Comment by awaythrowwwww | Hacker News Reader

Comment by awaythrowwwww | Hacker News Reader

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I see the "women go after 20% of men" line repeated over and over again as if it's some sort of self-evident truth. Aside from the fact that people who spew this line generally go on to justify why women's agency should be reduced ("enforced monogamy" or whatever that means), I have never seen any evidence for this stat. And no, how people behave on dating sites is not an accurate representation of social dynamics at large. It takes a certain kind of personality to go on dating sites and American men and women on Okcupid don't represent all men and women in the world. Dating apps also highly bias the way you engage people with undisclosed algorithms and shady practices aiming at maximizing your time on their apps. They don't have people's best interests at heart and influence them as part of their business model.

But seriously, think about the implications of these numbers: do 8 women just patiently wait in line for 2 men, doing literally nothing in the meantime while the remaining 8 men just stare at their feet or something? Is it something that people think actually happens in real life?

It is well established, from what I gather, that in many species, most (=more than half of the) ancestors (of the extant population) are female. For most of human history, most women had children, while most men did not have children. So, that is something that happened in real life.

Are you implying that our ancestors have had only as many sexual relations as they had children?

No. Are you implying that there is a systematic difference between men and women in the ratio of sexual relations and children?

I don't understand what you said. I also don't understand what children have to do with this and how they relate in any way to the amount of sex one may have beyond "once or twice".

If anything, our evolutionary history indicates a promiscuous lifestyle with everyone having sex with everyone else and post-spermatic competition.

I mean, the 80/20 rule is seen in all kinds of places. Probably the top 20% [0] of men are involved in the 80% of heterosexual sexual couplings, with the remaining 80% of men being involved in the other 80%.

Where the stat kind of fails flat is that the same is true of the top 20% of women.

That said, the model (with no statement being made of how much that model reflects reality) being described is sequential monogamy. One of the top 20% men will continuously have one or two partners, switching them out for new ones; the rest of the men will only rarely get a partner; and women will fall between those two. Matching them percentile-to-percentile, the average number of new partners in some timespan for a given percentile for women will be larger for women than for men, up until some crossover percentile X% at which point men will have more partners.

I do think that if a person's primary mode of dating is through online apps, they end up with a skewed mental model of what dating is like. They are, however, already the main mode of new relationships being formed, and perhaps are still increasing in importance.

[0] "Top 20%" being defined as the 20% of men who have the most sexual partners

"I mean, the 80/20 rule is seen in all kinds of places"

Sorry, repeating the same point won't make it any more true. Still haven't seen any evidence for this stat, only American stereotypes.

It's hard to track people's sex lives for obvious logistical/ethical reasons, but the most accurate study I've read on that was about teenagers in a high-school in a small rural town, so a closed environment that's easy to control. Forgot the link, will track it down if you're interested. But basically the "sex encounter" graph was fairly evenly spread and evenly balanced between men and women. Sure enough there were "clusters" but they were engaged with each other, not monopolizing 80% of everyone.

As it turns out, if your social circle is made up of sociosexually unrestricted people, everyone involved is going to have lots of sex. If it's made up of restricted people, few people are going to have encounters. But one person or two keeping all women in a sort of "serial monogamous schedule" while they do liteally nothing else? That doesn't make sense and I've never seen it happen, nor have I read any actual scientific study about this.

Dating in real life within a small(ish) social circle and modern online dating where the available pool is literally millions of people is completely different

Online dating is a tiny, tiny blip in the world of dating. Dating itself is a uniquely American practice and a tiny, tiny blip in the world of sociosexual dynamics. People meet, hook up with and bond with each other in all sorts of creative ways that goes way beyond Tinder, Bumble and Okcupid. If your only outlook on this stuff is through the lens of apps owned by shady companies optimizing for user engagement, you're going to have a skewed and miserable worldview.

Online dating is the only dating for many young people nowadays. Alcohol used to be a major factor in finding a partner but young people are drinking less and less by the year.

The social skills of the youth are also getting worse due to smartphones, leading to less interaction in schools at workplaces etc

Two objections:

1. The 80/20 rule is a rule of thumb that happens to apply in many fields, but you can't take it as a general law and stipulate that "Probably the top 20% [0] of men are involved in the 80% of heterosexual sexual couplings". It's an empirical question.

2. "the same is true of the top 20% of women". No, probably not. The statistics for men and women look quite different (which goes to show that you can't just apply the 80/20 "rule" willy-nilly).

Yes, empirical data is necessary for both, and it exists for both (I'm sure people will be posting that data, and I'm too lazy to look it up myself), but I'd bet an arbitrary amount of money that the top 20% of men get closer to 80% of the couplings than 20% of the couplings. It's an almost equally good bet that the top 20% of women get closer to 80% of the couplings than 20% of the couplings.

That 80/20 comes from Tinder sharing stats a couple of years back. Same was done by other dating sites with similar outcome. But that is probably not the only source for it.

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