Over on the Men’s Rights Subreddit, PacmanWasALangolier is taking concern trolling to a whole new level. Apparently, according to some unspecified research, the women of today have gotten picky — tragically picky — about the men they date.
It turns out that a lot of women aren’t interested in dating just any dude out there! They cruelly, selfishly, wantonly insist on choosing whom they date and whom they don’t.
The horror!
Mr. Pacman is concerned, “honestly concerned,” for this can only end in disaster, not just for men but for those poor misguided women themselves. And possibly civilization itself.
To drop the sarcasm for a moment, let’s look at his “evidence.” First, that bit about how, historically, only 40% of men have passed on their genes. This figure comes from a paper by psychologist Roy Baumeister that’s a favorite amongst the Men’s Rights crowd, and the claim seems to be true — at least if you’re talking about the whole span of human existence.
Does this prove that women have always looked down their noses at the majority of men, refusing to have sex with decent average Joes in favor of riding that old “alpha asshole cock carousel,” as manosphere assholes so delightfully put it?
Well, not exactly. It merely suggests that in the past, more powerful men had sex with more women than the poor and subjugated, and thus were far more likely to pass on their genes. (Or at least that, however many partners they had, their babies were more likely to survive to produce babies of their own.) The figure tells us very little about the actual preferences of women, because many times the choice about who had sex with whom was made by men. Powerful men collected women into harems; male soldiers routinely raped women on the defeated side; in patriarchal cultures, fathers decided whom their daughters would marry. And so on.
Mr Pacman might also be referring to an interesting post on the OKCupid blog that revealed some interesting data on how the dating site’s (straight and bi) men and women rated the attractiveness of members of the opposite sex. But (if that is indeed what he’s referring to) he’s leaving out half of the equation, and thus totally missing the point.
Yes, it’s true that women on the site rated roughly 80% of the men on the site as “below average,” while men were much more “charitable” in their choices, with “a woman … as likely to be considered extremely ugly as extremely beautiful, [while] the majority of women have been rated about “medium.”
But Mr. Pacman has left out the most interesting part of the findings. Even though men on the site were charitable in how they rated women, with their assessments of female attractiveness falling roughly along a normal bell curve, they were more selective — much more selective — in whom they contacted. As the OKCupid blogger, Christian Rudder, puts it, “when it comes down to actually choosing targets, men choose the modelesque.” Women at the top of the bell curve in terms of attractiveness (at least as rated by site members) get
nearly 5 times as many messages as a typical woman and 28 times as many messages as a woman at the low end of our curve. Site-wide, two-thirds of male messages go to the best-looking third of women. So basically, guys are fighting each other 2-for-1 for the absolute best-rated females, while plenty of potentially charming, even cute, girls go unwritten.
For women, the results are strikingly different. While they tended to be pretty selective when it came to rating men on their looks, in practice they were far more open to dating men they considered average or below average in looks. As Rudder notes,
women rate an incredible 80% of guys as worse-looking than medium. Very harsh. On the other hand, when it comes to actual messaging, women shift their expectations only just slightly ahead of the curve, which is a healthier pattern than guys’ pursuing the all-but-unattainable. … [T]he average-looking woman has convinced herself that the vast majority of males aren’t good enough for her, but she then goes right out and messages them anyway.
Of course, the data here might be skewed by another factor that the blogger doesn’t address: on OKCupid, when someone rates someone else highly, and that someone else has also rated them highly, the site sends out a message informing both of them of a possible match. Women rating particular men as unattractive may not actually think of them as unattractive, but may be simply trying to avoid getting a lot of spammy messages from guys whose profiles they may not have looked at in detail.
So, yeah, once again, the real world is a lot more complicated, and much more interesting, than the world inside the head of the typical MRA.
Oh pox, blockquotes fail!
@dualityheart
Hi. I think I’m you from the past. Do we end up getting into grad school?
I am so happy to have found a stylist who understands that curly hair does not generally benefit from blow drying (product yes, heat styling no). She tells all her curly haired clients to throw away their hairbrushes, it’s awesome. My hair is much better behaved since I adopted a more hands-off approach.
And yet, if these dopes ever met a woman who found pretty much everyone attractive, they’d hate her ass for not finding them exclusively attractive, and label her a slut because her very existence inflamed their insecurities.
Basically I think the idea is that women aren’t supposed to find anyone attractive because that’s too assertive and agent-like. We’re supposed to just sit and wait for the right man to come along and find us attractive, and in the meantime reject all the not-right men, who we know are not-right because they are not the man writing the whiny article about how women are all picky bitches and it’s ruining society.
(Also I’m still waiting for MRAs to admit that there’s something, anything, that women do that isn’t ruining society. Seems like it’s going to be a long wait.)
*YAWNS* I was all over my destroy Western civilization way back in the 1990s, dudes!
I moved on to destroying the Earth.
Then the planets (I’m why Pluto is no longer a planet).
I’m working on the Sun for next year, then, who knows what part of the Galaxy I will destroy.
Also, if women weren’t able to choose who they genuinely wanted to have sex with, wouldn’t any sex we had be kind of rapey? Or make us prostitutes?
ithiliana, I thought Pluto was just too hipster for us:
http://f.asset.soup.io/asset/1736/6559_fde1.jpeg
Not sure these guys would see that as a problem.
Cassandra, true.
And now, Grumpy Cat!
