To be honest I've seen more than one man fall down the onlyfans rabbit hole. There's a lot of lonely men out there that are being taken advantage of and if AI can help them stop getting emotionally swindled then all the more power to AI. Of course, ideally, these men should improve themselves by making more money, growing taller at the gym and getting a new jawline but for some its not an option especially since dating nowadays is more of a competition than a means to understand one another.
Seems a much better approach is to advocate for men exercising their agency and building relationships. I don’t see how dating is more a competition today than it has been historically?
If someone thinks it's a swindle when a woman charges for access to a real person but freedom when a tech company charges for access to a bot, they're really in a competition to see who can avoid giving in to the industry that profits from putting people into that mindset.
It seems unlikely that AI will prevent lonely men from being swindled, and instead that it will simply be AI doing the swindling rather than real women.
We let people buy cigarettes, alcohol, etc. Should we not let them buy this dopamine hit also?
The reality of the situation is that the dating marketplace is wildly dysfunctional now [1] [2] [3], and with women empowered and educated, they don't date down like men do [4] (women want high status, high earning men, men want younger, attractive women who can provide kids, very broadly speaking; there are only so many high status, high earning men). So, you have an entire cohort of men, through no fault of their own, who don't want to compete in a Sisyphean effort to attract a potential partner because the odds are very high they will not meet a potentially unrealistic bar [5] [6]. Shouldn't they at least get some enjoyment out of this existence if they weren't lucky to have been born a few decades earlier?
(TLDR: Macroeconomics and unrealistic expectations are causing a relationship market collapse, let people enjoy what they want vs screaming into the void about that which cannot be changed)
Some may draw the conclusion that women have an easier time dating. They do not. They are competing for what they believe are "more desirable" men. Everyone loses.
AI is dangerous here IMHO because it's going to disconnect people even more from the possibility of having a meaningful connection/relationship with another human.
People no longer like any kind of friction when it comes to interacting with other people.
Indeed, but you have no leverage to tell people to put work in to meaningful relationships vs social media and superficial signaling. There is no solution one individual can solve this with, and there is no leverage at scale to make people be better to each other in this regard. The system will eventually fail, you can only do what you can for yourself and those you love and care about.
People have to want to care and do better, you cannot make them (in this domain). Pick those you invest your time and emotional energy in wisely, that's all you can do.
There are things you can do. Usually given enough time you'll figure out what's going on and you'll adjust your expectations and manage to have mostly good interactions.
But who is adjusting their expectations? The data does not show women are and being willing to partner with men they don't currently believe to be suitable, and men adjusting their expectations is staying home, playing video games, and watching porn (which is entirely reasonable on their part, considering the landscape; if you can't win, why play?).
EDIT: @x86x87 We aren't disagreeing. The marketplace trajectory is already locked in due to the crystallization of ideas in this domain by market participants.
Ultimately everyone has to regulate their own expectations.
If you're a woman and it's either prince charming or bust you're going to most likely end up alone. You decide what you want to do.
If you're a man and expect women to jump all over you when you're not taking care of yourself and cannot hold a conversation + don't want to improve to become more sexually attractive you're going to end up alone.
I feel like many people (men) here seem to live in a different planet than me. Women care so much less about wealth and looks than men think. Be a nice person, caring, reasonably fun to take with, ensure basic hygiene and carry your part of emotional and household duties and there are plenty of women out there who would be interested. But that also requires going out and meeting real women at work or in leisure environments they enjoy.
Honestly it is quite staggering how easy many fellow men find it to blame women for all supposed dating unfairness, but most do not even a basic own effort (or do so once and then give up when it doesn't work). Take care of yourself, have some hobbies and dare to talk to new people. And stop blaming others or the system or an amorphous and diverse group like women which make up more than 50% of the population for your own unhappiness.
I would encourage you to set aside your feelings, and instead consume the data and build your model from there. Observe what people do, not what they say ("revealed preference"). What does the data show us?
I believe I have provided robust citations throughout this thread, and am happy to consider any data you might have refuting those citations; your advice blatantly ignores the data. Certainly, from a dating perspective, hygiene, emotional health, and maximizing social opportunities is important. But you will still arrive at poor outcomes if counterparties are not interested in what you offer (which I address verbosely with links in thread). Expectations are cheap to have, and the cost is borne by the party who must jump through hoops to attempt to meet them.
