The Chad myth
Debunking the bogeyman of our time
Key takeaways:
The 80/20 meme: Although sexual encounters are skewed across the population, with the top 20% of men in sexual partners accounting for half or more of all sexual partners, this pattern is neither gender-specific nor intensifying.
STDs don’t lie: Rates of STDs among women and heterosexual men have moved in tandem over time, and overall prevalence is similar—Chlamydia being an exception for reasons outlined.
The 80/20 rule, Pareto principle, or ‘Chadopoly’
2011 saw the rise of the Occupy Wall Street movement, whose slogan, ‘we are the 99%’, encapsulated the growing discontent over wealth inequality. Since then, a similar grievance has been voiced over perceived inequality in the sexual marketplace. This, I’d argue, is the core premise of manosphere worldview: the 80/20 rule, or Pareto principle, applies to sex. Nowadays, many argue it’s as bad as 95/5, and on track to becoming 99/1. We’ll call it the ‘Chadopoly’.
The idea is that a male sexual elite is hoarding an ever-larger share of the sexual pie, leaving the majority of men out in the cold to fight over scraps. This concept is sometimes described as ‘de facto polygyny’ or ‘soft harems’. Previously, this destructive sexual dynamic was suppressed by the enforcement of monogamy. Following the sexual revolution, however (being generous with the timing), it has naturally re-emerged, and is having disastrous effects on society. This narrative has gained enormous popularity and has begun to be adopted by academics.
Below are excerpts from a recent paper (Larsen & Kennair, 2024):
Sex differences in mate preferences empower women in short-term markets, giving them practically unlimited access to casual sex with higher-value men. Less restrained by monogamous mating morality—and given access to larger, more accessible short-term markets through technologies like Tinder—many women can serially date the small percentage of men whom they perceive to be the most attractive.
Season 3 explores how there might still be harmful consequences from how men with low short-term mate value are so strongly discriminated against about promiscuous sex. The fact that modern dating dynamics incentivize women to channel sexual opportunities mostly to the highest-value men could contribute to dysfunction in long-term markets.
Our evolved psychologies make it so that, in the modern West, women have far easier access to casual sex, an advantage they use to channel a disproportionate amount of sexual opportunity to the most attractive men.
Mating opportunities may be increasingly channeled to the most attractive men, but also other men respond to our present era’s promiscuity with a choosiness that makes it even harder for them to find a mate.
Women have the power in short-term markets, but because a large majority of women direct their attention to a small minority of men, mostly the most attractive men benefit from women’s short-term market advantage.
As a result, the average man and woman end up with incomparable sexual histories, with the women running circles around the men:
Strong sex partner stratification between men makes it so that many relationships will be like that of Sigurd and Josefin, in that the woman will be the most sexually experienced.
The sexual revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for everyone except Chad:
Women were promised emancipation through sexual liberation, but post-1968 mating morality has primarily benefitted the small number of men with high short-term mate value.
Widespread polygyny is the default mode of humanity, but until recently, Christianity did a good job of curtailing it, bringing stability to society:
The early-second-millennium Church’s imposition of life-long monogamy restrained Homo sapiens’ bias for polygyny and hindered women from channeling mating opportunities predominantly to the highest-value men.
Red pillers will often try to promise you the secrets to joining the ranks of the sexual elite through alpha male courses, crypto schemes, etc. Black pillers, in contrast, will argue that such efforts are futile, as this elite class is determined by physical attractiveness, which they often refer to as ‘genes’ to emphasize its fixed nature. That said, the community also popularized the term looksmaxxing, suggesting that aesthetic self-improvement can still be worth pursuing.
Do statistics support the 80/20 rule in dating?
It is true that many phenomena in nature follow a power-law distribution. Are sexual encounters a rare exception? Not quite – but there is a fundamental flaw in the conventional framing of it. Let’s start off with a study that looked at 800 US high school students and the peers they indicated they’d had a sexual or romantic relationship with over an 18-month period between 1993 and 1995. The flaw can be roughly observed in this sexual network diagram.
