I worked for $large_dating_site for a number of years. The real genius of Tinder was giving women the power. We came to the same realization as well: that no matter how bad you make the user experience for men, they will use the app endlessly if real women are there. Online dating business models are exclusively based around enticing men with sex, and giving women the power to choose precisely who they want.
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?
There were a few articles that came out a few years ago arguing that, no, dating apps were terrible for women because it makes men even more noncommittal with such easy access to dates. My hypothesis was that the women they interviewed for those pieces were all going after the same small group of elite men. Thus, ~3% of the whole male population is sleeping around with ~20% of the female population. Makes me wonder if polygamy is the natural course of things.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
I don't have a horse in that race, but I do have an ethical concern.
If you tell men that they're supposed to try, then it's likely that a lack of success will be met with trying harder.
What does this result in, practically speaking? Being more forward? Being more touchy? Being more in their face putting in the effort?
a.k.a. creepy, stalkerish behavior and possibly an increase in the incidence of sexual assault and/or harassment.
That's the concern I have with the "should" position.
That's an interesting definition of "trying harder". I think the person employing that strategy would quickly find that it doesn't work as well as some other ways of trying harder. Those could include:
Inhabiting different environments. E.g. a female friend suggested I take up yoga as yoga classes tend to be more/mostly female. Within a few classes I was dating a woman I met there.
"Putting it out there" by which I mean proactively telling friends that you're interested in meeting women. This was suggested to me and my first reaction was "That's silly. Everyone knows I'm single and looking..." but in fact most people - even your friends - aren't prioritizing your dating life. If you mention it to them it sometimes can trigger a "Hey, that reminds me, I know someone who's also single...you two might be a good match."
Increasing your velocity. At the end of the day meeting someone you want to date is a numbers game. The more women you meet the more likely you are to find a match. "Trying harder" can simply be making more attempts to meet more women.
> I think the person employing that strategy would quickly find that it doesn't work as well as some other ways of trying harder.
You'd think, but in practice, not always. Aren't humans amazing?
I think if we're being prescriptive, I think working towards a culture where all parties involved do both choosing and trying. Put forth the effort to get to know people, then choose who you want to be romantically/sexually involved with among the people for whom there is even a remote mutual desire.
That results in what is basically the dating schema for the last century. Men put forth the effort, and women choose the winners. If a man does not try, he does not find anything. If a woman does not try, she just gets poor suitors.
You could also argue it's a small contribution ( don't want to give it too much credit) to the creation of `incel` which now has driven multiple frustrated young men to commit mass murders.
The one making the choice is more likely to end up with preferred partner. The one accepting/rejecting existing proposal has less chance to end up with most preferred partner.
I compared advantages of active vs passive person in that model - that holds true regardless of which gender is on which side.
I think there are three different datings - the one when you look for partner, the one where you seek temporary fun and then the one when you seek brag points/social status through trophy partner you don't really care about. These discussions tend to confuse them.
> It's the man's job to try, and it's the woman's job to choose.
IMO this is very close, but missing an important point. It's a man's job to escalate, it's a woman's job to choose.
Women definitely try. They put a lot of effort into how they are perceived (looks, mannerisms, etc.) and giving us subtextual clues that they are interested.
All we have to do is be a little vulnerable and ask them out on a date, go for that first kiss, get down on one knee and so on.
i skimmed the article and did not find anything stating that females frequently and actively compete for males. there are a lot of other counterexamples to anthropomorphic behavior there [that has been assigned to sexes] but not the specific one we're discussing here. i think the generalization at hand is on pretty solid footing.
it's really the same for all generalizations. i can make the statement, "males are attracted to females" and it will be true in 95%+ of cases. just because some limited counterexamples exist does not make this generalization a poor representation - these are not laws of physics or mathematical axioms that need absolute conformance to be usefully true.
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.
>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.
Yes, many anthropologists have theorized the same idea. William Tucker (journalist) wrote a whole book about marriage being a social mechanism to reduce violence:
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.
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.
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.
And that somehow precludes marrying for love?.. You are a village girl, you've been around the village, you know all the boys you age. You marry the one you like. Love.
I am not denying that pre-arranged marriages are a thing, and that they played a more prominent role in the past, but to say that genuine love played no part in the match making process until 200 years ago, like the OP suggested, is an exaggeration.
Love is a part of human evolutionary toolbox, it's been around for a while. Accordingly, the subject of love, and marrying for love, comes up in literary works since the start of recorded history.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It doesn't work like that. Every assumption from a reasonable person that hasn't had cynicism seared into them through experience would make the same conclusion about the world as you do, but, well, here's a reddit comment that explains it better than I ever could:
> Men, most men, arent afraid that they dont know how to treat women with respect. Which every single comment to the article suggests men dont...every fucking one. [...]
