I’m not innately a misogynist, but I think most American women are seriously defective, for probably cultural reasons. I’m going to establish one of the reasons why in this post. Let’s look at an OkCupid study that has recieved a lot of attention: Your Looks and Your Inbox. Not surprisingly, it shows that women are focused as strongly on appearance as men are. Surprise? Not really. Cause for moral outrage? No. Everyone knows that looks are a substantial component of the dating process, and most of us accept this. Thankfully, not everyone’s appraisal of attractiveness is the same. A few of us are attractive to most people; most of us are attractive to some people. Given enough tries, we find one that likes us; life goes on. The real shocker is this: women on OkCupid have rated 80% of the men as unattractive, including four demonstrably average-looking men (OkCupid staff). It’s quite possible that this reflects only on the women who chose to give ratings– e.g. that bitchy women rate men, the rest don’t. However, although it is far from a scientific analysis, this publication contradicts much of what society prefers to believe about women: that they are kind, less shallow than men, and relatively accepting of the average man’s appearance.
The average man, based on the histogram, appears to have been rated at about 1.4 stars (out of 5) by women. That’s a D, on an A-F scale. Let me explain just how bad that is. A general rule in survey design is that ratings of anything will be inflated compared to the respondent’s actual opinion. If 100 viewers watch a television show and their ratings of it average 3.7 stars, on a 1-to-5 scale, that’s not a “good” rating. The show sucked! The same goes for performance reviews. A ubiquitious constant in such surveys is the “real average” of 4.3– a product rated below this by the public, on a 1-5 scale, is generally below-average. (Expert raters and critics are more conservative in their grading; a 3-star film, according to Ebert, is not being rated as mediocre.) And what is the average GPA at Ivy League colleges (where there are few poor students who must be given failing grades)? It’s about 3.3. It’s the same principle.
People seem to be much more candid when rating the physical attractiveness of strangers, so this rating inflation may not apply, but I’d still contend that a luke-warm rating– say, 3 stars– is not a good sign. In any case, the graph of male ratings of women shows absolutely no inflation. The distribution of attractiveness ratings seems to show a symmetric, bell-shaped curve. This is what we’d expect, and I posted on this matter in October. An average woman is sexually attractive to about 45% of men; an 85th-percentile woman is physically acceptable for about 71%, and a 15th-percentile woman is acceptable to about 23 percent. It’s fairly close to a normal distribution. For men, the story is different, and for those who lack the skills to project sociosexual confidence (e.g. “Game”), quite dismal.
Now consider the distribution of attractiveness ratings given by women to men on OkCupid, which exhibits severe skew in the fugly direction. Of seven categories, a quarter of men fall into the “least attractive” category, while almost none fall into the “most attractive” category. The median male is generally given terrible ratings, with only a few men in the thin rightward tail rated well. This occurred, one should note, in an environment of passive rating, where “Game” is almost certainly not a major factor. It’s likely, then, that these men were rated under the assumption that they have average (e.g. almost none) game.
Men on online dating sites are assumed to have poor game, and to be single, two severe attraction killers. As defined in my October analysis, a man with “7″ looks (84th percentile) and “4″ game (43rd percentile) is sexually attractive to only 2.7% of women. Of course, posting to an online dating site is suggestive of weak game, to the extent that this trait is tacitly assumed by most women. This, in my opinion, explains why the men were rated so badly– and, yes, 1.4 stars is not merely below-average, but abysmal, keeping in mind what I said about rating inflation. I would argue that the cutoff for a “good” average is probably in the mid-3 range (this is someone who is substantially attractive to a few women). Yet less than 10% of men are rated so highly.
What is “game”, again? I defined it as sociosexual confidence, but its root is preselection. Men with “game” are those who adopt the mannerisms of the sexually experienced and somewhat callous. They’ve adopting a set of behaviors to suggest preselection. Registering on an online dating site has the opposite effect– it indicates that a man is single, and eager enough in his search for a partner to invest time in an online profile.
Single men are really in a sandtrap– assumed, because they are unattached, to be awkward, unattractive, and undesirable. It’s inconsistent with the norms of the rest of society; for example, an unemployed man is expected to look for work– that’s normal, and people worry about him if he doesn’t– and yet a single man has absolutely no way of maintaining face while looking, even very casually, for a girlfriend. Simply put, he shouldn’t search. No paying for a stranger to have a nice dinner, no online profiles, no face lighting up when introduced to a pretty girl at a party– none of these can do a man any good.
This all comes down to preselection– women want what is not available to them. Fuck it. I agree with others who’ve called it “the root of all evil”, and it’s a trait that I advocate forcing out of the human species through any means possible– even eugenics, re-education, and aggressive social engineering.
On that note, my guess is that the OkCupid developers, rated as unattractive by their site’s women, posted pictures of themselves next to attractive women, they’d get ratings in the 3-4 range, not the abysmal scores that these average-plus men were given.
Ok. I’m done getting riled up and angry. I need a drink. Over-and-out.
