Axiom of Chance

thoughts from the Laboratory for Social Minds at Carnegie Mellon University

Hypergamy, Incels, and Reality

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This is a story about a big untruth.

When Alek Minassian, a man bitter about his lack of sexual contact with women, mowed down pedestrians on a sidewalk in Toronto as a political act, Ross Douthat used the occasion to suggest a problem was that “the sexual revolution created new winners and losers“. Douthat’s concerns resonate with many young men in America, and they even have a word for what deprives them of sex: Hypergamy. Jordan Peterson sums it up in a sentence: “women mate across and up dominance hierarchies”; Peterson’s fans express it more clearly: “Why does it appear that the vast majority of women prefer the same small group of men?”

Robin Hanson, never one to squander an opportunity, used the same murders to expand on the idea: “one might plausibly argue that those with much less access to sex suffer to a similar degree as those with low income, and might similarly hope to gain from organizing around this identity, to lobby for redistribution along this axis and to at least implicitly threaten violence if their demands are not met.” Context, occasion, and political reality necessarily mean one thing in each of these cases: the problem is male access to sex with women, and the fact that some men have (a lot) more, and many have (much) less—if any at all. A rebellion is coming.

Internet communities make the story explicit: just as “the 1%” control all the income in the country, a politically and socially select group of men control “sexual access” to women. The analogy between cash and intimacy is direct, clear, and common across the political spectrum. The vulgarity is clearest when it’s phrased in the language of the Incels movement that spawned the topic to begin with. “Chads”—a few men with high “sexual market value” (SMV)—monopolize the majority of women. As their own SMV declines, these women marry hapless “betas”, who support them while they occasionally stray to old pastures on the side (“alpha widowhood“). This is summarized in an acronym: AF;BB. What determines who counts as a “Chad” is up for debate. But whether it’s a product of race, income, or political support from the Jewish lobby, the inequality is assumed to be real. A large number of women give sex to a small number of men; most men go without. It’s enraging.

It’s also false. Whether or not sexual-access inequality of this form exists should not (in my opinion) be a political matter; that’s a separate question. What this post addresses is the rather remarkable fact that many people are saying this inequality exists, when it doesn’t.

It’s no surprise that some people have more sex than others, of course. Casanova and Isaac Newton are part of the human comedy in equal measure. But the discourse of inequality is new. The common thread of these pieces, which use the occasion of a mass murder by a sexually disappointed man to make their points, is that men, in particular, are subject to sexual inequality in sufficiently extreme ways that the inequality itself has become a political problem. Douthat calls Hanson a “brillant wierdo”, but there’s no bizarre brillance here. Hanson is simply detached from reality.

The gender differences in who is having sex, and how much sex they’re having, was a topic at the American Sociological Association’s blog, Contexts, which hosted a piece by the sociologists Paula England and Eliza Brown in 2016. “Access to sex can be unequally distributed“, they write, and they study it using a common measure of income inequality, the Gini coefficient. They conclude: “single men have a higher Gini coefficient (.536) than single women (.470)”. Taken at face value, this ought to support the hypergamy narrative.

England and Brown are scientists who have looked at the data, and I’ll do my best to explain why their conclusions are read misleadingly, in a respectful fashion appropriate for academic discourse; if I come off as less than collegial to them, it’s unintended. Scientists should, however, have little patience for the ideologues who rely on personal anecdote and ideology to tell a story the current moment wants to hear.

To counter the claims of England and Brown, and their application to the state of young men, I’ll draw on an exceptionally detailed piece of sociological fieldwork by Peter Bearman, James Moody, and Katherine Stovel.[*] Published in the American Journal of Sociology (AJS) in 2004, it reported on an extensive survey of the sexual partnerships (“contacts”) at “Jefferson” High School. The name is a pseudonym, but the setting might have been drawn from central casting: if anything captures the liberal stereotype of “Trump country”, it is Jefferson.

“Jefferson High is an almost all-white high school of roughly 1,000 students located in a midsized midwestern town,” Bearman et al. (BMS) write. The town is isolated, an hour drive from the nearest significant city, and “a close-knit, insular, predominantly working-class community, which offers few activities for young people. In describing the events of the past year, many students report that there is absolutely nothing to do in Jefferson. For fun, students like to drive to the outskirts of town and get drunk.”