One lucky guy apparently managed to get with nine girls – but even here, only for two of them was he their sole partner, so this can hardly be considered a Chadopoly.
Despite the trope that ‘the jocks get all the girls’, there were actually more female than male nodes with four or more connections. It doesn’t bode well for the Chadopoly theory if we see little across-gender sexual inequality even in an environment where people are in their experimental phase before forming stable long-term relationships.
We also see in nationally representative surveys, such as the National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG), that 20% of young women are responsible for a similarly disproportionate number of sexual encounters as the ‘top 20%’ of men. Therefore, this doesn't constitute a ‘monopoly’ – a minority are simply more promiscuous than the rest, and the effect isn’t uniquely male. The ratio also appears to be quite stable over time. The 80% figure may be a slight exaggeration in this case – to what extent depends on the age range and timeframe – though 80/20 is probably best regarded as a rough rule of thumb.
One study in particular (Harper et al., 2017) has begun to be cited as empirical support for the Chadopolization narrative. Here Lindner (2023) details the findings:
Specifically, it is increasingly common for a minority of men to engage in casual sex and open relationships with many women. Data from the 2011–2013 National Survey of Family Growth, a U.S. household survey focusing on sexual and reproductive health, attests to these perceived grievances: compared to a decade earlier, men overall had the same median number of sex partners in 2013. However, the top 20% of men reported a 25% increase in sexual partners. This increase was even more dramatic among the top 5% of men, for whom the number of sexual partners increased by 38%. Thus, while the amount of male sex that was had was unchanged, more of the sex was consolidated into ‘extra sex’ for the top 5-20% of men.
It was also referenced in the previous Larsen & Kennair study, as well as in a brief article on ‘sexual loneliness’ (Räsänen, 2023) that generated a buzz on social media.
While this study analysed two NSFG waves (2002 and 2011–13), four more surveys have since been conducted. Let’s take a look at them to see whether this apparent trend has continued. If the popular dating app narrative is true then surely it will only have gotten more extreme.
On the contrary, the surveys in 2017–19 and 2022–23 show that the 80th and 95th percentile of men are reporting fewer partners than they were in previous waves.1
We can limit the analysis to those between ages 18–29, divided into four bins, as lifetime sex partners increase substantially during this period. If the trendy dating app narrative is true, we should definitely see an increasing skew in the age range that is most active on dating apps and supposedly embroiled in ‘hook-up culture’. We do not see evidence of this.
Examining sex partners in the past year yields a similar picture. If we look at 18–29s, there is even a hint of a decline in the last two surveys.
Returning to the claim that ‘while the amount of male sex that was had was unchanged, more of the sex was consolidated into ‘extra sex’ for the top 5–20% of men’, this seems implausible on its surface. The same paragraph acknowledges that the number of lifetime partners didn’t change for the median man, meaning the bottom men would have needed to have had a considerable number of sex partners siphoned off by the top men for the overall male total to remain constant.
Let’s say there are 100 men: the top 5% had 12 more,2 and those between the 80th and 95th percentile had three more.3 This comes out to 105 extra partners. I computed the mean lifetime female sex partners for men below the median in 2002, and it was 2.08. For the top men to have ‘taken’ 105 partners, the bottom men would have had to all be virgins by 2011–13 – which with an age range of 15–44 doesn’t seem possible without a mass culling of sex havers. In reality, the mean for this group changed only nonsignificantly, from 2.08 to 2.03.
A simple way to demonstrate this is untrue is to compute the mean lifetime female sex partners. The overall mean for 2002 and 2011–13 was 8.61 and 9.85, respectively – a significant increase (p < 0.005). Additionally, there was no meaningful change in the percentage of men reporting no female sex partners in the past year (21.1% in 2002 vs. 21.5% in 2011–13, slightly inflated by homosexual men). Even within this same dataset, there is no evidence of a zero-sum redistribution producing incels.