If aggregate female expectations are beyond what a male population cohort can obtain, what do you expect of those men? They can either grind to meet a standard they will never meet, or opt out and seek their own happiness. Is it wrong to believe someone's expectations are unrealistic? I don't believe so, that is an opinion that can be held. I am happily partnered for over two decades, the advice I give to young men is simple: rapidly ascertain if a potential partner is worth your time and energy, and move on the moment you discover they're not. If you don't want a partner, or the effort is not worth the outcome, opt out and live your best life solo. That is all you can do. ~50% of first marriages fail, and the numbers get worse for second (67%) and third (73%) marriages. Most of this is luck anyway.
@toomuchtodo I think we are saying the same thing. Were we differ maybe a bit I read this correctly in how much agency one individual can have and how hard it is to swim against the current.
> I guess that women just aren’t so interested in porn as they are in companionship
Depends how you define porn. For example smut books are very popular among women, I think they are even the primary market for them. It is not that they are not interested in porn, they are just looking for a different type.
Note as well in reports women report using the AI boyfriend for sex as well ("Both Valenciano and Ramos say sex with their AIs is the best they’ve ever had." from https://www.thecut.com/article/ai-artificial-intelligence-ch...). They seem to also use the AI for sexual gratification, but they might not look for the same visual aspect and more as you say the emotional aspect.
> People no longer like any kind of friction when it comes to interacting with other people.
This is the key. We're aiming to make our lives as convenient and frictionless as possible -- and this is monotonically increasing. Technology enables us to essentially be shut-ins, like the hikikomori.
This is a fragmentation/rending of the social fabric on a massive scale, and we're seeing it happen in real time.
the other side of this is that uneducated women cant reliably date up anymore and this is single handedly exacerbating inequality greater than capital consolidation and other socioeconomic factors
although it might currently masquerade as a cultural thing or a factor of the gender identity, men dated down out of necessity, by population alone.
find the study to corroborate that, this is the first generation where the middle on the higher rungs and the upper middle class actually has enough women in it to date and thats whats happening
entire dynasties of women that thought they could offer their presence alone, and finding out they only have choices with socioeconomic equals instead of higher
lower socioeconomic status groups of women are so vocal about their sex work or balking at questions of “what do they bring to the table” because they thought being available sexually and pleasant would open up a different path, but are just entertainment options. they basically have to be louder because they don’t know what’s going on, notably, this groups considers themselves empowered too, at least self identify as such.
I should clarify, the stats are for who is actually getting married by prior socioeconomic class.
And I’m considering everything else to be an entertainment option.
But the dating patterns corroborate the same view. Wealthy men picking younger and attractive women who offer nothing else have a population constriction too. There are far more poorer people than wealthy, its too small of a population for it to buck a trend further compounded by the newfound existence of women who are the first generation in their higher socioeconomic class.
> It was determined that the bottom 80% of men (in terms of attractiveness) are competing for the bottom 22% of women and the top 78% of women are competing for the top 20% of men.
This fails one of my heuristics for valid statistics: things that don’t deserve to be exactly equal are exactly equal.
We're supposed to believe that the women can be partitioned into groups A (bottom 22%) and B (top 78%). (I'll assume that this is well defined for the sake of argument.) And this study showed that the bottom 80% of men are competing for group A and that group B is competing for the top 20% of men? That is, group B is competing for exactly the set of men that, themselves, arent' competing for group A? That's a remarkable claim!
> While an extensive scientific literature now exists on the use of online dating services, there are very few studies on user satisfaction with dating apps and with the resulting offline dates. This study aimed to assess the level of satisfaction with Tinder use (STU) and the level of satisfaction with Tinder offline dates (STOD) in a sample of adult users of the app. The study also aimed to examine, among 28 variables, those that are the most important in predicting STU and STOD. Overall, 1,387 Tinder users completed an online questionnaire. A machine learning model was used to rank order predictors from most to least important. On a 4-point scale, participants' mean STU score was 2.39, and, on a 5-point scale, mean STOD score was 3.05. The results indicate that satisfaction with dating apps and with resulting offline dates is strongly predicted by participants' age and by their motives for using Tinder (enhancement, emotional coping, socialization, finding “true love,” or casual sexual partners), whereas the variables negatively associated with satisfaction were those related to psychopathology. Interestingly, 65.3 percent of app users were married or “in a relationship,” and only 50.3 percent of app users were using it to meet someone offline. Generally, participants who engage with the app to cope with personal difficulties seem more likely to report higher levels of dissatisfaction, suggesting that dating apps are a poor coping mechanism and highlighting the need to address underlying problems or pathologies that may be driving their use.