> What men are worried about is how can they interact with women and KNOW that there is no way they are going to have to defend against a sexual harassment accusation and lose their careers. Thats the question men want answers to and thats why suddenly even crack-pot [Vice President] Pence makes some fucking sense.
> Which is what the NYT couldnt bring itself to say. Because even if it did, it knows theres no answer.
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.
So that's it? 30 people "interest probe" a woman at work, in the street, at the grocery store, etc. and as long as they didn't intend to be one part of the endless steam of harassment, the harassment doesn't exist?
That situation isn't actual harassment, at least not in the legal definition of the term as long as you are talking about an out of work context and these guys just approached you once.
Is being approached by a beggar harassment? Is it these individual guys fault that many little annoyances add up to be a big headache/borderline harassment? It's not like clairvoyance is an actual thing, so what are you actually blaming them individually for? And what could they, individually, ever do to prevent that situation?
The expectation you are having here is that all males should instead always be passive and never approach a female of interest because she might or might not have been approached before and thus feel harassed. Doing this "equal" would mean females should also never approach males, where would that leave us?
Tbh there is no easy solution to this because there are issues for both sides: Females getting dogpiled and males usually getting nowhere without taking opportunities leading to said dogpiling.
On a more practical note: There are subtle ways to prevent at least some approaches from happening and deflecting them somewhat effectively. Like wearing visible headphones when in public, instantly, but politely, declining the approach with body language by keeping a steady pace of urgency and slightly shaking the head.
With time this is bound to get better, at least if eroding of societal role expectations happens equally for all genders and females actively approaching males becomes something that isn't considered "out of the ordinary" due to its sheer rarity of happening. Imho that's something that very likely will require a multigenerational effort.
While divorce rates may be around 55% and if, for the sake of argument, the total percentage of unhappy marriages is 30% (although combining lack of sex with domestic abuse is a strange categorisation to me) don't you think a lot of those unhappy marriages end in divorce? The remaining "happy" couples is probably higher than 10%.
On top of that I think you're using some very vague statistics and a stated concern for women's mental health to justify a misanthropic and potentially misogynistic world-view. It's not a very healthy mental position to take, for yourself, to believe that the majority of women or society at large is set against your own happiness.
There is actually an insane correlation between abuse and sex.
Draw what inferences you will from this, but women in abusive relationships overwhelmingly report having fantastic sex lives.
If true, it seems like the research backing this up wouldn't be shouted from the rooftops because it makes people uncomfortable, but I'm unable to find anything backing up your fairly wild claim.
One could probably cite the immense popularity of Fifty shades of gray. It's supposed to be "BDSM themed", but actually, it's just a story about an abusive relationship build on "great sex" [0].
Most people familiar with BDSM practices/norms hate those books/movies with a passion due to how they misrepresent BDSM like it's just an abusive relationship.
The article also quotes a 2000 paper about consent by legal scholar Robin West [1], imho it's relevant to the discussion at hand as it argues that even violent and abusive marriages are often traceable back to acts of consent by the woman.
As I mentioned to above poster. Here is a source from "The Science of Trust" by Dr. John M. Gottman, foremost expert on this subject.
"As we interview these abused women, Neil and I were astounded by one consistent story about half of these women told us. They said that the best sex they had ever had in their lives occurred right after a violent beating they took from their husbands. The very thought of having sex with someone who had just hit you was totally out of the realm of our experience. Is that the combined result of dopamine and oxytocin."
There is more but really I'm at a -4 for making this post, so trying to teach people uncomfortable truths is not well-rewarded around here.
Maybe you're being downvoted because you're spouting unsourced nonsense with a wink-wink as to why it might be true, instead of "teaching truths"?
A line in a book about interviews of abused women doesn't really equal actual research sufficient to back up your wild claim here. Further, you stated that women in abusive relationships "overwhelmingly report have fantastic sex lives", but you've posted a line from a book stating that roughly half (of some) abused women said their best sexual encounters had occurred immediately after physical abuse.
That's a world of difference, and it really draws into sharp relief the underlying point you were trying to make (your clever "draw what you will from this, but..." notwithstanding) and how far from the truth it actually lies.
Yes. It would. Here's one from "The Science of Trust" by Dr. John M. Gottman, foremost expert on this subject.
