> That 5% is static - individual guys can improve their chances of being in the 5%, but that pushes out others already in the 5%.
Why makes you think that? It seems much more likely to me that women are selecting whatever profiles that interest them, which would be >5% if potential matches made better profiles. I've seen the women experience of dating apps from women friends, and indeed men profile quality is abysmal (my bisexual and lesbian friends seem to swipe on a much higher proportion of women profiles FWIW), to the point that 5% even seems pretty high once you also take into account personal preferences.
I mean there is lot of research behind this. I read a book also by a guy who was founder of eHarmony or some similar portal, and this 5% statistic match real data from their site. Individual success stories are not replacement for hard statistical facts.
That isn't a rebuttal to the point made. You haven't differentiated between a fixed 5% on the part of women versus a fixed 5% on the part of how men present themselves. Both mechanisms can explain the observed outcome.
> individual guys can improve their chances of being in the 5%, but that pushes out others already in the 5%.
When everyone invests equally in getting to the top 5%, because of how competitive it is, then it results in people maintaining their same spots as before on the leaderboard.
Also you can't improve things like height which is one of the most important things women care about.
>there's very little you can do to make them look at the top 50% of men
Historically it's been solved using religion and families enforcing monogamy in society, like in the past 2000 years of human history, to ensure most men and women get to find a pair to make a family and giving them a relatively equal opportunity/stake in the future of society as an incentive to help maintain and defend it.
Without these traditional enforcement mechanisms, I guess we can explain them the math that if they wish to find happiness and not die alone surrounded by cats, then they can't all share the same top 5% of men, and so will need to settle for a realistic man in the same league as them, instead of waiting for gigachad because their biological hypergamy instincts tells them to.
> I guess we can explain them the math that if they wish to find happiness and not die alone surrounded by cats
Let me tell you, women are waiting with bated breath to hear you explain this to them.
Last I checked, most western societies don’t allow polygamy and most people still prefer monogamy. You don’t have to explain anything to anyone, women get it. They are just happier living by themselves than surrounded by dudes who make condescending remarks about them dying surrounded by cats. I guess maybe we can explain that to men.
>Let me tell you, women are waiting with bated breath to hear you explain this to them.
Are you saying women can't understand the basic arithmetic of demographics relationship pairing, on their own? That they don't understand they can't all realistically settle down with the top % of men, if they don't want to end up alone?
> They are just happier living by themselves
Says who? Polls and studies show a massive drop in womens' happiness since the 70s, along with a massive increase in use of alcohol, antidepressants and SSRIs, especially amongst childless women over the age of 40 in the present, because as it it turns out, human evolutionary biology engineered womens' bodies and brains to desire to have kids for a good reason(procreation of the species), and years/decades of feminist anti-natalist propaganda takes its biological toll on the mind eventually, no matter how hard the cope is that they're "happy alone". Is that what womens' "happiness alone" looks like to you, popping pills and getting drunk?
If you don't believe me then just Google it, ChatGPT it, Gemini it, etc. and see for yourself.
You can tell yourself and others whatever you want and what makes you feel better about yourself, but in the end, biology always wins, as it has for the past two thousand years of human existence and for the next two thousand years in the future, as people who are "happy alone" get selected out of the gene pool. Reproductive biology is the undefeated champion over everything else humans created.
> Are you saying women can't understand the basic arithmetic of demographics relationship pairing, on their own? That they don't understand they can't all realistically settle down with the top % of men, if they don't want to end up alone?
No, that’s what you were saying and I was responding to that. I’m genuinely baffled at this response. Did you lose context? Do you really think I am saying that? Are you unfamiliar with sarcasm, or do you assume everyone being sarcastic always labels it with /s? Genuine question because I thought my meaning was pretty clear.
Similarly with the other point you quoted (out of context). Yes, women are happier living by themselves than with men who feel only contempt for women. The worst thing in life is not to end up alone, it’s not ending up selected out of the gene pool, the worst thing in life is to end up chained to a bad partner.
By the way I did chatGPT your claims and, unsurprisingly, they range in accuracy and substantiation. The claim about childless women over 40 being particularly unhappy is especially badly substantiated (particularly since it mixes those who are willingly childless with those who wanted children but couldn’t have them). In fact, older men who are childless seem to be unhappier than older women who are childless.
It’s interesting to see the narrative in men’s spaces about how dumb women are and how they’re going to end up dying alone surrounded by cats and how the men pushing this narrative don’t realize how supremely unattractive this makes them to women.
I don’t know if you’re capable of actually hearing this, but I will repeat it for you again. Talking about women like they’re idiots and expressing this kind of contempt towards them makes you supremely unattractive to women. And yes, they absolutely can tell that this is what you think, no matter how well you think you hide it in person. I hope that, if not today, then maybe a year from now or five years from now, you will sit with yourself and really consider that idea.
I don't have trauma. I have two eyes, a pair of ears and a brain.