> Well, the first truth about what people look for in romantic partners, like so many important truths about life, was expressed by a rock star before the scientists figured it out. As Adam Duritz of the Counting Crows told us in his 1993 masterpiece “Mr. Jones”: We are all looking for “something beautiful.” The conventional attractiveness of a mate is the number one predictor of how many messages someone gets, for both men and women. We are also looking for:
> someone tall (if a man),
someone of a desired race (even though most never admit it),
someone rich,
someone in an enforcement profession (like lawyer or firefighter) if a man,
someone with a sexy name (such as Jacob or Emma),
and someone just like ourselves (people are 11.3 percent more likely to match with someone who shares their initials)
Fully agree, this is unscientific nonsense trying to model an incredibly hard to model thing. People seem to just Google papers that support their worldview without even bothering to read them.
I've never used Onlyfans but it seems to me the issue is parasocial relationships can be unhealthy, but I don't see why Onlyfans would be worse than obsessing over a Twitch streamer, talk show host, politician, or twitter obsessed billionaire.
It isn't, there's just a lot people out there who don't like women, don't like women with power, don't like women with power over men, don't like women using their sexuality to get power/money, and really don't like women using their sexuality to get power/money from men. So they invent a lot of reasons that porn is bad and unethical, the latest one is using the phrase "parasocial" to imply that any man who pays a woman online for sexual content is being exploited or manipulated in some way, as if every man has a gambling addict between his legs that cannot be trusted. It's ridiculous and motivated entirely by sexism masquerading as puritanicalism.
I think many men don't even try or they restrict themselves to online dating. There are a lot of women looking for partners, regardless of your jawline.
Especially if you have a high level of education there seem to be a lot more women than men and intelligence equally inhibits many of them to find fitting dates. Sure, if you do online dating, better have a good resumé and some good photos.
The free availability of online pornography has distorted sexual behaviors, with some women feeling pressured to indulge in activities they see on screens to "compete". If AI porn can "learn" and create increasingly tailored experiences, it could be even more damaging / addictive, making it that much harder for men and women to relate. A brave new world indeed.
Porn has not distorted sexual behaviours. If anything it allowed people to experiment and not feel shame for wanting to experiment. Most sexual encounters out there are as vanilla as it gets. If you feel the need to compete with someone that has sex on screen for a living you are going to have a bad time.
Hard disagree. You probably start with the premise that there is a standard, normal behaviour and porn introduced deviations from it. It has not unless we are talking about really extrem, pathological cases.
You’re starting from the premise that if it’s possible, everyone does it. Obviously wrong. You can be influenced, and the influence of porn is extreme / deviant behaviour (to counteract the hedonic treadmill).
You can't require that people accept that you're right as a precondition for arguing with them. If you want to argue that porn perverts sexuality, you can't demand that your opponent acknowledge that their sexuality has been perverted by porn. You wouldn't take that structure seriously in any other context.
An example which I’ve seen raised by researchers: 20 years ago, choking was considered an extreme, pathological case due to the risks. Now it’s very easy to find surveys where women report pressure or even attempts to do it without consent because a generation of men grew up with porn presenting that as standard. The same is true for things like anal sex, etc. which aren’t enjoyable and involve hassle/risk for the female partner but a lot of young men don’t realize that because they’re used to seeing porn actors imitating pleasure and often masking discomfort. I wouldn’t expect anyone to say that there were never extreme porn options on the market but it seems pretty broadly accepted that a lot of previously niche things have become mainstream as vendors are trying to stand out in a very competitive market.
I'm sorry, what? Choking someone without their consent? This is not porn, it's assault.
Anal sex is not enjoyable? It is. And has been a thing for eons. In fact anal sex was a way to workaround getting pregnant before birth control was a thing/was mainstream.
I feel like we have the puritan point of view of what sex should be and anything that is not that is bad/not pleasurable.
So here's where I land: what whatever you want. Do whatever you want in the bedroom as long as it's 2 consenting adults. I don't believe that porn itself is to blame or be demonized for anything.
I also firmly believe that porn may provide an outlet for people to see and experience things that they don't want or cannot experience in real life.