Instead, in all three of the previously mentioned papers, the infamous GSS statistic is cited as evidence of a rise growing male sexlessness alongside a supposed rise in promiscuity. Yet two subsequent surveys showed a reversal of this apparent trend.4 The timeframes don’t even align: the GSS shows a rise from 2008–18, but not from 2002–13. To paint the picture they’re trying to paint, you have to cherry-pick different measures from different surveys across different timeframes.
There also seems to have been an error made when it comes to the confidence interval for the 80th percentile of males. When I replicate their analysis, I find the same results for the 95th percentile, the 80th percentile in 2002 returns an upper bound of 15, which going by their criteria for statistical significance would render it a nonsignificant change.
Another survey, NHANES, shows that from 1999–2016, Chad has gotten lazy. To the extent that we’re seeing a decline in sexual activity, he must not be immune to the causes.
Another survey – the Youth Risk Behavior Survey – shows a decline in the proportion of 12th-grade males reporting five or more sex partners in the past three months down to about 2%. This was a highly significant trend (for both genders).
Update: I recently examined the 2023 YRBS data; these are the sex partner distributions for the lifetime and the past three months.
The GSS likewise shows a significant drop in 18–29-year-old men reporting 5–10 sex partners in the past year between 1988–2022. It’s possible that promiscuity has become even more concentrated, and that being in the top 20% isn’t enough anymore. However, we don’t see a corresponding rise in those reporting 11–20 or 21+ sex partners. The latter began at 1% and has since fallen to about 0.5%, though a larger sample size would be needed to detect significance.
Of course, one can always just say that it must be because hypergamy keeps intensifying, and women are all going to the top 0.1% now, then the top 0.01%, until eventually top 0.001% terachads will be relegating mere gigachads to incel forums. In this way, it becomes an unfalsifiable hypothesis.
To conclude the sex partner data section, here’s a simple chart comparing 18–29 men and women’s past-year sex partners:
Not only is the Chadopoly narrative false, but all the hand-wringing over ‘hook-up culture’ is equally misplaced. Roughly 80% of both genders have sex with either one or no partners over the course of a year. Of the remaining 20%, about half of report two partners – and many of these additional partners likely reflect serial monogamy rather than promiscuity. Of the remaining 10%, even the bulk of these can hardly be described as engaging in wild debauchery.
It’s often asserted by detractors of this data that ‘men lie up’ while ‘women lie down’. With this in mind, the sex partner counts of men effectively set an upper limit on female promiscuity, since nobody is seriously claiming that men are downplaying their sexual exploits.
STD trends: Is there a Chad-transmitted disease epidemic?
On a highly liked comment beneath one of the many viral 2018 GSS tweets, it is claimed that women have a sevenfold higher STD rate than men, implying that this is connected to the ‘incel epidemic’:
It’s true that in theory, a Chadopolized hook-up culture would produce a higher STD rate among women than heterosexual men, as the Chads would act as hubs in the sexual network, each connected to multiple female nodes through which infections could spread. We would also expect to see an increasing divergence over time if this pattern were intensifying.
According to both the US and European CDCs, it’s not in fact true that women have STD rates seven times higher than men:
You may have noticed that there is one STD women apparently contract more often: chlamydia. If there aren’t more promiscuous women than heterosexual men, how can this be? Anatomical differences may have something to do with it; for instance, cervical ectopy can make women particularly susceptible.
The primary reason, however, may be more procedural than biological: women are screened at higher rates, as the potential complications are considered more serious in their case (e.g. pelvic inflammatory disease and infertility). The CDC determined in 2007 that screening programs should target young women:
A premise of the consultation was that STD programs should screen women less than 26 years of age for chlamydia infection as a primary focus (24;25) and that screening men for Ct should be considered as a secondary focus to prevent Ct infection and sequelae among women.
When we instead examine positivity rates among those tested, we don’t find higher rates among women:
Regardless, as with the other STDs, there’s no evidence of a widening gap brought about by dating app-facilitated Chadopolization.
