Here's my understanding of the "slut overrepresentation" misconception: the squeaky wheel.
Promiscuous women are squeaky wheels. Let's say that promiscuous women are 1% of the population. In my survey, I found that less than 16% of women are on Tinder. However, if all of the promiscuous women are on Tinder, then promiscuous women will *appear* to be 6.25% of all Tinder users.
Next, imagine you're a man swiping right on Tinder. You swipe on 16 different profiles. The first 15 are women without any signs of promiscuity -- no cleavage, no sexual language. However, profile #16 is extremely promiscuous. Because #16 is a squeaky wheel, she stands out more in the man's memory than the 15 other profiles. This biases the man's memory to think that 50% of women are promiscuous.
The other explanation I would put forward is that men tend to ignore ugly women. When men say, "women are promiscuous," they are almost exclusively thinking of and talking about attractive women. Ugly women (femcels) might not be having sex, but as far as men are concerned, these women don't exist.
Attractiveness is difficult to measure in the data, but I would hazard to guess that attractive women have higher body counts than the average woman.
'Let's say that promiscuous women are 1% of the population. In my survey, I found that less than 16% of women are on Tinder. However, if all of the promiscuous women are on Tinder, then promiscuous women will *appear* to be 6.25% of all Tinder users.'
Could definitely be onto something -- I was wondering if something like this could be at play but wasn't quite sure how to frame it. I was also thinking that if these women could also be algorithmically boosted: if men are more keen to swipe right on women that signal sexual openness and those women are less willing to service everyone than they appear, their ranking should end up high. Tbh I think it has to be more than 6% of profiles you see on that app.
I also meant to include something in the previous article about women dressing more provocatively in general and showing more skin in public but it slipped my mind. Not sure how strongly this actually signals more promiscuous inclinations; my guess is not very.
'Attractiveness is difficult to measure in the data, but I would hazard to guess that attractive women have higher body counts than the average woman.'
Interesting, because usually the assumption is the opposite, often justified with evolutionary logic. The idea is that more attractive women due to their greater bargaining power have less motivation to offer uncommitted sex as they can more easily secure commitment from desired partners. In terms of overall sex partners though, more attractive people of both genders might accrue more simply due to staying single for shorter periods. Reminds me that I was going to look into whether the data bore this out; so far it looks like there's probably not much effect either way though.
I think the median bodycount of women using tinder is probably 2-3 per year. But you also have to consider that profiles are displayed according to activity level. If a woman is constantly on tinder, her profile gets boosted over the girl who uses it once a month.
The problem gets worse with matches. A woman may be on tinder, but match with no one. The women who match with 100s of men are the most promiscuous women. From the male perspective, promiscuous women are overrepresented in their matches.
It’s possible that there’s a small percentage of Tinder users who are having dozens of hookups per year, but it’s not a Chadopoly. It’s a Slutopoly, where a small number of highly promiscuous women are having many encounters with a small number of highly promiscuous men. Then incels watch from the sidelines and label the men chads and the women “typical/average.”
'The problem gets worse with matches. A woman may be on tinder, but match with no one. The women who match with 100s of men are the most promiscuous women. From the male perspective, promiscuous women are overrepresented in their matches.'
Is this true? I would've thought if they were more popular they could afford to be more selective. Like I said, I don't think they're actually looking to service a large number of men, and being more selective also boosts your ranking. They might be more willing to service certain men and be more overrepresented among their matches though.
DatePsych has argued that the most attractive women have lower bodycounts because, in contrast to less attractive women who may have to use early sex for mate retention, attractive women have no such need and can afford the pickiness that all women may prefer. And the least attractive women are mostly excluded, rather than chaste by choice, so it ends up being a curvilinear relationship.
“I still don’t understand why people are so desperate to believe this”
Tbh I think this is a much more interesting phenomenon than the data itself. I can think of tons of contributing factors but idk how you could collect data on it:
1) Women’s promiscuity as a topic in media has been increasing for a while and a lot of guys infer this must be a reflection of reality. Women love songs about having sex all the time, and they’re not having sex with me or anyone I know, so they must be all having sex off screen with the same guy. When in reality, women just enjoy it vicariously through these songs/shows in the same way a guy would enjoy a rapper talking about making a million dollars or killing his opps.