> I'm sorry, what? Choking someone without their consent? This is not porn, it's assault.
Seeing it in porn is what makes some men think it’s mainstream and something that their partner should enjoy, and there are many reports that it’s no longer uncommon for someone to try it unsolicited and then express surprise when his partner complains.
> Anal sex is not enjoyable? It is.
For men, yes, but women don’t have a prostate and report far less enjoyment. That doesn’t mean that it hasn’t been used for birth control (people have been joking about technical virginity for ages) but again there are many reports of women being pressured into it or having men try it without asking because those guys are used to porn stars pretending to find it incredibly pleasurable and, in many cases, not at all discussing how to be safe.
Again, the claim is not that porn is evil for showing uncommon things but the problems around misrepresentation and consent. If sites promote videos showing women pretending to find it highly pleasurable to be slapped or choked, having forceful anal sex, etc. some fraction of the men watching it are going to think that’s representative of real life. Hopefully they will talk with actual partners about what they enjoy, but that’s certainly not a given and there’s a long, ugly history of men resorting to threats or violence when they think they’re owed something.
This is another area where companies’ promotion algorithms raises questions about how much they’re contributing to a trend, too. If their design encourages studios to push boundaries harder to get more interactions, the feedback loop is no longer organic - they’re shaping the market, not just responding to customer demand.
you know, the same kind of discourse used to be applied around videogames. The claim was that they will turn kids into murderers. In reality: video games make you smarter and may even contribute to kids being more social.
It's the perpetual protestant bullshit that has plagued the society in US for hundreds of years now. God forbid we see a breast or are exposed to a dick or mention the possibility of inserting something into an asshole - everything will break down.
There’s a key difference: nobody thinks playing a game is practicing for a real career as a space marine or heroic paladin. There’s a ton of research published about how teenagers and young adults do pick up unrealistic or even harmful ideas from porn because, unlike almost all games, it is depicting a part of life they will actually practice. Worse, various sex negative cultural beliefs mean that there are a ton of people who are not getting countervailing information – you could argue, for example, that teenagers playing GTA encourages bad driving but they will have good examples from their parents & neighbors, classes, etc. explaining how it really works.
Well. Nobody used to believe this. If you subscribe to the idea that porn alters your perception of reality I don't see why you can extend it to: videogames alter your perception of reality.
There may be some feeble-minded people whose sexual expectations may have been distorted by viewing porn, like there may exist some people who believe that something they have seen in a superhero movie has some relationship with reality.
Nevertheless, that cannot be true for most people, who are able to distinguish fact from fantasy.
In my opinion a much more important role in distorting the sexual expectations of young and inexperienced people has been played for some centuries by the conventional representation in literature and starting with the 20th century also in movies of a conventional feeling of "romantic love", which has been a completely fictional creation that does not correspond to any feeling that exists between real humans.
Instead of the fictional "love", between real humans there exist 3 or 4 distinct sentiments, which are independent, so they can exist or not exist separately, even if when they exist simultaneously there exists a positive feedback that reinforces them (e.g. physical attraction, love in the sense of opposite of hate, i.e. as also possible towards friends and family, and trust; even physical attraction is a different sentiment from considering that someone is beautiful or handsome).
When I was very young I was confused by the depiction of "love" in novels and movies, where frequently one discovered the appropriate partner for the rest of their lives by falling in "love" at the first sight, after which they never had any interest for different people. In reality, the only sentiment that is possible at the first sight is physical attraction, while "love" in a stricter sense is possible only after months of shared experiences and trust is possible only after several years, outside of completely exceptional circumstances.
Moreover, none of such sentiments is exclusive towards a single human. There are many valid reasons to choose monogamy, but that is a choice enforced by rational will, not a characteristic of human feelings.
So when I was very young, my expectations about human relations were distorted by these conventional incorrect descriptions of "love" from fiction, so I could not be certain of the nature of my feelings towards others, i.e. whether they were "love" or not. I have also seen many others who have been confused for the same reason, so they were not able to analyze their own feelings and distinguish e.g. between physical attraction and trust, with bad consequences.
On the other hand, viewing porn has never distorted my sexual expectations, because there was no doubt about that being fantasy and not reality.
Therefore I believe that many classic novels or RomCom movies may be more prone to distort sexual expectations than viewing porn movies.