The authors’ goal was to understand how sexual contacts could lead to disease transmission. The isolation of the community worked to their advantage, since they could capture, in a survey of a single high school, the overwhelming majority of the sexual contacts people had. The survey was popular, and 90% of the students participated. In a move that was, at the time, quite avant garde, BMS provided an image of the hookup network.

Each dot here (each node) is a student in the survey; dark dots are the men, light dots are the women. Lines connect students who reported sexual contact (because BMS were concerned with STDs, these contacts were meant to capture fluid exchange that put students at risk). The most obvious feature of this graph is how straight it is—heterosexual. Dark dots connect to light, and light connect to dark. BMS did capture same-sex contacts, but did not include them in this graph; they did, however, include two bisexual nodes (one male, one female; can you spot them?)

The piece is a wonderful piece of quantitative sociology, and a delightful excursion for those of us who live at the interface of the mathematics and empirical reality. Even without the analysis, it captures an entire world that you may have forgotten. Little tight-knit groups exist in isolation (band camp? The theater people?), while the majority of students join a long “ring” of contacts that connects up a significant fraction of the school (amusingly, without one of the bisexual nodes, it would all fall apart). For most readers, memories of high school are covered in a forgetful haze; BMS suggests that however bad it was, it’s nothing like the Hobbesian world where Douthat’s analysis begins.

For our analysis, the overall structure, and the stories it can tell, isn’t necessary. All we need is one thing, what network scientists call the degree distribution: put crudely, the count of who is getting how much. BMS didn’t share their raw data, but after an hour or so of hand counting we can plot the distribution: what fraction of men, or women, have no partners, one partner, two partners, three, and so on. BMS didn’t give the number of people who had zero sexual contacts (the “incels”), so I’ve inferred it from the total school population and the assumption that the breakdown is 50-50; more on the technical details later—if you’re expecting under-reporting by women, you’ll be surprised.

The graph summarizes the differences between students in a simple fashion. The majority of both men and women reported one sexual contact in the past 18 months. Among those who are not having sex, it’s more the women than the men; even allowing for under-reporting by women, the idea that the majority of women are giving their favors to men, in Peterson’s words, “across and up dominance hierarchies”, is an absolute fantasy.

If the incels story fails, perhaps the idea of the 1% survives. Where is Chad? There is one candidate, an outlier male that reported nine sexual contacts. The data set as a whole contains 477 relationships, so this man monopolizes a total of… 1.8% of the sex in the school. Bill Gates he is not.

It gets worse for the Petersons and the dominant lobsters of the world. Not only is there not a conspiracy of elite men to monopolize women, it appears that if anything, it’s the other way around. Only fourteen men in the sample have four or more partners, but twenty-four women do. Combined with the fact that there are more women than men who report zero sexual partners, it appears to be women who have the stronger grievance, should they wish to lodge it, against a few Chad-like Queen Bees.

Incel violence is a young man’s game, and Jefferson High School provides an almost too-perfect sample of the world from which they emerge. England and Brown’s ASA blog post, by contrast, draws for its claims of a sexual hierarchy from a wider survey taken by the US Census data, of older adults. Their methods of analysis complicate the matters more. Rather than studying the experiences of men and women in total, EB split their groups into two: “single”, and “married or cohabiting”.

It is the “single” group EB focus on for their inequality question, but even here, the differences are minor, and its not quite clear why the split should be made. Once the two groups are combined, which allows for a comparison with the high school case, the differences shrink further still. Finally, racial differences may explain some of the gap; “the dispersion of a larger minority out to the extremes of 3 and 4+ partners is greatest for Black men and least for White men”, while the Jefferson study was of a (nearly) all-white school. In short, if there is evidence of inequality in the other direction, it is in a population quite different in both age and race from the world that made Rogers and Minassian.

When we do look at that world, we find the opposite of what the media coverage suggests. The claim that women have sex with high-status men and, in doing so, deprive other men of their attentions, is false. And, not only is it false, but the willingness of editorial writers and ideologues to repeat it, and give it political weight, tells us a lot how detached these people are from reality.

[*] Peter S. Bearman, James Moody, Katherine Stovel. Chains of Affection: The Structure of Adolescent Romantic and Sexual Networks. American Journal of Sociology, Volume 110 Number 1 (July 2004): 44–91

Followup. I’m very pleased with the attention this article has received, and the numerous comments and discussions on Twitter (I don’t have Facebook, so can’t participate directly there).