"As we interview these abused women, Neil and I were astounded by one consistent story about half of these women told us. They said that the best sex they had ever had in their lives occurred right after a violent beating they took from their husbands. The very thought of having sex with someone who had just hit you was totally out of the realm of our experience. Is that the combined result of dopamine and oxytocin."
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.
"The illusion of choice." Would women be better off if we could somehow free them from those false expectations, even if it meant losing their freedom to experiment?
“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.”
Why flag? Why not respond.
I think women learn pretty quickly that these “Don Juan” types will not settle with them. They learn this when they attempt to settle with these “Don Juan” types, who readily cast aside any disillusionment about them settling.
I don’t mind that they experiment, but not building wrong expectations is important. Without this illusion of choice, they might be more satisfied with an average guy.
They might settle younger, spend time building the relationship with a man who’ll enjoy paying for her studies and who will remember her beauty for the rest of his life; and both will rise in their career by receiving more affection in their 20ies. Then at 30 have kids, without the impression of having lost her youth like when you have the illusion of choice, and without the impression of getting second-hand goods with a lot of baggage (fat on one side, kids pension on the other).
Can we remove the illusion of choice without removing freedom? That’s the problem with traditionalists. But I’m convinced we should at least try to convey the message, so little girls know where not to fall, or explain that the Charming Prince doesn’t exist. But we’re far, far from having a discussion like this is the current education.
And somehow the bachelor carousel is more attractive. Humans. (I’m joking, I know both genders are desperate in such situations, one of the big problems being the illusion of choice).
Except people's expectations and standards are shaped by what they are surrounded by; what's available. Now that you're exposed to way more profiles, that all feel available, standards naturally rise.
okcupid published some nice research into this, iirc women consider ~80% males to be "below average". So female standards are seriously skewed towards a small number of super-alphas, who, given a totally free market, would get all the dates
Yeah, but what about the flip side? Not all women are desirable to men: fat, unattractive, already have kids, etc. There's a lot of women who just never get a date, because their photos aren't very attractive and men want pretty women (I'm a man and I'll admit this readily: if a woman is a little overweight that's an automatic disqualifier for me).
Basically, men rate women more along a bell curve, but mostly message the upper end of attractiveness, whereas women rate most men as ugly and then reply anyway.
It's nice that you can afford to be picky, but Okcupid talked about this as well, iirc _any_ woman short of actual physical deformity will get plenty of suitors. Compare this to about 50% of men who will not get any at all. In pre-historic times, only 40% of males procreated (again, iirc)
> they will use the app endlessly if real women are there
Do they actually? I've spoken to many men and those apps don't seem to work at all. Usually gets deleted after a few days of usage. Like what's the point of being there if absolutely noone wants to write?
It's no wonder Tinder is up there on the Play Store as the second highest grossing app alongside all the online gambling apps. That's because Tinder and all the online dating platforms are exactly designed to mimic gambling.
I created several tinder profiles of men of different ethnicities. As a white person, tinder does wonders. As a brown person, you’re the least desirable.
I used tinder in college and it worked pretty well for me (male). I would swipe right 100%, and get 3-10 matches per day. Out of all of the matches, maybe 5% would message me. That would be the first time i even looked at the profile, and would decide to go for it or not. Out of that 5% i might actually go on a date with 1% of that group. It wasnt great, but wasnt terrible either.
I think it was 6 during my undergrad, 2 of which ended up in relationships, one of which lasted for 2 years. If i was just looking for a hookup it would have been more, but those % were based off people i thought i would honestly be compatable with. I blew off a lot of people looking for hookups
Hmm. Tinder and Bumble both absolutely work. I'm kinda old, but I've used them and two of my best friends have used them, and we've all had pretty great success achieving our goals through the apps. I would definitely say that these apps work well.
You're part of the problem you know. By judging people based on their success or failure in the sexual market, you're helping to build the mentality that causes people to do things like get in a van and drive down the sidewalk for a while.
Hmm. I'm not sure why my comment above is getting downvotes. It seems like a perfectly rational response to the very interesting insider revelation posted by the parent.
To be honest I'd suspected this for a while based on conversations with female friends, and had therefore considered shutting down the relevant accounts. Now I've had it confirmed, it's simply provided the push I needed: why continue to do something that's mostly an unsatisfying waste of time when I could spend that time on something more interesting instead?
And, whilst I realise you were being sarcastic, what's to mourn for anyone? Certainly nothing for me.
response ot your note: mostly because the traditional HN culture values comments with content in them, rahter than joke filler comments. Your second comment appears to fit in much better!
tinder isn't giving women the power, since the user experience is identical for both genders. what gives women the power is the dynamics of the dating market.