::snorfle::
I’m glad I’m only at the toast stage of lunch and not the tea stage, ‘cos Hipster Pluto would have caused yet another tea-meets-screen incident.
@Jayem Griffin- I don’t know if you are past me because I never really wished to go to grad school when I finished college, mainly because I didn’t have a strong desire to get into high levels of debt without a guaranteed career path, and of course, I graduated the same year the entire job market tanked, which sucked, so I spent some time in Retail Hell (TM).
But good news! I now work in local government and really enjoy my job! Plus I get good benefits, good healthcare, and a fairly secure job backed by a fairly strong union. This allows me to volunteer my time doing things I enjoy, writing blogs, spending time with my family, etc.
RE: Heels-And I don’t have to wear heels and shit at work. Danskos are the closest thing to heels that I wear and I love them because they are so comfy.
RE: Hair-And my personal favorite hairstyle? My hyper detached A-line, which is easy to clean, style with minimal effect and looks stylish as well. I go to the local Great Clips and have had a great experience with them. I shower with my 3 year old on my hip. I need something I can wash with one hand but doesn’t look like shit. Also, it doesn’t kill my monthly budget either. 🙂
RE: body care- I find what works for me and leave out the rest. For me, applying moisturizing cream to my face helps me fight off chapped skin from being out in the cold air all the time, but I don’t do it to be SUPAH SEXAY.
PS: I am in a partnered relationship with someone who I love and desire and hope to spend my life with. I am due with my second and final pregnancy in just under a week. I do not plan on having any further babies. I don’t give a flying fuck what other dudes and their penises and their evo-psych “theory” thinks about me.
Grumpy cat is super-cute cat.
While we’re on the body care stuff… I’m not sure if its the case for many guys but… at least for me, the extremely high level of what society deems minimally acceptable for women is a bit offsetting for me at times. Its as if I’m walking into a corner Chinese restaurant where half the wait staff doesn’t know anything other than Mandarin, and there’s no place matts (so you know its going to be good food), and you see someone in a tux in there. Even if you’d otherwise just want to have a chat about if the special is any good, you’re not going to do it thanks to feeling as if you’d be insulting them by talking to them while you’re in a t-shirt and jeans. While I can’t speak for the other side of it, I’d guess it’d be just as annoying but for different reasons.
It should also be taken into account that many men have no idea how to pick a flattering photo of themselves. A “candid” shot from your cell phone in the bathroom mirror rarely presents your best image.
Many women, on the other hand, have learnt through years of socialisation how to do this.
Photos on dating sites, I’ve found, are a really poor way of assessing others’ attractiveness.
@MorgainePen
That’s very true. Women are taught in a lot of ways to act as if always being watched in ways that men certainly aren’t.
I’ll confess that I mainly just use a picture of me that possibly isn’t that flattering to my arms or skin but does show me with well-behaved moustache and hair, and with a cassowary, because cassowary.
“Well-behaved moustache and hair” – I love the thought of not-well-behaved moustache and hair, lowquacks – I’m having images of Gene Wilder in Young Frankenstein! 😀
@kittehhelp
Well, both my moustache and hair are quite long. On a good day, the look is “swashbuckling”, or “pleasant late-’60s hippie Americana”. On bad days, it’s “seedy Reddit type who works at a service station”. My mo’s waxed in the picture, too, which it isn’t usually, and doesn’t like staying that way.
Waxed! The best! Mr Kitteh waxes his. Just the ends, we’re not talking Kaiser Bill here.
Swashbuckling and hippie are both excellent looks. I’m convinced Mum’s copy of San Francisco by Scott McKenzie (it has his pic on the cover) shaped my male beau-ideal forevermore.
Does Pacman think men aren’t picky? Tell that to all the not-so-pretty girls who never get asked on dates. How does that song go? “I learned the truth at 17 that love was made for beauty queens……”
I’m happy that I work in a job that requires neither high heels nor make up nor suits. 🙂 My first interview out of university, I went for a job in full make-up and then spent a year bloody putting the stuff on every morning. Then I cold-turkeyed on it close to when I quit. I got an extra 10 minutes in the mornings.
Plus, I’m really bad. I forget I have lipstick on, and bite my lip. I tend to rest my cheek on my hand when I’m thinking or listening in a meeting, goodbye foundation and blush.
I get my hair cut around once a year, but I’m growing it long, so it’s normally up in a simple ponytail as I have no idea how to do normal plaits, let alone french plaits etc. Although, a couple of years ago I got dreadlocks for a while, which I got cut out when the maintenance was just getting too annoying.
Oh look, another MRA whining about women won’t fuck him. Keep fighting the good fight for men’s interests or whatever it is you guys do.
You know… I’ve got to wonder, do MRA’s realize the potential impact on the population if their dream were to come true beyond the whole turning women into glorified sex toys? Lets be honest here, how many do you think would use a condom? Or encourage use of the pill? That’s going to mean a lot of babies. A lot. How would they feed them all? We’ve already got a ton of people here, you’d be heading to various Malthusian scenarios I’d think.
@SkyBorn Rocket:
As far as I can tell, they HAVE thought of it. The answer seems to be: “Bitchez better not take my money.” They seem to have absolutely no interest in caring for kids. But, on the other hand, they don’t want women to take their kids away from them, either…
So, so long as they don’t have to pay a dime for the kids, involve themselves in the day-to-day care, but still have end rights/ownership over them, they’re happy!