The main criticism the article received, from the most upset people, was that it was about the wrong thing. A number of people referenced Aspirational pursuit of mates in online dating markets, a lovely piece by my colleagues (via SFI) Elizabeth Bruch and Mark Newman (BN). BN take an enormous dataset from an online dating website, and measure desirability and its covariates. BN’s conclusions are shocking in how stark they are. Online dating is a strong hierarchy for both men and women, with all the regular variables you’d expect playing a role in who gets written to, and who writes back.

There’s just one problem. Online dating is not measuring outcomes. It’s measuring desire. If Scarlet Johansson shows up on OK Cupid, I am going to message her. This will show up in BN’s data as a social gradient, and from that point of view, Johansson is making the online dating market more unequal for other women.

Except it’s not. That would only be the case if Johansson actually went on a date with me and thus stole me from someone else. My desires can not harm anyone; only my actions—to believe otherwise is magical thinking. To be clear, Robin Hanson is saying that men who have the undesired outcome of not having sex with women should consider resorting to violence. Jordan Peterson is talking about the outcomes different kinds of men (or lobsters) receive. These are the claims at issue.

It is certainly the case, and many men of the Peterson/Hanson world obsess about this, that they are not sufficiently desired by women. There is a constant fear of being a “beta”—which means that, even though you are no longer suffering from sexual deprivation, your partner really wants to be with someone else. This is a danger in most relationships, and a psychological fact that novelists have written about for centuries. It can be expected to harm women in a similar fashion, perhaps (just to drive the intuition) when pornography comes into the mix. But if this is the kind of inequality that these people are talking about, it is even crazier than we thought. For these people, it’s not what women do that must be controlled, it is literally what they think.

All of this gets worse when self-help guides are added to the mix. Not only should your desires be satisfied, not only are they politically valid, but if you follow my rules, you will satisfy them.

For some people, the bare facts of this analysis were difficult to take in. It was surprising to see people respond to the article with the flat statement that of course “Chads” existed in any meaningful way, of course hypergamy was real. In some cases, respondents showed me simulations of societies in which hypergamy happened. In others, the claim appeared to be that hypergamy must be real because not all men will pass their genes down many generations in the future. Neither of these makes sense. Some respondents agreed that the data did indeed establish the conclusions, but described Jefferson High as an idyllic utopia that obtains no where else. I’ve now checked this; see the second followup for data that shows the adult world is actually more equal than Jefferson High.

Peterson himself is an absolute disaster when it comes to reality. I learn the following from Patrick Steinmann, a Ph.D. student at Wageningen U&R:

“[…] women have a strong proclivity to marry across or up the economic dominance hierarchy” are Peterson’s exact words (12 Rules for Life, p. 301). The (only) source given is Greenwood, Guner, Kocharkov & Santos (2014).”

Amazingly, this article establishes the exact opposite. It describes the emergence of assortative mating, where individuals marry others at “their same level” (e.g., matching education levels, income, and so forth). Hypergamy, in the fictional form it is found in this cast of characters, says the opposite—some fancy investment banker swooping in and picking up your high-school sweetheart. Peterson might have noticed this because the article’s title is, literally, “Marry Your Like”.

A final point that comes up, from After Sol (who makes many points, which you can find!): “the study ignores the ‘lived reality’ of incels (who for the most part aren’t living in closed dating pools in rural areas).” I think this is an important point, but not perhaps for the reasons AS thinks. There is absolutely no doubt that there are many distressed men out there, who live in a hell where a few Chads are stealing all of the women who could love them. The data show that this hell is not real. This hell is, in fact, made up by older men with some kind of psychological axe to grind. There are enough partners, and potentialities, for everyone. Liberate yourselves from this story. Please.

Second Followup. Some commenters were curious about the post-high school experience, and some have claimed that the Incel ideology is validated on adult data. Just as much as in the Jefferson case, however, the Hanson-Douthat story is completely detached from reality.

Below is data from the General Social Survey, which since 2008 has asked questions about the number of sexual partners in the last year. I selected on heterosexual men and women only. I dropped “no response” data, informally, this appears to correlate with highly conservative attitudes. There is a lot of data here; 1688 respondents alone in 2008, or about twice the Jefferson survey.

First, the men.

The data are almost perfectly consistent with the Jefferson study. As you would expect with this older population, there are fewer men who did not have a sexual partner. There are almost no men who report more than ten partners in the last year (yes, the 0.8% figure is correct, and is consistent with the Jefferson survey.)