Maybe it was true for millenials. We may have grown up with unlimited unsupervised internet, but we didn't have tube sites and mobile phones to make it available privately at any time. Check out what Billie Ellish (gen-z) had to say about the influence on her generation:
> “I think porn is a disgrace. I used to watch a lot of porn, to be honest. I started watching porn when I was, like, 11,” the “Bad Guy” singer said, saying it helped her feel as if she were cool and “one of the guys.”
> “I think it really destroyed my brain and I feel incredibly devastated that I was exposed to so much porn,” she added, saying she suffered nightmares because some of the content she watched was so violent and abusive...
> “The first few times I, you know, had sex, I was not saying no to things that were not good. It was because I thought that’s what I was supposed to be attracted to,” she said.
This thought has crossed my mind. Different generation may experience things differently and the subjective experience of any individual cannot capture all pros and cons. That being said, I don't think rich people (eg Billie) can actually capture why something is good or not in the context of "normal" people given how disconnected they are - i may be wrong.
Simple. While not all activities depicted in porn are damaging to all people, some activities can be damaging some people. Doesn't have to be black or white. Make sense?
nope. i can find cases where smiling is not beneficial. Eg: Lookup Angelman syndrome and tell me again how smiling is beneficial to parents that have a kid with this disease.
Do you think that the distortions effects are negative or positive overall now? And in the future? I'd argue they are positive now and in the future, so it sounds like this is where your disagreement is coming from (since you said it as if it's overwhelmingly negative now and into the future).
If you want to argue that porn is not materially distorting sexual behavior, you would have far more credibility if you first acknowledge there’s a range of outcomes.
Pornography absolutely reframes expectations and impacts behaviors. To what extent, that is a fair debate.
The range or the spectrum is there and implied for anything in life. The question is: if you take porn free sexual behavior and you overlap watching porn on top of it does the resulting spectrum differ? How do you control the effect porn has on us vs the effect of all the other things we are, as a society, exposed to?
For me porn does not reframe expectations. You still end up fucking and you still end up having to treat the other person as a human being. As long as everyone is having a good time and everything is between consensual adult I'm good.
I think its not right to think of the OF type of person a traditional sex worker. Online sex work used to be the domain of women in failed states, who had no other options for work. But OF and the growing acceptance from the sex positivity crowd has attracted women that leave respectable corporate jobs or school to pursue this line of work. I listened to a lot of them on the Whatever podcast, and it strikes me if OF didn't exist, they would likely be working in HR or communications department in some large organization. They'd probably be getting paid less short term but long term I think it would be a lot better for them in terms of career trajectory, personal satisfaction, finding a partner, etc.
Technology could have brought down labor when it comes to education and health care. Yet these keep growing in price and administrators are added. So maybe in the future we're all just doing admin jobs
Education and health care require people, and technology has continually failed at replacing people in those sectors. If tech could replace labor in education, we would have seen it during covid. Technology also still can't pull out stitches or change a bedpan.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 148 ms ] threadSeems a much better approach is to advocate for men exercising their agency and building relationships. I don’t see how dating is more a competition today than it has been historically?
The reality of the situation is that the dating marketplace is wildly dysfunctional now [1] [2] [3], and with women empowered and educated, they don't date down like men do [4] (women want high status, high earning men, men want younger, attractive women who can provide kids, very broadly speaking; there are only so many high status, high earning men). So, you have an entire cohort of men, through no fault of their own, who don't want to compete in a Sisyphean effort to attract a potential partner because the odds are very high they will not meet a potentially unrealistic bar [5] [6]. Shouldn't they at least get some enjoyment out of this existence if they weren't lucky to have been born a few decades earlier?
Subthread where I talk about this ~2 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32430248 | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32429544 (thread "The rise of lonely, single men")
[1] https://medium.com/@worstonlinedater/tinder-experiments-ii-g... ("Tinder Experiments II: Guys, unless you are really hot you are probably better off not wasting your time on Tinder — a quantitative socio-economic study")
[2] https://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/why-women-lose-the-dating-g... ("Why women lose the dating game")
[3] https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2021/10/05/rising-... ("Rising Share of U.S. Adults Are Living Without a Spouse or Partner")
[4] https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/nov/10/dating-... ("The dating gap: why the odds are stacked against female graduates finding a like-minded man")
[5] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/09/20/americans-s... ("Americans see men as the financial providers, even as women’s contributions grow")
[6] https://www.americansurveycenter.org/research/from-swiping-t... ("From Swiping to Sexting: The Enduring Gender Divide in American Dating and Relationships")
(TLDR: Macroeconomics and unrealistic expectations are causing a relationship market collapse, let people enjoy what they want vs screaming into the void about that which cannot be changed)
AI is dangerous here IMHO because it's going to disconnect people even more from the possibility of having a meaningful connection/relationship with another human.