2) Dating apps encourage this thinking because it makes them money. They rly shock even attractive men into a scarcity mindset. Men are constantly seeing women on dating apps but being rejected, so they infer that SOMEONE has to be getting accepted somewhere. Why else would the women be on there? Which leads to the next point
3) Bad mental model of women’s behavior. They just assume women act like they would if they had the same power on dating apps, but don’t understand it’s a completely different game for them. If they were women, they would be having sex constantly until they settled down later in life, so they assume this must be desirable for women too. This also leads to valuing quantity of sex over quality, which most women would find ridiculous.
4) They need Chad to exist because it gives them hope that SOMEONE is being fulfilled by the dating app game. Even if they aren’t, it gives them hope that they’re not wasting all their mental energy being resentful over not getting something that won’t even make them happy. If even the men who get sex from dating apps are unhappy and still face constant rejection, they would need something else to blame for why they feel like shit all the time.
Chad is just a sexually attractive man. They do exist. For instance, if you need to take a woman out on a date before sex then she likely doesn't find you attractive.
"I still don’t fully understand why people are so desperate to believe this"
Reading the comments on the previous article, it's easy to tell why: misogyny. That's how hatred and prejudice against women looks like. To value the data, they have to trust women's reports. It's not going to happen, since misogynists believe all women are liars.
They can't justify that, and can't admit they just hate women, so they rationalize and cope themselves into thinking they know more than researchers, that thousands of women every year coordinate with each other to lie in the same way so the numbers are consistent, etc. It's not that their worldview is wrong, is that "all women are whores" and is "blue pill" to suggest otherwise.
You are dealing with emotional manchildren. Good article.
Cock Carousel Theroy (CCT) would predict, top x% of males are having a lot more sex, which checks out or otherwise compatible with data you presented (removing 99% percentile of male would be a mistake like in the 2019 paper for this discussion - they also reported male 10% lifetimepaid prostitute use, stuff like that should be removed)
CCT would predict before age of marrige-engagement for men and women(or before/between long term relationships?), non-top x% male sex havers would have lower average sex having than females (excluding female prostitute - who knows what percent) -- your NSFG data doesn't really suggest this without wild assumption but I don't think the rest really apply directly
Need more bogus pipeline condition type studies, for now I'd increase female pre-engagement age partner count by 30% and remove 10% of men for prostitute use to see how it looks if we had between relationship type data that is per age than grouped and without the prostitution stuff.
I wouldn't expect CCT outcome to be true widely for all sorts of reasons but maybe only where there are higher concentration of sex-chads or easier access to them that it should be true. Sex-chads would be an extreme rarity and would be busy with women so chance of other women finding them easily and in the right info/safety-availability-context is low. In the meantime women might be in relationship so when sex-chad do show up, risk of acting on it is higher.
'(CCT) would predict, top x% of males are having a lot more sex, which checks out or otherwise compatible with data you presented (removing 99% percentile of male would be a mistake'
It doesn't start and end there though, it also tends to be accompanied by claims of rising promiscuity (among women and 'Chads') and an increasing skew in men's partner distribution. As mentioned in the footnote (with a link to the graph), there's also no consistent upward trend in the average male partner count when you include outliers reporting over 100 partners. It's just a bit more messy without the cap because there will randomly be a few who report 989 or more partners. I guess I could increase it to 200, which includes 99.7% of men, without as much of an issue. Or will it then become the top 0.1%? You can't just keep pushing Chad into an ever smaller box. Even 1% is going beyond common claims of the top 20% or 5% hoarding an increasing share.
What would you response to the STD argument be?
Increasing female partner counts by 30% would probably just make things line up even more evenly tbh.
“there's also no consistent upward trend in the average male partner count when you include outliers reporting over 100 partners”
CCT isn't incompatible with that though, idk what you mean then. The data can mean regular Joe haivng sex less and sex-chad is having more sex evening it out (lol@2004). Is there a way to see top x% male-sex-havers vs the rest partner count in that tool over the years? There could be a different trend.
“You can't just keep pushing Chad into an ever smaller box”
I think bottom 80% of men and women sex-havers being equal would be good enough for the outcome purpose for that since 80-20 thing is a meme. Although the concern probably won't go away even if all women were found to be virgin before marrige since it's likely about built in unconcious paternal uncertainty risk expectations.
“What would you response to the STD argument be?”
I'd expect "Men who have sex with women only" and "women who have sex with men only" to be equal (excluding clamadya like stuff where it's female biased), if not(as your graph from other article shows) something is missing from data. I'm guessing these are not self reported but data from medical records, so not much upto desirability bias and such.