Second, the women.

Again, we see the same pattern as in the Jefferson case. Contrary to the gatekeeper myth, and consistent with the Jefferson data, women are more likely to report having zero sexual partners in the last year. The Queen Bee effect may also hold; data crunching in progress.

Some commenters talk about a “Tinder effect”: the idea that hypergamy has been enabled by the rapid-fire partnering available on this particularly successful app. This is, again, detached from reality. The data presented are consistent with no shift in sexual experience for men (or women) over the course of eight years that span its introduction in 2012.

For this follow-up, I used the “in the past year” data because it is going to be more accurate than the other column, “in the last five years”. The GSS also asks about the sex of the sexual partners you have had since eighteen; since one answer is “I have not had any sex partners”, this allows us to count the potential “incels” directly. The number of heterosexual men eighteen and over who have never had sex is 2.4%.

It gets even crazier. If we exclude men who are unmarried, but express a religious opposition to having pre-martial sex, the number drops to 1.3%. About half of the men who have never had sex are doing so entirely voluntarily.

The U.S. Census counts 109 million men over eighteen; the upper limit on the number of men who are incels is thus just a little over 1.3 million. Bear in mind that’s an upper limit; you’re not an incel if you just haven’t found someone you love yet. If this still sounds like a lot, if you restrict to twenty-five and over, then the number is 700,000.

To put this in perspective, there are 5.2 million Native Americans in the U.S., about four times more than the potential pool of incels.

But it is this latter group that has begun a series of terrorist attacks on the American population. It is this group whose grievances got attention and sympathy from reality-detached people like Ross Douthat and Robin Hanson. I will leave it to others to explain why.

Afternote. Liberalism has largely found itself immune to the charms of thinking that “sexual-access inequality”—access to someone else as a form of property—is a topic of political discussion at all. The idea has resonated with some on the left, however. “Personal preferences,” Amia Srinivasan writes in the London Review of Books, “are never just personal … Some men are excluded from the sexual sphere for politically suspect reasons.” Srinivasan focuses on the sexual politics of gay life; more broadly, she suggests that not liking someone sexually might be a form of discrimination (ageist, racial, etc) and thus fall unfairly upon some in a politically suspect way. The article is an essay in the original sense, rather than a political program or worldview in the style of Peterson, Hanson, Douthat, et al.

The most explicit voices (that I know of) on the left that do have a political program come from parts of the transgender community. The argument goes (roughly, and as I see it) like this: (1) transwomen are women, in all senses of the word, and to deny this is to do violence and political harm against this community; (2) to be a transwoman, it is not necessary to have genital surgery, i.e., a transwoman can have a penis; (3) any woman who identifies as a lesbian, but would not (as an aspect of her sexuality) be sexually attracted to a transwoman who has a penis, must be denying that her (potential) partner is a woman. By (1), this is politically suspect. In an extensive piece on the philosophical and social concerns of the lesbian community, Kathleen Stock writes that “[s]ome of [the transwomen who identify as lesbian] also think it is a morally suspect, ‘transphobic’ decision of female lesbians not to sleep with them. This is the phenomenon dubbed colloquially as ‘the cotton ceiling’.” Paralleling the case of the Incels, this political debate has turned violent, particularly in the United Kingdom. See Kathleen Stock’s Twitter feed (and references) for more on this. It’s probably a bad idea to treat sex as a political good.

25 Replies to “Hypergamy, Incels, and Reality”

  1. “A large number of women give sex to a small number of men; most men go without. It’s enraging. It’s also false. … many people are saying this inequality does exists when, in fact, it doesn’t. … common thread of these pieces, … is that men, in particular, are subject to sexual inequality in sufficiently extreme ways that the inequality itself has become a political problem. Douthat calls Hanson a “brillant wierdo”, but there’s no bizarre brillance here. Hanson is simply detached from reality.”

    I just said that sex inequality exists, I didn’t make more specific claims about its form or extent. I’m pretty sure that you aren’t denying the existence of sex inequality.

    • Dear Robin,

      You are the writer of some of the most disingenuous prose I have ever seen. Here is the claim about the nature of the world that you cite:

      “It is quite distinctive in its hate figures: Stacys (attractive women); Chads (attractive men); and Normies (people who aren’t incels, i.e. can find partners but aren’t necessarily attractive). Basically, incels cannot get laid and they violently loathe anyone who can. Some of the fault, in their eyes, is with attractive men who have sex with too many women.”