I was raised as a classical cis male. I have spent most of my time in male-exclusive or male-majority circles.
I have yet to find a male with even a sliver of moral or ethical behavior. Behind closed doors, in a male-only environment, you discover the truth about males. There is not a single salvageable male.
"Aren't you a male, too?" Do you think I haven't tried to kill myself? It's surprisingly difficult. Besides, I'm trying to get as far away from masculinity as physically possible.
> When everyone invests equally in getting to the top 5%, because of how competitive it is
Yes, but everyone isn't doing that. You'd think men would, but I suggest you ask around some women on their experience of the quality of mens dating dating profiles.
The fault is in the assumption that "That 5% is static". There's zero proof behind that assertion.
If every man groomed himself and presented just "good" portraits and captures in his dating profile pics, that 5% would probably improve.
I'm a hetero man, but I've formed a fake female profile just to investigate. Wow... my competition is 95% disappointing. My non-existent labia recoiled in dismay. "May or may not be an axe murderer." "Thinks sports fanwear is dressing to impress." "I just killed this animal! Date me!" "Dude, do you realize you are grimacing?"
>You can punch far above your metaphorical weight very easily because most guys hardly tries.
Like? I haven't tried online dating in a long time, but all guys I knew had normal profiles and rarely got any matches let alone dates.
>most guys hardly tries
That's irrelevant. Women on dating apps are still only going to interact with the top guys that are above their league, let's say a 9/10. Whether there's more who don't even try, doesn't help you at all. Like if you now try and you go from a 4/10 to a 6/10, you're still below the 9/10 throeshold the top guys have set the bar at. Women don';t choose on statistical distribution, thinking that there's only a handful of guys at the top so they'll have to lower the bar to find a mate, meaning you'll have a chance by going to a 6/10.
> Like? I haven't tried online dating in a long time, but all guys I knew had normal profiles and rarely got any matches let alone dates.
"Normal profiles" for men typically means hardly trying. It means poorly lit pictures. It means bad angles. Often it means things that instantly puts most of the women off, like shirtless pics [1], and poorly written profiles.
I've never had any problems getting matches and dates, but I did have to work for it. That meant ensuring I had good quality pictures, and ensuring my profile matched what women on the given site that I might want to date said the were looking for.
I went from rarely if every getting matches and dates to getting a steady stream of them not by magically getting better looking, but by improving my profile.
Just fixing the writing multiplied the number of dates I got by a decent factor.
> That's irrelevant. Women on dating apps are still only going to interact with the top guys that are above their league, let's say a 9/10. Whether there's more who don't even try, doesn't help you at all.
The point is that those "9/10"'s also mostly don't try (I'd argue most 9/10's aren't on the dating sites, so really you're competing against "dating site 9/10's" who are mostly going to be relatively regular guys who know how to pick a good photo)
[1] Shirtless pics works if you're built - it worked for me after I'd spent 10 years in the gym powerlifting, it did nothing before that - and are posting on a hookup focused site like Tinder, and have a profile written to focus on giving off that vibe. It does not work well on a more "serious" dating site even if you're seriously muscular. But still if you look at the guys profiles, you'll still see a steady stream of them. Most men going on dating sites really ought to take a look at the competition, and then do pretty much the opposite of what most guys are doing.
>"Normal profiles" for men typically means hardly trying. It means poorly lit pictures. It means bad angles. Often it means things that instantly puts most of the women off, like shirtless pics [1], and poorly written profiles.
No, they had good pics. What then? When can we just admit short stature, ugly face, small, jawline, etc. are just not attractive to women on dating apps, and lighting conditions, angles and all that and everything is just cope.
My experience from looking at how men presents themselves to gauge "the competition" back when I was single was that most guys have absolute garbage photos on dating profiles.
> When can we just admit short stature, ugly face, small, jawline, etc. are just not attractive to women on dating apps, and lighting conditions, angles and all that and everything is just cope.
You're never going to make the bottom 5% look like the top 5%, but you can certainly move yourself very significantly up. To take your examples, if you're short don't post pictures of yourself next to things that highlight how short you are. If your face is ugly, don't highlight it, and so on.
What is cope is to dismiss that your failure to get responses can't at least to a very significant degree be mitigated by presenting yourself better.
It's how guys decide to keep posting the utter shit pictures most men put on their dating profiles.
Seriously: Ask women to help you pick photos or for advice on how to do better. Worst case, hire a female photographer.
Wow, must be a US bubble. I've never heard of this in Germany, and I'd say iPhone vs Android seems to be more of a gender thing over here (although plenty of counterexamples as well).
I went on a date with a woman in Romania. During the date she commented that my phone wasn't an iPhone but that I had a fancy Sony mirrorless camera (as I was a tourist) so that made up for it.
That 5% is static - individual guys can improve their chances of being in the 5%, but that pushes out others already in the 5%.
IOW, if women are only looking at the top 5% of men, there's very little you can do to make them look at the top 50% of men.