For STDs you'd also need to remove top x% men and sex worker women and then compare rest of the men's STD rate pre-marrige with non-prostitute women's STDs rates for CCT. Would probably be hard to find such data in research. (Post marrige/long term relationship the STDs are going to even out if CCT is true since they are going to get passed to the beta bucks.)
'CCT isn't incompatible with that though, idk what you mean then.'
Because like I said the CCT is also associated with the narrative that promiscuity is rising. It's not just framed as a zero-sum redistribution typically. This was just about the limit of female promiscuity and how much it can be rising.
'Is there a way to see top x% male-sex-havers vs the rest partner count in that tool over the years?'
Yes, you can look at the partner counts of certain percentiles. I've already done this in the Chadopoly article, finding no evidence for increasing partner counts among the 80th or 95th percentiles.
'I'd expect "Men who have sex with women only" and "women who have sex with men only" to be equal (excluding clamadya like stuff where it's female biased), if not(as your graph from other article shows) something is missing from data'
It wouldn't be if men and women's partner distributions were significantly different in their skew though.
There are other things that can go into STD transmission such as biological factors, but I'm not too familiar with the details.
For women, could it be partly due to them finding few men sexually attractive and rarely getting the chance with these types of men? It's important to note that women make rules for men they're not attracted to (going on dates before sex) and break them for the men that they are attracted to.
If every redpill/manosphere podcast ecosystem and the entire dating discourse disappeared tomorrow, I think it would reassemble in some very close form with the same talking points within a year from independent (mis)observations and outlier reports and extrapolations. Not only are the Chad harem, stacy body count, and looks/height myths memetic, they’re schelling points for dating opinions. Even normies or those outside of structured dating discourse I think believe it if they are queried, just don’t give it much thought or emotion. People generally do very poorly with estimating small probability and top percentile experiences bc of salience bias, which are magnified all the more with social media and its underlying virality mechanisms and the appearance of normality behind those documented experiences. That’s what you’re fighting against with this moderating and qualifying argument. And you seem to be the only one doing so systemically now that datepsych is less active. Is there any chance you think that this ever gets picked up in the mainstream or at least has some prominent figureheads advocating for … or is this all an exercise for the few?
Here's my understanding of the "slut overrepresentation" misconception: the squeaky wheel.
Promiscuous women are squeaky wheels. Let's say that promiscuous women are 1% of the population. In my survey, I found that less than 16% of women are on Tinder. However, if all of the promiscuous women are on Tinder, then promiscuous women will *appear* to be 6.25% of all Tinder users.
Next, imagine you're a man swiping right on Tinder. You swipe on 16 different profiles. The first 15 are women without any signs of promiscuity -- no cleavage, no sexual language. However, profile #16 is extremely promiscuous. Because #16 is a squeaky wheel, she stands out more in the man's memory than the 15 other profiles. This biases the man's memory to think that 50% of women are promiscuous.
The other explanation I would put forward is that men tend to ignore ugly women. When men say, "women are promiscuous," they are almost exclusively thinking of and talking about attractive women. Ugly women (femcels) might not be having sex, but as far as men are concerned, these women don't exist.
Attractiveness is difficult to measure in the data, but I would hazard to guess that attractive women have higher body counts than the average woman.
'Let's say that promiscuous women are 1% of the population. In my survey, I found that less than 16% of women are on Tinder. However, if all of the promiscuous women are on Tinder, then promiscuous women will *appear* to be 6.25% of all Tinder users.'
Could definitely be onto something -- I was wondering if something like this could be at play but wasn't quite sure how to frame it. I was also thinking that if these women could also be algorithmically boosted: if men are more keen to swipe right on women that signal sexual openness and those women are less willing to service everyone than they appear, their ranking should end up high. Tbh I think it has to be more than 6% of profiles you see on that app.
I also meant to include something in the previous article about women dressing more provocatively in general and showing more skin in public but it slipped my mind. Not sure how strongly this actually signals more promiscuous inclinations; my guess is not very.
'Attractiveness is difficult to measure in the data, but I would hazard to guess that attractive women have higher body counts than the average woman.'
Interesting, because usually the assumption is the opposite, often justified with evolutionary logic. The idea is that more attractive women due to their greater bargaining power have less motivation to offer uncommitted sex as they can more easily secure commitment from desired partners. In terms of overall sex partners though, more attractive people of both genders might accrue more simply due to staying single for shorter periods. Reminds me that I was going to look into whether the data bore this out; so far it looks like there's probably not much effect either way though.
I think the median bodycount of women using tinder is probably 2-3 per year. But you also have to consider that profiles are displayed according to activity level. If a woman is constantly on tinder, her profile gets boosted over the girl who uses it once a month.