      It is these men, with these theories they have about the world, that you then urge to violence after your quote. I suppose you could say that you disbelieve their theory, but believe these same men to be justified in acting on a false belief. Or perhaps your pronouns in the just-next paragraph refer somewhere else. Or perhaps you meant something completely different from the obvious interpretations people draw from what you say. If you wish to take these gambits, or any other, see my opening sentence in this reply.

      I am not going to get into further debate about what you do and do not say or imply. I think you know exactly what you are doing.

      I had not seen this piece before I agreed to debate you on your Futarchy Proposal. As I have previously requested after our interactions on Twitter, please contact me by e-mail first if you wish to engage me further.

      Simon DeDeo

      • Hanson is not encouraging anyone to violence. He’s comparing one kind of demand for redistribution to another and noting violence backing up demands, then asking why there’s little overlap between these camps. He belongs to neither circle in the Venn diagram and isn’t pushing for redistribution or violence. And if he referenced an article on income/wealth inequality, one needn’t assume that he agreed with the particular theories of Piketty, Marx or any other theorist in order to discuss such inequality.

  2. Dear Simon,

    Thank you very much for your article. I think it’s a great effort to lay out all the arguments on this matter, and there should be more discussions in this format (but understandably, and unfortunately, not everyone has the dedication to do so).

    I personally think that Peterson’s arguments are somewhat taken out of context. In his book he gives more context about why women might decide to look for a partner that has an equal or higher hierarchical position. The propagation of a single quote make it easy for arguments to be misunderstood, and taken as absolute truths as opposed to a small segment in a (not always true, and not always coherent) stream of thought, which is what I think Peterson is really good at.

    I would just like to add some more nuance to the Incel topic: this podcast’s episode touches on the gender-sexual orientation aspects of the discussion. I found it illuminating then, and consider it an important reference point. I hope it helps.
    https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply-all/120-invcel#episode-player

    Thanks again,

    Seb

  3. Your distribution fits with my observations but isn’t the incels complaint is that too many women are going without partners at all hoping to snag prince charming?
    My problem with that complaint is that many men, including the incels themselves, are doing the same thing that is just trying for the most attractive girls.

    BTW I think you are unfair to Robin Hanson.

    • Just informally (this is a brief study of the demographics, not the culture of incels itself, and a colleague knows more than I), there does seem to be a paradox of desire.

  4. BTW I think the whole alfa/beta male thing is pop psychology and is not well supported in human society. Society seems to be designed to minimize that, the great majority of human families live in separate home not matter how humble.

  5. And BTW

    “All of this gets worse when self-help guides are added to the mix. Not only should your desires be satisfied, not only are they politically valid, but if you follow my Twelve Rules, you will satisfy them.”

    I feel the same about wealth, it does not bother me that some people are much richer than me. In as much as I would be jealous it would be more of the guys with the beautiful and nice wives than of those with lots more money, but neither bothers me significantly.

  6. I enjoyed this post, but was disappointed to see your afternote included Peterson-adjacent Julian Vigo (https://quillette.com/author/julian-vigo/).

    You mention violence in the UK without specifying that trans people are overwhelmingly the victims, rather than the perpetrators: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jan/22/epidemic-violence-transgender-people-experienced-stonewall

    I *believe* (although I am just one cis person, so it’s not for me to *say*) that politically active trans people are less interested in the particulars of who has sex with whom than in the effect of prominent cis LGB people referring to trans women as “men” or genital surgery as “mutilation” (Vigo).

    • Hello Adam —

      Thank you for your note. Just to be clear, I don’t have a political criterion for sourcing and I do my best to find the best data. “X or Y-adjacent” is not a good epistemic criterion.

      That said, Vigo is does take a pretty aggressive attitude towards the transgender question elsewhere. Terms like “mutilation” are un-necessary and they’re not helpful in this context. At least for one person (you?) it’s obscuring the issues discussed in the Afterword.

      To that end, I’ve swapped out the cite for a longer-form article by Kathleen Stock. Stock’s piece also has the advantage of focusing on the philosophical questions, while spending time on the rights and concerns of transwomen. The ideas there are not the central concern of the post, and I’m in the position of a reporter of, not a scientist on, the question. I do find the arguments and statistics of this community reality-based, which is why I cite them.

