4 ms·

I mean, the conclusion I saw drawn from the okcupid study was that it’s much more rare comparatively for women to be attracted solely on the basis of appearance

by johnfn 5y ago

I mean, the conclusion I saw drawn from the okcupid study was that it’s much more rare comparatively for women to be attracted solely on the basis of appearance. And it bears out: it’s basically common knowledge that women are attracted to confidence, and confidence is nowhere to be seen on dating apps. And if not confidence, charisma, or how he acts in public, etc. So it makes sense that women wouldn’t find men nearly as attractive as men find women on dating apps, since a large part of what they find attractive about guys is invisible on the apps. I feel the solution here is the same it’s always been. Dating apps benefit some subset of the population. If you’re not in that subset you should probably find another strategy that is more in your favor. It’s funny you say guys can’t become more attractive because, compared to women, we’ve been pitched a softball: it’s a lot easier to become more confident than to improve your appearance, as a woman might need to do! I feel I may be moralizing a little here, but in the end, every guy ends up with exactly one girl, and actually studies show that most people are happy in their marriage, so even is it were strictly true that girls find most guys unattractive, it doesn’t seem to matter in the long run.

honkdaddy 5y ago
I tend to largely agree. I think dating apps are being pitched as a "one size fits all" solution for finding a partner, but I have a handful of close friends, both men and women, who've ditched them entirely as they weren't finding what they were looking for. You're totally right about confidence. I should have been more specific - there are lots and lots of ways for men to improve their _overall_ attractiveness, working on confidence being one of the best. Unfortunately, confidence, humor, sociability, and charm are really hard to translate in dating apps, whereas face shape, stature, and other immutables are front and center. I'm sure we can agree that for the folks frustrated with their luck in OLD, their best bet is to find IRL avenues to meet partners.
- armitron 5y ago
  Confidence only works when there exists a base level of attraction, which is entirely based on looks (face, height, race). A woman that ƒinds a man ugly and is not open to even the possibility of dating him, will not care one bit about confidence or any other soft-attribute.
veganhouseDJ 5y ago
Because women can't tell confidence on a dating app they have a height filter and then it is 99% based on how photogenic the person is. I have been on internet dates for almost 25 years now and I could even tell how interest in me would go down when I gained weight and then interest would come back massively after a diet. Age though has caught up with me that I don't bother with apps much anymore. Just talking to people randomly in person is just so much better. It has really never been easier to show confidence. Just talking does the job now.
faeriechangling 5y ago
>Find another strategy We’re at 39% meeting online up from 2% in 1995. We’re also at 27% meeting through bars/restaurants, similarly superficial. Online is increasingly where the women are. https://www.statista.com/chart/amp/20822/way-of-meeting-partner-heterosexual-us-couples/ https://www.statista.com/chart/amp/20822/way-of-meeting-part... Half of singles aren’t seeking a relationship and singles have gone up over time, especially among men (Half 18-29 are single) https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/08/20/a-profile-of-single-americans/ https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/08/20/a-profi... People have this deep discomfort with the fact that more men are single now. About a quarter of the male population has just given up or just does not care. I’m well into the “don’t care” camp and I’m on meds that reduce libido and a bit of chemical castration is a blessing for me. I don’t believe people care about dating as much or CAN date as much due to economic concerns. I believe that highly desirable men are now more marketable to women through dating apps, who are now serving the women who only ever wanted a fuckboy and then to get on with their lives. Men have less opportunity to market themselves to this smaller fraction of women in ways that don’t involve looks and men have become more superficially obsessed and this is a totally rational reaction. Just offering some generic tip like “be confident” is just out of touch. Men know women like confident men, they aren’t stupid.
- AtlasBarfed 5y ago
  Confidence is a gender-specific codeword. And there are dozens of these codewords which in cis-gender subcultures communicates far more than the members of the other gender subculture can appreciate unless they are fairly perceptive. Confidence in the case of (traditional) women is a strange one. Women are almost universally insecure. Anyone that looks at beauty magazines can see the underlying direct psychological manipulation they represent. Men value women more on absolutes (appearance) than women do, which is why arbitrary measures such as social graph relations like like "that guy has a lot of women that talk about him, so I find him attractive", they use dress and other indirect indicators to guess social status and wealth more than even if you outright tell them positions or wealth numbers. What a woman means by a "confident" man is that dating the man makes THEM feel less insecure and more confident. It represents another indirect emotional measure of a man's status and wealth, likely because the group dynamics we evolved in resulted in insecure men actually not being able to provide/defend/protect mates and offspring. Of course those indicators vary substantially by culture and individual. Of course those individuals don't understand that their personal choices aren't universal (much like men with a distinct type often are mystifying by men being attracted to appearance features they abhor). Men are often perplexed by the confidence vs arrogance angle. I believe this is another fine-tuned evolutionary sense, where arrogance implies lack of faithfulness/devotion to offspring in the long run, and implies that, while they may be able to dominate socially, it is an unstable one. It may also be intuition that they are faking true confidence aka the ability to dominate resources. In the land of the blind...
nfw2 5y ago
Becoming more physically attractive is much simpler, if not easier, than becoming more confident if someone is prone to anxiety. There are at least concrete steps you can take to become more physically attractive, like: - lift weights and run regularly - cut out the carbs - drink less - buy more fashionable clothes - take care of your skin and hair
- Nextgrid 5y ago
  Becoming more physically attractive will surely help with confidence too.
vannevar 5y ago
Yes. It makes sense if you assume a sexual reproduction system where one sex is the prime mover and the other applies filtering. Men need to be attracted at a distance in order to motivate them to approach strangers, hence they are more stimulated by appearance. Women need to be able to discriminate between the men who approach them, so a woman can take into account all of a man's qualities, since he's interacting with her. I think a lot of men make the mistake of assuming that they're either attractive to women or not, when in fact you can make yourself more attractive with some effort. "Be yourself" is not an excuse to do nothing---be your best self, you'll do all right.