People no longer like any kind of friction when it comes to interacting with other people.
People have to want to care and do better, you cannot make them (in this domain). Pick those you invest your time and emotional energy in wisely, that's all you can do.
EDIT: @x86x87 We aren't disagreeing. The marketplace trajectory is already locked in due to the crystallization of ideas in this domain by market participants.
If you're a woman and it's either prince charming or bust you're going to most likely end up alone. You decide what you want to do.
If you're a man and expect women to jump all over you when you're not taking care of yourself and cannot hold a conversation + don't want to improve to become more sexually attractive you're going to end up alone.
Honestly it is quite staggering how easy many fellow men find it to blame women for all supposed dating unfairness, but most do not even a basic own effort (or do so once and then give up when it doesn't work). Take care of yourself, have some hobbies and dare to talk to new people. And stop blaming others or the system or an amorphous and diverse group like women which make up more than 50% of the population for your own unhappiness.
I believe I have provided robust citations throughout this thread, and am happy to consider any data you might have refuting those citations; your advice blatantly ignores the data. Certainly, from a dating perspective, hygiene, emotional health, and maximizing social opportunities is important. But you will still arrive at poor outcomes if counterparties are not interested in what you offer (which I address verbosely with links in thread). Expectations are cheap to have, and the cost is borne by the party who must jump through hoops to attempt to meet them.
If aggregate female expectations are beyond what a male population cohort can obtain, what do you expect of those men? They can either grind to meet a standard they will never meet, or opt out and seek their own happiness. Is it wrong to believe someone's expectations are unrealistic? I don't believe so, that is an opinion that can be held. I am happily partnered for over two decades, the advice I give to young men is simple: rapidly ascertain if a potential partner is worth your time and energy, and move on the moment you discover they're not. If you don't want a partner, or the effort is not worth the outcome, opt out and live your best life solo. That is all you can do. ~50% of first marriages fail, and the numbers get worse for second (67%) and third (73%) marriages. Most of this is luck anyway.
(I recommend "Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are" by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz on this topic: https://www.amazon.com/Everybody-Lies-Internet-About-Really/...)
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2024/02/13/asia-pacific/so...
I guess that women just aren’t so interested in porn as they are in companionship. That somehow men and women will tend to use AI differently?
Depends how you define porn. For example smut books are very popular among women, I think they are even the primary market for them. It is not that they are not interested in porn, they are just looking for a different type.
Note as well in reports women report using the AI boyfriend for sex as well ("Both Valenciano and Ramos say sex with their AIs is the best they’ve ever had." from https://www.thecut.com/article/ai-artificial-intelligence-ch...). They seem to also use the AI for sexual gratification, but they might not look for the same visual aspect and more as you say the emotional aspect.
amen to that. everyone has some sort of drive to reproduce that is hardwired into us.
This is the key. We're aiming to make our lives as convenient and frictionless as possible -- and this is monotonically increasing. Technology enables us to essentially be shut-ins, like the hikikomori.
This is a fragmentation/rending of the social fabric on a massive scale, and we're seeing it happen in real time.
although it might currently masquerade as a cultural thing or a factor of the gender identity, men dated down out of necessity, by population alone.
find the study to corroborate that, this is the first generation where the middle on the higher rungs and the upper middle class actually has enough women in it to date and thats whats happening
entire dynasties of women that thought they could offer their presence alone, and finding out they only have choices with socioeconomic equals instead of higher
lower socioeconomic status groups of women are so vocal about their sex work or balking at questions of “what do they bring to the table” because they thought being available sexually and pleasant would open up a different path, but are just entertainment options. they basically have to be louder because they don’t know what’s going on, notably, this groups considers themselves empowered too, at least self identify as such.
That's not the case? If you are young and attractive woman, you'll have no problem dating up for the most part.
And I’m considering everything else to be an entertainment option.
But the dating patterns corroborate the same view. Wealthy men picking younger and attractive women who offer nothing else have a population constriction too. There are far more poorer people than wealthy, its too small of a population for it to buck a trend further compounded by the newfound existence of women who are the first generation in their higher socioeconomic class.