      Thanks for the suggestion,

      Simon

  7. Hypergamy is real. It has replaced monogamy in most the western world, EXCEPT in some places where monogamous model continues to be enforced by a tight social fabric, typically in white, conservative, small town high schools, because people date within their social circle, know each other’s parents etc… Wait till those guys find a job in NYC, or go to college, and update the graph.

    Also note that 2004 was 8 years before Tinder.

    • You say “hypergamy is real”. I don’t doubt that it *seems* real to many people.

      But do you have any scientific evidence, or estimates of the magnitude of this effect?

  8. I think you’d find it hard to convince people that high school measures “reality” since it is a small and closed community, and may be insufficient to serve as a model for the kinds of communities that lead to a higher proportion of incels. Why should this study on high school sex serve as a sufficient model?

    • I talk a little bit about this in the post. The high school case is particularly useful because it’s the most recent reference point for many of the men who find hypergamy claims compelling, and who become violent as a result. They’re (very) young men.

      Having a study of a similar kind in an older population would be fascinating. Those who do say that hypergamy has a relevant impact on mating and matching outcomes have (as far as I am aware) no empirical evidence to validate their claims.

  9. I’d like your thoughts on this line of reasoning –

    – The human sex ratio is more or less 1:1.

    – Almost every study on the matter shows that men have higher sex drives than women.
    https://www.webmd.com/sex/features/sex-drive-how-do-men-women-compare#1

    A logical implication of the difference in sex drives between men and women is that while nothing can be concluded about any individual, the total amount of times women, as a whole, want to have sex will be lower than the total amount of times men, as a whole, want to have sex. Therefore, the amount of (consensual) sex that happens within society is determined by the amount of times women want to have sex.

    So far this should explain, as a matter of logic, why women , in general, do not complain about scarcity of sex – (at least not the quantity, maybe the quality). They control the market, so to speak. Anecdotally, men have a much more difficult time finding willing sex partners on apps like Tinder, while women are bombarded with options. This makes sense within the context of the above facts.

    The next question is, while we know that the demand for sex by men will not be met by women, how is the limited amount of sex women want to have distributed among men?

    Imagine a group of 2 women and 2 men. Let’s pretend women want to have sex once a week and the men want to have sex twice a week. How is the sex distributed? It’s possible each man has sex once a week. The other possibility is one man has sex twice a week with both women and the other man has no sex.

    What is not possible (or highly unlikely), in the above scenario, is that any of the women will have trouble finding sex when they want it (because the men want to have sex 4 times overall. ) In general then, women can find sex easily relative to men . Would you agree that this a logical conclusion stemming from the understanding of differing sex drives within a species where the sex ratio is 1:1 ?

    • Much of the confusion on this question comes down to a category error. This is not a market, or, at least, looking at sexual intimacy as if it were a market leads to a divorce from reality and misses the point. You use the term metaphorically, “they control the market, so to speak”, but much of the contemporary conversation takes it literally. So let’s being there.

      A sexual relationship is not, it turns out, a matching process where there is a supplier and a demander. One way to see this is that when it *is* a purely market transaction, as in the case of prostitution, the problem goes away immediately. There is no shortage of sex sold, and the prices get very low. In the UK, for example, after the creation of red-light districts in Leeds, the price went to £30, a reasonably cheap dinner for two. Yet the “incels” who have developed the myth of hypergamy are just as easily found in the United Kingdom. Sex (“pure sex”, whatever that may mean) is not the issue.

      (Control may be. I talk about this a little in the “followup” section. What seems to be at issue is not who-is-getting-what, but who-is-wanting-what. But that’s an aside.)

      The classic paper along the lines of your link is “Gender Differences in Receptivity to Sexual Offers”, Clark & Hatfield; http://www2.hawaii.edu/~elaineh/79.pdf “Male and female confederates of average attractiveness approached potential partners with one of three requests: “Would you go out tonight?” “Will you come over to my apartment?” or “Would you go to bed with me?” The great majority of men were willing to have a sexual liaison with the women who approached them. Women were not. Not one woman agreed to a sexual liaison.”