The problem gets worse with matches. A woman may be on tinder, but match with no one. The women who match with 100s of men are the most promiscuous women. From the male perspective, promiscuous women are overrepresented in their matches.
It’s possible that there’s a small percentage of Tinder users who are having dozens of hookups per year, but it’s not a Chadopoly. It’s a Slutopoly, where a small number of highly promiscuous women are having many encounters with a small number of highly promiscuous men. Then incels watch from the sidelines and label the men chads and the women “typical/average.”
'The problem gets worse with matches. A woman may be on tinder, but match with no one. The women who match with 100s of men are the most promiscuous women. From the male perspective, promiscuous women are overrepresented in their matches.'
Is this true? I would've thought if they were more popular they could afford to be more selective. Like I said, I don't think they're actually looking to service a large number of men, and being more selective also boosts your ranking. They might be more willing to service certain men and be more overrepresented among their matches though.
It's not about service; it's about matches.
There are also plenty of bots who probably deceive men.
Yeah I got you. Just wasn't really my experience that those kinds of women were easier to match with.
DatePsych has argued that the most attractive women have lower bodycounts because, in contrast to less attractive women who may have to use early sex for mate retention, attractive women have no such need and can afford the pickiness that all women may prefer. And the least attractive women are mostly excluded, rather than chaste by choice, so it ends up being a curvilinear relationship.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fzw0hfP81bo
Open to changing my mind! I’ll take a read when I have a chance. Appreciate the thought and research that clearly went into this piece.
My bad for assuming otherwise, then. Looking forward to your feedback.
“I still don’t understand why people are so desperate to believe this”
Tbh I think this is a much more interesting phenomenon than the data itself. I can think of tons of contributing factors but idk how you could collect data on it:
1) Women’s promiscuity as a topic in media has been increasing for a while and a lot of guys infer this must be a reflection of reality. Women love songs about having sex all the time, and they’re not having sex with me or anyone I know, so they must be all having sex off screen with the same guy. When in reality, women just enjoy it vicariously through these songs/shows in the same way a guy would enjoy a rapper talking about making a million dollars or killing his opps.
2) Dating apps encourage this thinking because it makes them money. They rly shock even attractive men into a scarcity mindset. Men are constantly seeing women on dating apps but being rejected, so they infer that SOMEONE has to be getting accepted somewhere. Why else would the women be on there? Which leads to the next point
3) Bad mental model of women’s behavior. They just assume women act like they would if they had the same power on dating apps, but don’t understand it’s a completely different game for them. If they were women, they would be having sex constantly until they settled down later in life, so they assume this must be desirable for women too. This also leads to valuing quantity of sex over quality, which most women would find ridiculous.
4) They need Chad to exist because it gives them hope that SOMEONE is being fulfilled by the dating app game. Even if they aren’t, it gives them hope that they’re not wasting all their mental energy being resentful over not getting something that won’t even make them happy. If even the men who get sex from dating apps are unhappy and still face constant rejection, they would need something else to blame for why they feel like shit all the time.
Chad is just a sexually attractive man. They do exist. For instance, if you need to take a woman out on a date before sex then she likely doesn't find you attractive.
"I still don’t fully understand why people are so desperate to believe this"
Reading the comments on the previous article, it's easy to tell why: misogyny. That's how hatred and prejudice against women looks like. To value the data, they have to trust women's reports. It's not going to happen, since misogynists believe all women are liars.
They can't justify that, and can't admit they just hate women, so they rationalize and cope themselves into thinking they know more than researchers, that thousands of women every year coordinate with each other to lie in the same way so the numbers are consistent, etc. It's not that their worldview is wrong, is that "all women are whores" and is "blue pill" to suggest otherwise.
You are dealing with emotional manchildren. Good article.
Cock Carousel Theroy (CCT) would predict, top x% of males are having a lot more sex, which checks out or otherwise compatible with data you presented (removing 99% percentile of male would be a mistake like in the 2019 paper for this discussion - they also reported male 10% lifetimepaid prostitute use, stuff like that should be removed)
CCT would predict before age of marrige-engagement for men and women(or before/between long term relationships?), non-top x% male sex havers would have lower average sex having than females (excluding female prostitute - who knows what percent) -- your NSFG data doesn't really suggest this without wild assumption but I don't think the rest really apply directly
Need more bogus pipeline condition type studies, for now I'd increase female pre-engagement age partner count by 30% and remove 10% of men for prostitute use to see how it looks if we had between relationship type data that is per age than grouped and without the prostitution stuff.
