additional members may be added or removed at any time, when some matches may already be dating. To be sure, whomever it is that figures out the fair dating algorithm would have to cite Gale-Shapley as a starting point.
• tim333 9y ago
  >a few articles Tinder and the Dawn of the “Dating Apocalypse” https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2015/08/tinder-hook-up-culture-end-of-dating https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2015/08/tinder-hook-up-cu... I think is noted literature in that field