      The classic response, meanwhile, is “Perceived Proposer Personality Characteristics and Gender Differences in Acceptance of Casual Sex Offers”, Conley; https://s3.amazonaws.com/academia.edu.documents/38012548/perceived_proposer.pdf?AWSAccessKeyId=AKIAIWOWYYGZ2Y53UL3A&Expires=1543300271&Signature=IbRrseksQDfnF43PDasi8k%2FbKuA%3D&response-content-disposition=inline%3B%20filename%3DPerceived_Proposer_Personality_Character.pdf The latter suggests that it is quality, not quantity, that matters. This complicates the story: it is not that one wants more, the other less, but that one is happier with lots of low-quality encounters than the other. It’s not “lots of X”, but rather “lots of good X”. (Physical safety is a second major concern that Conley covers over and above physical pleasure.)

      You ask if it’s a logical conclusion that “In general then, women can find sex easily relative to men”. The answer is that it’s not that simple, because sex is not a market good, like a can of coke, provided in a regular and fungible fashion by a supplier. It’s a big umbrella term for a very large and diverse set of things, that are co-created by two people together.

      It may seem (to you, e.g.) that a woman is rejecting a male advance; but this does not mean (in any logical fashion) that the woman is satisfied with the sex she’s having and simply doesn’t need any more. If what is most commonly on offer is provided in abundance by men, and rejected in abundance by women, this may tell us a great deal, but what it does tell us is not immediately obvious. We have no idea whether it is the men, or the women, who are more dissatisfied with their sexual lives.

      Thanks for the question; I hope this helps.

      PS: as a side note, you mention Tinder. Tinder’s an interesting case, because it was one of the first dating apps/sites to get anywhere near a 50-50 ratio. Older sites such as OK Cupid had a skewed ratio, with many more men than women. The puzzle, then, was why Tinder *was* so appealing to women, and one of the answers was the linkage to Facebook. Early versions of Tinder required users to attach their Facebook account, which enabled people to see how many shared contacts they had with a potential match. This may have led to a sense of safety via social proof that a site such as OK Cupid could not provide.

      • Whether economic terminology is best suited to explain sexual selection is besides the point, so I shouldn’t have offered the analogy, although I do think the it is valid.

        Here’s the logic laid out more concisely:
        (Working with averages means this is obviously not indicative any individual’s experience, only helps understand the big picture.)

        1. Sex ratio is 1:1.
        2. ‘Study after study’ shows men want to have sex more often than women. (WebMD)
        3. (male average) * 3.5billion = M (total number of times men want to have sex)
        4. (female average) * 3.5billion = W (total number of times women want to have sex
        5. Sex has to be consensual in society.
        6. Due to 5, W is the number of times sex happens.
        7. M – W = F (number of times men want to have sex but can’t)

        Monogamy –
        8a. F / 3.5billion = (number of times each man wants to have sex but can’t)
        Monogamy would make it so sexual failure is ‘distributed’ evenly among all men

        Non-Monogamy –
        9b. Many possibilities including one where some men have very little chance to have sex.

        Conley’s paper suggests that under certain circumstances – when the proposer is perceived as safe and sexually adept, women are more receptive to casual sex. This is predictable and doesn’t change the conclusions of the other papers, (unless those specific circumstances become the norm).

        Here is one of many papers that establish the trend of men having higher sex drives than women –
        https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17975724
        As the WebMD article points out, it’s ‘study after study’….so there is more or less a consensus on this matter. Conley’s paper and others like it can offer helpful nuance and maybe explain the ‘why’ – is it because of hormonal differences, psychological differences, asymmetry of the sexual experience or maybe women are innately more ‘choosy’, etc. The exact answer is not important for the lines of logic I was presenting.

        The statement you were addressing – ‘A large number of women give sex to a small number of men; most men go without.’ Exaggeration aside, genetic studies show that this has been the case for most of human history. It is the case in most of our closest animal relatives – other large sexually dimorphic mammals. I gave you one line of rationale for why sexual dimorphism leads to high variability of male reproductive success – the delta in sex drive, there are plenty of other reasons.

        So is ‘a large number of women giving sex to a small number of men’? No, because monogamy is not completely gone so you will find many data-sets where there is no inequality. But as monogamy diminishes, its reasonable to assume that we will trend towards that state again.

        I asked earlier ‘Is it easier for a woman to find sex?’, I’ll be even more precise and ask this –
        ‘Do women have more choice in willing sex partners than men?’
        Given the delta in sex drive, the answer to this question is a matter of logic, not opinion. Yet the question is hard for people to answer not because of its complexity but because of its political implications.