I wouldn't expect CCT outcome to be true widely for all sorts of reasons but maybe only where there are higher concentration of sex-chads or easier access to them that it should be true. Sex-chads would be an extreme rarity and would be busy with women so chance of other women finding them easily and in the right info/safety-availability-context is low. In the meantime women might be in relationship so when sex-chad do show up, risk of acting on it is higher.
'(CCT) would predict, top x% of males are having a lot more sex, which checks out or otherwise compatible with data you presented (removing 99% percentile of male would be a mistake'
It doesn't start and end there though, it also tends to be accompanied by claims of rising promiscuity (among women and 'Chads') and an increasing skew in men's partner distribution. As mentioned in the footnote (with a link to the graph), there's also no consistent upward trend in the average male partner count when you include outliers reporting over 100 partners. It's just a bit more messy without the cap because there will randomly be a few who report 989 or more partners. I guess I could increase it to 200, which includes 99.7% of men, without as much of an issue. Or will it then become the top 0.1%? You can't just keep pushing Chad into an ever smaller box. Even 1% is going beyond common claims of the top 20% or 5% hoarding an increasing share.
What would you response to the STD argument be?
Increasing female partner counts by 30% would probably just make things line up even more evenly tbh.
“there's also no consistent upward trend in the average male partner count when you include outliers reporting over 100 partners”
CCT isn't incompatible with that though, idk what you mean then. The data can mean regular Joe haivng sex less and sex-chad is having more sex evening it out (lol@2004). Is there a way to see top x% male-sex-havers vs the rest partner count in that tool over the years? There could be a different trend.
“You can't just keep pushing Chad into an ever smaller box”
I think bottom 80% of men and women sex-havers being equal would be good enough for the outcome purpose for that since 80-20 thing is a meme. Although the concern probably won't go away even if all women were found to be virgin before marrige since it's likely about built in unconcious paternal uncertainty risk expectations.
“What would you response to the STD argument be?”
I'd expect "Men who have sex with women only" and "women who have sex with men only" to be equal (excluding clamadya like stuff where it's female biased), if not(as your graph from other article shows) something is missing from data. I'm guessing these are not self reported but data from medical records, so not much upto desirability bias and such.
For STDs you'd also need to remove top x% men and sex worker women and then compare rest of the men's STD rate pre-marrige with non-prostitute women's STDs rates for CCT. Would probably be hard to find such data in research. (Post marrige/long term relationship the STDs are going to even out if CCT is true since they are going to get passed to the beta bucks.)
'CCT isn't incompatible with that though, idk what you mean then.'
Because like I said the CCT is also associated with the narrative that promiscuity is rising. It's not just framed as a zero-sum redistribution typically. This was just about the limit of female promiscuity and how much it can be rising.
'Is there a way to see top x% male-sex-havers vs the rest partner count in that tool over the years?'
Yes, you can look at the partner counts of certain percentiles. I've already done this in the Chadopoly article, finding no evidence for increasing partner counts among the 80th or 95th percentiles.
'I'd expect "Men who have sex with women only" and "women who have sex with men only" to be equal (excluding clamadya like stuff where it's female biased), if not(as your graph from other article shows) something is missing from data'
It wouldn't be if men and women's partner distributions were significantly different in their skew though.
There are other things that can go into STD transmission such as biological factors, but I'm not too familiar with the details.
For women, could it be partly due to them finding few men sexually attractive and rarely getting the chance with these types of men? It's important to note that women make rules for men they're not attracted to (going on dates before sex) and break them for the men that they are attracted to.
If every redpill/manosphere podcast ecosystem and the entire dating discourse disappeared tomorrow, I think it would reassemble in some very close form with the same talking points within a year from independent (mis)observations and outlier reports and extrapolations. Not only are the Chad harem, stacy body count, and looks/height myths memetic, they’re schelling points for dating opinions. Even normies or those outside of structured dating discourse I think believe it if they are queried, just don’t give it much thought or emotion. People generally do very poorly with estimating small probability and top percentile experiences bc of salience bias, which are magnified all the more with social media and its underlying virality mechanisms and the appearance of normality behind those documented experiences. That’s what you’re fighting against with this moderating and qualifying argument. And you seem to be the only one doing so systemically now that datepsych is less active. Is there any chance you think that this ever gets picked up in the mainstream or at least has some prominent figureheads advocating for … or is this all an exercise for the few?
Human sexuality in modern times is a nothingburger