by johnfn 5y ago

honkdaddy 5y ago

I tend to largely agree. I think dating apps are being pitched as a "one size fits all" solution for finding a partner, but I have a handful of close friends, both men and women, who've ditched them entirely as they weren't finding what they were looking for. You're totally right about confidence. I should have been more specific - there are lots and lots of ways for men to improve their _overall_ attractiveness, working on confidence being one of the best. Unfortunately, confidence, humor, sociability, and charm are really hard to translate in dating apps, whereas face shape, stature, and other immutables are front and center. I'm sure we can agree that for the folks frustrated with their luck in OLD, their best bet is to find IRL avenues to meet partners.

armitron 5y ago
Confidence only works when there exists a base level of attraction, which is entirely based on looks (face, height, race). A woman that ƒinds a man ugly and is not open to even the possibility of dating him, will not care one bit about confidence or any other soft-attribute.

veganhouseDJ 5y ago

Because women can't tell confidence on a dating app they have a height filter and then it is 99% based on how photogenic the person is. I have been on internet dates for almost 25 years now and I could even tell how interest in me would go down when I gained weight and then interest would come back massively after a diet. Age though has caught up with me that I don't bother with apps much anymore. Just talking to people randomly in person is just so much better. It has really never been easier to show confidence. Just talking does the job now.

faeriechangling 5y ago

>Find another strategy We’re at 39% meeting online up from 2% in 1995. We’re also at 27% meeting through bars/restaurants, similarly superficial. Online is increasingly where the women are. https://www.statista.com/chart/amp/20822/way-of-meeting-partner-heterosexual-us-couples/ https://www.statista.com/chart/amp/20822/way-of-meeting-part... Half of singles aren’t seeking a relationship and singles have gone up over time, especially among men (Half 18-29 are single) https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/08/20/a-profile-of-single-americans/ https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/08/20/a-profi... People have this deep discomfort with the fact that more men are single now. About a quarter of the male population has just given up or just does not care. I’m well into the “don’t care” camp and I’m on meds that reduce libido and a bit of chemical castration is a blessing for me. I don’t believe people care about dating as much or CAN date as much due to economic concerns. I believe that highly desirable men are now more marketable to women through dating apps, who are now serving the women who only ever wanted a fuckboy and then to get on with their lives. Men have less opportunity to market themselves to this smaller fraction of women in ways that don’t involve looks and men have become more superficially obsessed and this is a totally rational reaction. Just offering some generic tip like “be confident” is just out of touch. Men know women like confident men, they aren’t stupid.

AtlasBarfed 5y ago
Confidence is a gender-specific codeword. And there are dozens of these codewords which in cis-gender subcultures communicates far more than the members of the other gender subculture can appreciate unless they are fairly perceptive. Confidence in the case of (traditional) women is a strange one. Women are almost universally insecure. Anyone that looks at beauty magazines can see the underlying direct psychological manipulation they represent. Men value women more on absolutes (appearance) than women do, which is why arbitrary measures such as social graph relations like like "that guy has a lot of women that talk about him, so I find him attractive", they use dress and other indirect indicators to guess social status and wealth more than even if you outright tell them positions or wealth numbers. What a woman means by a "confident" man is that dating the man makes THEM feel less insecure and more confident. It represents another indirect emotional measure of a man's status and wealth, likely because the group dynamics we evolved in resulted in insecure men actually not being able to provide/defend/protect mates and offspring. Of course those indicators vary substantially by culture and individual. Of course those individuals don't understand that their personal choices aren't universal (much like men with a distinct type often are mystifying by men being attracted to appearance features they abhor). Men are often perplexed by the confidence vs arrogance angle. I believe this is another fine-tuned evolutionary sense, where arrogance implies lack of faithfulness/devotion to offspring in the long run, and implies that, while they may be able to dominate socially, it is an unstable one. It may also be intuition that they are faking true confidence aka the ability to dominate resources. In the land of the blind...

nfw2 5y ago

Becoming more physically attractive is much simpler, if not easier, than becoming more confident if someone is prone to anxiety. There are at least concrete steps you can take to become more physically attractive, like: - lift weights and run regularly - cut out the carbs - drink less - buy more fashionable clothes - take care of your skin and hair

Nextgrid 5y ago
Becoming more physically attractive will surely help with confidence too.

vannevar 5y ago

Yes. It makes sense if you assume a sexual reproduction system where one sex is the prime mover and the other applies filtering. Men need to be attracted at a distance in order to motivate them to approach strangers, hence they are more stimulated by appearance. Women need to be able to discriminate between the men who approach them, so a woman can take into account all of a man's qualities, since he's interacting with her. I think a lot of men make the mistake of assuming that they're either attractive to women or not, when in fact you can make yourself more attractive with some effort. "Be yourself" is not an excuse to do nothing---be your best self, you'll do all right.