Mona Pereth wrote:
Unfortunately "Wheat Waffles," the creator of this video, has also made another video, titled "Who Cares More About Looks? Men or Women" in which he claims that when women say we value personality more than looks, we're lying. Moreover, he claims that women value looks even more than men do.
He says he bases these claims on the differing results of surveys of women's stated preferences vs. studies of women's actual actions.
Problem: The study he cited, regarding women's actual actions, had to do with women's behavior on dating apps, specifically. Problems with this:
1) Women who use dating apps are not representative of women in general. Women are much less likely than men to use dating apps.
2) Most of today's dating apps -- especially Tinder, the one used in the study -- are intrinsically looks-oriented. The first thing a user sees about potential partners is a photo. Furthermore, a potential partner's looks can be evaluated in a split-second, whereas everything else about a potential partner takes much longer to evaluate. So, even if the user sincerely considers personality to be more important than looks, the very structure of today's dating apps impels people to evaluate looks first, then everything else later.
3) Because fewer women than men use dating apps, women seeking men have a lot more choices than men seeking women. This would likely exacerbate the looks-first tendency mentioned above. It conceivably might even be true that women on dating apps judge potential partners more by looks than men on dating apps do, simply because the women on dating apps have more people to judge, hence less time in which to judge any given potential partner.
All of the above is far less likely to be true for women and men who meet in more old-fashioned ways, e.g. at church (where there are likely to be more women than men).
It might even be true that a woman who meets men both via dating apps and by more old-fashioned means might judge the exact same man in very different ways, and by very different criteria (at least initially), depending on the setting in which she first encounters him.
A guy named AlexDatePsych has made similar suggestions to what you're saying above, as well as that when looking at the curve of women's attraction to men per studies being a curve that's peaked against the left side of the map (where men fall on a 0 to 10 rating) there's the possibility that yes - most women aren't attracted to most men, but they are attracted to 'type', maybe 10's unite the curves but that's a bit like saying that most men would fine certain women attracted and most women unattracted and this would be a diffuse effect rather than every whole number a guy steps down from a 10 being exponential loss of relationship opportunity.
The other bit - yeah - we really need some institutional way or context to meet people that isn't Tinder or sites like it. The problem with all of it - if that eats the public square, ie. becomes the de facto Twitter or Instagram of dating, that's Darwinian evolution taking us down a very particular rabbit hole, cheapening the heck out of human life until the game is so degrading that only low-EQ NT's of the sort that are just winning oriented with little introspective capacity (a lot of subclinical cluster B) would be interested in it. It's a bit like sanitizing the gene pool of anything that looks like a well-rounded person. It's what complexity theorists would call an acceleration of network dynamics which create incentives in that direction (and the technology itself is clearly not neutral - it's framing the terms of the behavior).
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“Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word "love" here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace - not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.” - James Baldwin
23 Dec 2022, 7:44 pm