> It was determined that the bottom 80% of men (in terms of attractiveness) are competing for the bottom 22% of women and the top 78% of women are competing for the top 20% of men.
This fails one of my heuristics for valid statistics: things that don’t deserve to be exactly equal are exactly equal.
We're supposed to believe that the women can be partitioned into groups A (bottom 22%) and B (top 78%). (I'll assume that this is well defined for the sake of argument.) And this study showed that the bottom 80% of men are competing for group A and that group B is competing for the top 20% of men? That is, group B is competing for exactly the set of men that, themselves, arent' competing for group A? That's a remarkable claim!
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/02/02/key-findi... ("Pew Research: Key findings about online dating in the U.S.")
https://www.marketplace.org/2023/09/07/singles-speed-dating-... ("APM Marketplace: Some singles are done with dating apps")
https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/abs/10.1089/cyber.2022.0367?j... ("Finding Intimacy Online: A Machine Learning Analysis of Predictors of Success")
> While an extensive scientific literature now exists on the use of online dating services, there are very few studies on user satisfaction with dating apps and with the resulting offline dates. This study aimed to assess the level of satisfaction with Tinder use (STU) and the level of satisfaction with Tinder offline dates (STOD) in a sample of adult users of the app. The study also aimed to examine, among 28 variables, those that are the most important in predicting STU and STOD. Overall, 1,387 Tinder users completed an online questionnaire. A machine learning model was used to rank order predictors from most to least important. On a 4-point scale, participants' mean STU score was 2.39, and, on a 5-point scale, mean STOD score was 3.05. The results indicate that satisfaction with dating apps and with resulting offline dates is strongly predicted by participants' age and by their motives for using Tinder (enhancement, emotional coping, socialization, finding “true love,” or casual sexual partners), whereas the variables negatively associated with satisfaction were those related to psychopathology. Interestingly, 65.3 percent of app users were married or “in a relationship,” and only 50.3 percent of app users were using it to meet someone offline. Generally, participants who engage with the app to cope with personal difficulties seem more likely to report higher levels of dissatisfaction, suggesting that dating apps are a poor coping mechanism and highlighting the need to address underlying problems or pathologies that may be driving their use.
https://www.wired.com/story/data-marriage-behavior-love-psyc... | https://archive.today/4nHbU ("Wired: People Are Dating All Wrong, According to Data Science")
> Well, the first truth about what people look for in romantic partners, like so many important truths about life, was expressed by a rock star before the scientists figured it out. As Adam Duritz of the Counting Crows told us in his 1993 masterpiece “Mr. Jones”: We are all looking for “something beautiful.” The conventional attractiveness of a mate is the number one predictor of how many messages someone gets, for both men and women. We are also looking for:
> someone tall (if a man), someone of a desired race (even though most never admit it), someone rich, someone in an enforcement profession (like lawyer or firefighter) if a man, someone with a sexy name (such as Jacob or Emma), and someone just like ourselves (people are 11.3 percent more likely to match with someone who shares their initials)
Additional citations wrt dating market place dynamics: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29581620 (Dec 16, 2021) | lock-the-spock ↗ Fully agree, this is unscientific nonsense trying to model an incredibly hard to model thing. People seem to just Google papers that support their worldview without even bothering to read them.
Especially if you have a high level of education there seem to be a lot more women than men and intelligence equally inhibits many of them to find fitting dates. Sure, if you do online dating, better have a good resumé and some good photos.
This, in turn, MAY have distorted behavior.
I’m exhausted writing something so obvious.
Anal sex is not enjoyable? It is. And has been a thing for eons. In fact anal sex was a way to workaround getting pregnant before birth control was a thing/was mainstream.
I feel like we have the puritan point of view of what sex should be and anything that is not that is bad/not pleasurable.
So here's where I land: what whatever you want. Do whatever you want in the bedroom as long as it's 2 consenting adults. I don't believe that porn itself is to blame or be demonized for anything.
I also firmly believe that porn may provide an outlet for people to see and experience things that they don't want or cannot experience in real life.
Seeing it in porn is what makes some men think it’s mainstream and something that their partner should enjoy, and there are many reports that it’s no longer uncommon for someone to try it unsolicited and then express surprise when his partner complains.
> Anal sex is not enjoyable? It is.