To the extent that infection rates are rising, this doesn’t necessarily indicate rising promiscuity; it may instance declining condom use – one behaviour that seems to buck the broader ‘risk aversion’ trend.
If there were any doubts regarding self-reported partner counts, this data should largely bypass them – unless one believes the CDC is fudging the numbers to keep the Chadspiracy under wraps.
Conclusion
What is true is that mating isn’t perfectly symmetrical. However, this asymmetry is found within each gender, and not so much between them. Where a between-gender asymmetry does exist, it lies chiefly in the appetite for casual sex and sexual variety. While it’s theoretically plausible that such sex differences could result in the most desirable men fooling around with women they wouldn’t be caught dead with in public, it could just as easily suggest that promiscuity in the heterosexual community is not something which flourishes naturally, even in the absence of strict social norms opposing it, or with the active encouragement of sex-positivity.
It may be the case that monogamy isn’t quite what it used to be, with the institution of marriage waning and shorter-lived pair bonds becoming more common. ‘Serial monogamy’ is sometimes described as a form of ‘de facto polygyny’, but if so, the effect must be subtle enough to avoid clear detection in the sex partner data.
The narrative that uncommitted sexual encounters have replaced pair bonding as the normative sexual script has the potential to do harm, as it nurtures unrealistic expectations which, when inevitably unmet, could give way to disillusionment and resentment. This may be partially responsible for the rise of the Chadopoly theory: if women are hooking up left and right yet I'm missing out on this action, then they must be directing their lust toward that small pool of men who make them wet.
In reality, the data make it clear that if ‘hook-up culture’ exists, it’s at most in the weak sense that society is more tolerant of premarital sex and less tolerant of ‘slut shaming’. More of an attitudinal shift than a behavioural one. Otherwise, when talking heterosexuals at least, we're at most talking about a fringe subculture. There may have been some sex-crazed nymphomaniacs waiting to be liberated from the shackles of sexual repression, but they seem to have been the exception rather than the rule.
When some people hear that ‘women are more selective’, they construe it as ‘they sleep around with a bunch of hot guys’. This misconception is especially prevalent within the incel community, where the belief tends to be that women are just as horny and open to uncommitted sex as men – but only for a small slice of the population:
The overrepresentation of autistic traits in this community may play a role, seeing as autism is associated with limited cognitive empathy. If anything, ‘black pillers’ aren’t black pilled enough. Even ‘Chads’ don't just have sex handed to them on a silver platter. While it’s conceivable that some men might figure that stringing women along and feigning commitment is the most effective way to get sex, it's probably not in most men’s nature to exploit people like this, or maybe even to exert the required effort, and also women tend to be effective at sniffing out this kind of deception (Buss, 2017).
Many have speculated that the singleness gap in the Pew survey signals the rise of this phenomenon, but as I’ve shown, this data is likely misleading; and even if it weren’t, the gap is primarily driven by higher cohabitation and marriage rates among young women, leaving sneaky Machiavellian Chads with little room to spin their plates.
Aside from this, why do so many people cling to the Chadopoly theory with such conviction despite such scant evidence?
Much of it may simply come down to dating apps. The narrative that dating apps are enabling a Chadopolized hook-up culture has ballooned to insane proportions. It’s not too hard to see how, at first glance, the gender dynamics could create this impression: women tend to swipe right on relatively few profiles, and as a result it’s difficult for most men to get matches. For reasons that I still struggle to understand, otherwise intelligent people will frequently leap from these observations to wild and completely unjustified conclusions. Why these extrapolations are unjustified is detailed further in this article:
For those frustrated by a lack of female attention, Chad serves as a convenient scapegoat: if you don’t have something, it must have been stolen by a big bad bogeyman. It’s arguably more comforting to imagine yourself as belonging to a burgeoning cohort of men victimized by a rigged system wherein ‘the winner takes all’ than to confront the reality that you belong to a minority of men who are struggling for their own reasons. Add in the endless parade of ‘Chadfish’ videos and similar ragebait content which tap into this frustration and insecurity to stoke envy and resentment, and this character begins living in their heads rent-free.