        (Here is another article that might interesting -)
        http://sciencenordic.com/quarter-norwegian-men-never-father-children

        • “‘A large number of women give sex to a small number of men; most men go without’. Exaggeration aside, genetic studies show that this has been the case for most of human history.”

          This is does not appear in data for the contemporary era, which is what we’re after here. I’ve been struck by commenters who take the claim to be true, even when the data is literally right before them, and I try to get into the psychology behind this in the Followup. (It is fine to tell a story about “our closest animal relatives”, which takes us into another domain altogether. That divergence is at least 40,000 years in the past.)

          “”Do women have more choice in willing sex partners than men?” Given the delta in sex drive, the answer to this question is a matter of logic, not opinion.”

          Unpacking the response to Conley, your arguments here appear to be about the demand for casual sex that is potentially unsafe and is unlikely to provide pleasure to one of the partners. I’m certainly willing to grant that, as a matter of empirical fact, one of the potential participants has a greater demand for this kind of encounter. To get the logical deduction off the ground requires a very narrow conception of what sex is, how it works in human society, and what it means to be a “sexual failure”.

          • “”It is fine to tell a story about “our closest animal relatives”, which takes us into another domain altogether. That divergence is at least 40,000 years in the past.”

            The reason this is brought up is because there seems to be a correlation between sexual dimorphism and high sexual/reproductive variance among males.

            When it comes to bonobos, researchers thought that since there is much less violent competition among the males for sex (in contrast to chimpanzees), and thus much more female choice in choosing partners, that there might be less reproductive variance for males. Turns out there is even more variance.
            https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28697359
            Conclusion of the study – “Here, we show using the largest sample of paternity data available that, contrary to expectation, male bonobos have a higher reproductive skew and a stronger relationship between dominance rank and reproductive success than chimpanzees.”

            https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00265-009-0867-6
            This study on gorillas begins its abstract with – “Variance in male reproductive success is expected to be high in sexually dimorphic mammals..” This is what makes someone go – ‘Hey, wait…aren’t humans sexually dimorphic mammals? What does that mean for us?”

            We don’t have to guess what that means –
            https://genome.cshlp.org/content/early/2015/03/13/gr.186684.114.abstract
            Studies like this show high sexual/reproductive variance is found for human males as well. Genes can’t really lie.

            https://psmag.com/environment/17-to-1-reproductive-success
            This is an article based on the gene analysis. Notice the Y axis of the graphs are scaled differently for women and men. While the article focuses on the anomaly of the ratio dipping all the way to 17-1 for a period of time, it also says this about more modern times – “In more recent history, as a global average, about four or five women reproduced for every one man.”

            “”This is does not appear in data for the contemporary era, which is what we’re after here.”

            http://sciencenordic.com/quarter-norwegian-men-never-father-children
            This study from Norway uses data from 1985 – 2012. It suggests working class men are having a tough time getting married and becoming fathers despite wanting to. What seems responsible for this – “What actually happens often is that men who are already fathers get recycled.” The author opines that perhaps the Nordic model of social and economic policies are responsible.

            Despite this study I would agree with you that there is much more parity overall these days, especially in the United States. But if for almost all of human history there has been this sexual/reproductive variance, we would do well to identity what’s keeping this phenomenon somewhat at bay. I say ‘somewhat’ since recently there’s been tens of thousands of men complaining on strange parts of the internet about not being able to have sex or find a girlfriend to save their lives, while similar complaints are not observable by women in the same magnitude.

  10. If I understand the data, they show that the incels complaint is really, “The cool girls don’t want me. Waaah!”

    Which, is indeed, not about sex, it’s about desire. Not on the part of women, but of incels.

    Thinking a bit further, just to drive the intuition (in your great phrase), it looks to me that the desire here isn’t actually about sex. The data say there’s plenty of that to go around.

    The desire is for status, especially in the form of admiration / jealousy from other males at the sheer coolness of the girls they manage to “get.” Except they don’t. So they’re furious. (And they’re not fit enough to vie for that admiration by winning triathlons, or rich enough to compete for it with a Bugatti.)

    Women and sex aren’t actually part of this except as notches on the bed post.

    • Non-sexual intrasexual competition may well be a big part of this. A comment on Twitter remarked that a show like Friends would show a statistically implausible number of sexual partners even for the “loser” characters. I wonder if that’s also in play.

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