For men, yes, but women don’t have a prostate and report far less enjoyment. That doesn’t mean that it hasn’t been used for birth control (people have been joking about technical virginity for ages) but again there are many reports of women being pressured into it or having men try it without asking because those guys are used to porn stars pretending to find it incredibly pleasurable and, in many cases, not at all discussing how to be safe.
Again, the claim is not that porn is evil for showing uncommon things but the problems around misrepresentation and consent. If sites promote videos showing women pretending to find it highly pleasurable to be slapped or choked, having forceful anal sex, etc. some fraction of the men watching it are going to think that’s representative of real life. Hopefully they will talk with actual partners about what they enjoy, but that’s certainly not a given and there’s a long, ugly history of men resorting to threats or violence when they think they’re owed something.
This is another area where companies’ promotion algorithms raises questions about how much they’re contributing to a trend, too. If their design encourages studios to push boundaries harder to get more interactions, the feedback loop is no longer organic - they’re shaping the market, not just responding to customer demand.
It's the perpetual protestant bullshit that has plagued the society in US for hundreds of years now. God forbid we see a breast or are exposed to a dick or mention the possibility of inserting something into an asshole - everything will break down.
Nevertheless, that cannot be true for most people, who are able to distinguish fact from fantasy.
In my opinion a much more important role in distorting the sexual expectations of young and inexperienced people has been played for some centuries by the conventional representation in literature and starting with the 20th century also in movies of a conventional feeling of "romantic love", which has been a completely fictional creation that does not correspond to any feeling that exists between real humans.
Instead of the fictional "love", between real humans there exist 3 or 4 distinct sentiments, which are independent, so they can exist or not exist separately, even if when they exist simultaneously there exists a positive feedback that reinforces them (e.g. physical attraction, love in the sense of opposite of hate, i.e. as also possible towards friends and family, and trust; even physical attraction is a different sentiment from considering that someone is beautiful or handsome).
When I was very young I was confused by the depiction of "love" in novels and movies, where frequently one discovered the appropriate partner for the rest of their lives by falling in "love" at the first sight, after which they never had any interest for different people. In reality, the only sentiment that is possible at the first sight is physical attraction, while "love" in a stricter sense is possible only after months of shared experiences and trust is possible only after several years, outside of completely exceptional circumstances.
Moreover, none of such sentiments is exclusive towards a single human. There are many valid reasons to choose monogamy, but that is a choice enforced by rational will, not a characteristic of human feelings.
So when I was very young, my expectations about human relations were distorted by these conventional incorrect descriptions of "love" from fiction, so I could not be certain of the nature of my feelings towards others, i.e. whether they were "love" or not. I have also seen many others who have been confused for the same reason, so they were not able to analyze their own feelings and distinguish e.g. between physical attraction and trust, with bad consequences.
On the other hand, viewing porn has never distorted my sexual expectations, because there was no doubt about that being fantasy and not reality.
Therefore I believe that many classic novels or RomCom movies may be more prone to distort sexual expectations than viewing porn movies.
> “I think porn is a disgrace. I used to watch a lot of porn, to be honest. I started watching porn when I was, like, 11,” the “Bad Guy” singer said, saying it helped her feel as if she were cool and “one of the guys.”
> “I think it really destroyed my brain and I feel incredibly devastated that I was exposed to so much porn,” she added, saying she suffered nightmares because some of the content she watched was so violent and abusive...
> “The first few times I, you know, had sex, I was not saying no to things that were not good. It was because I thought that’s what I was supposed to be attracted to,” she said.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/12/15/entertainment/billie-eilish-p...
So, they experimented by trying new things, correct? Which, by definition, is a change (i.e., a distortion) in their sexual behavior.
If you try to read the "distortion" as being a non-judgmental "change", which was my intent, it may feel less triggering.
What else do you have?
Whenever you are trying to measure change you need to control for all the things that are happening.
I think framing it as "may change" is closer to what you maybe intended but I'm just guessing.
Pornography absolutely reframes expectations and impacts behaviors. To what extent, that is a fair debate.
For me porn does not reframe expectations. You still end up fucking and you still end up having to treat the other person as a human being. As long as everyone is having a good time and everything is between consensual adult I'm good.
In this case, the argument reduced down to “well, not for me” which is likely a form of denial
So maybe its a good thing
Similarly, there are services that chat with people who contact your OnlyFans. The customer is again the women.
I expect, at least initially, that same pattern will repeat.