When it comes down to it, the narrative never made much sense to begin with. Sixty years is a long time – at least three generations have lived under the effects of ‘sexual liberation’. Sure, KISS and Van Halen may have had their fair share of groupies, but there has been no sign of a widescale transition into a ‘de facto polygynous’ mating system. We only started hearing reports of an ‘incel epidemic’ in recent years, and an appreciable gender gap in sexlessness only emerged in GSS data in 2018 (which wasn’t seen in subsequent surveys). Even if one wanted to argue that dating apps accelerated the imagined Chadopolization process, there had to be something there to accelerate – which the evidence does not support – and there’s nothing that would have obviously prevented it from occurring before. It never even began for Chad.
References
Larsen, M., & Kennair, L. E. O. (2024). Enough with the incels! A literary cry for help from female insings (involuntary single).Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1037/ebs0000349
Bearman, P. S., Moody, J., & Stovel, K. (2004c). Chains of Affection: the structure of adolescent romantic and sexual networks. American Journal of Sociology, 110(1), 44–91. https://doi.org/10.1086/386272
Harper, C. R., Dittus, P. J., Leichliter, J. S., & Aral, S. O. (2017). Changes in the Distribution of Sex Partners in the United States: 2002 to 2011-2013. Sexually transmitted diseases, 44(2), 96–100. https://doi.org/10.1097/OLQ.0000000000000554
Lindner, M. (2023). The Sense in Senseless Violence: Male Reproductive Strategy and the Modern Sexual Marketplace as Contributors to Violent Extremism. Adaptive Human Behavior and Physiology, 9(3), 217–251. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40750-023-00219-w
Räsänen, J. (2023). Sexual loneliness: A neglected public health problem? Bioethics, 37(2), 101–102. https://doi.org/10.1111/bioe.13134
Lee, V., Tobin, J. M., & Foley, E. (2006). Relationship of cervical ectopy to chlamydia infection in young women. The journal of family planning and reproductive health care, 32(2), 104–106. https://doi.org/10.1783/147118906776276440
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2007). Male Chlamydia Screening Consultation, March 28-29, 2006, Meeting Report. Available at: https://www.cdc.gov/std/chlamydia/chlamydiascreening-males.pdf
Alexander. (2023). Male Attractiveness and Sexual Partner Count. Date Psychology. Available at: https://datepsychology.com/male-attractiveness-and-sexual-partner-count/
Buss, D. M. (2017). Sexual conflict in human mating. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 26(4), 307–313. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963721417695559
The latest survey was multimodal; the online sample reported significantly less sexual activity than the face-to-face one (potential reasons discussed here), but limiting the sample to FTF respondents only increases the number of partners among the 95th percentile to 35.
At a minimum, as 50+ is the cap in this survey and those above the 95th percentile could have experienced a larger increase.
At a minimum, those closer to the 95th percentile probably saw a higher increase.
The latest survey result could just as easily be a random fluctuation in the other direction; the sample size for the GSS is low, especially after stratification. The NSFG shows evidence for a very mild trend which both started at a higher point and ended at a lower one than the GSS trend from 2008-18.
>The negligible correlations between attractiveness/height and sex partners have not risen in recent years.
This matches my intuition. I know not conv. attractive guys who have a lot of not conv. attractive sex partners. Most of "inceldom" is basically not accepting one's league. I distinctly remember being 16 and having two utterly different mental categories for attractive girls in the class, whom I categorized as "girls" and the other girls whom I categorized as "classmates".
Dating apps: so there are dating sites, which are used with a computer and revolve around writing and reading profiles, and dating apps, which are phone based and revolve around pics. These later are necessarily more looks-based, but there is also the part where a lot of guys really don't know how to take a good pic, the gym mirror selfie, the bathroom mirror selfie... generally the best idea is pics while doing interesting things.
Also, it is useful to conceptualize Tinder by comparing it to lottery, small chance of very high payoffs, with all the usual features of lottery.
stop trying to subvert our society jewy