Why such a hostile response to someone who cares about presenting themselves in a way they see fit? Your image is very important and it's logical that they want to control theirs.
The whole AI discussion reminds me of David Graeber's "bullshit jobs" book. If the content doesn't matter, why not have an AI generate something polite and meaningless? Why not save effort managing your inbox full of meaningless emails by having the AI summarize them? It might lose some of the details, but they didn't matter. And so more and more of the white collar world gets replaced by AI .. until it actually disrupts away all the bullshit jobs entirely.
1. Born into plague
2. Never learns maths or writing
3. Nor spelling
4. Half the time your life ends before childhood does
5. Nothing happens in your life
Nevermind that "nothing happening" sounds positively amazing, especially if my surroundings were a bucolic river side European village.
Farm work done? Picked all my parasites out of my hair and clothes? Now to settle down for the very-zen "sit by the fire, sing some peasant songs and do nothing" -- sounds amazing
There are alternate explanations here. Men do not put as much effort into their presentation as women do. Men are putting out profiles that show themselves as anti-woman, and that's unattractive. Men absolutely should be pickier - they would honestly only date people compatible with them, but try to cast the widest net rather than finding people they could vibe with.
Men in the dating pool have become toxic, and women are doing their best to weed those out. Don't be toxic. Don't endorse people who are looking to make women's lives worse. Put effort into your presentation in your profile pictures - have a woman friend take them. Put effort into your profile to show that you are not someone who would endanger women - have other women in your life help you present your profile. (That probably means don't have a fishing photo, even if you enjoy fishing!)
Much of this is predicated on having women in your life that you trust and that trust you, and who want to see you happy. This means listening to them and trusting them.
And then, you might be a little pickier in your profile too.
No matter how much polishing a man does to his appearance / profile the biological reality is that women are sought after and men have to compete for their attention. There's some statistic along the lines of "the average female has about as much 'pull' as a male A list celebrity"
This means that women will receive far more attention from the opposite sex, and therefore have an "easier" time finding potential partners. This problem is just exacerbated by dating apps and social media making women more aware of their position and options - 100 years ago women could barely date outside their village. Nowadays they receive 100s of messages from men around the world competing for her attention. The opposite happens to men, they become more aware of how "undesired" they are so they start casting a wider net since no fish are caught in their smaller nets.
Blaming the men here just reeks of those toxic standards - since again it is on the men to improve. Not the women who should continue being hyper selective (most attractive, wealthy, etc.).
(Note I'm not blaming any side just showing the reality men face - really this is a problem both sexes need to tackle)
"easier" is in quotes because I appreciate women have to filter out abusers and creeps. But from the male perspective they'd kill to even have a chance with an abuser or creep.
Is it so hard to believe that going onto a digital marketplace with an order of magnitude more humans than you would ever physically deal with physically is probably what's leading to a type of thalassophobia (the fear of deep or vast bodies of water)?
Life is simple. He or she lived in the town, or your school, or was someone you pass by on the way to work daily. It's not some complicated digital dance where the universe presents to you all possible mates.
Date the person you wouldn't. Give it a chance, because you just don't know how this love stuff happens.
Completely agree - on top of the thalassophobia there’s also decision paralysis, and I’m not sure what you call it but: When you reject the good in hopes for something perfect down the line.
Safety is super important and I share your concern. I think online dating is similar to the internet. When the Internet started, there was a niche group that were really into it (early adopters). This was also true for dating apps in their infancy. It was safer simply because the pool was self selected (you had to be open minded to even try it).
Then the internet became for everyone and so did online dating. When there's that many people involved, things get more unsafe. It's not the same pool of early adopters on the same wavelength. It's everyone now, and everyone includes every wave length.
In my experience women are not statistically hyper selective. The less selective women are just out of the dating pool faster than the hyper selective ones. A lot of the women I know are happy to marry a man who grooms himself, respects basic boundaries, and has income. A lot of religious women in particular are socially pressured to drop the "respects boundaries" category also.
I think this is mainly a problem with dating apps - I have seen what you're talking about myself when the pair meets "naturally" or are set up by mutual friends.
People are far more forgiving in real life than they are online.
But part of the problem here is that the dating apps are like junk food: easy, satisfying, but ultimately unhealthy. And unfortunately because of this ease a lot of people reach for them instead of doing the more difficult leg work.
But I can also see it from the female perspective: If almost everyone I swipe right on matches with me - I'd start becoming WAY more selective about who I swipe right on. This leads to less matches but now the guys are also getting even less matches but they can't so easily fix it. The only remedy for the males is to start swiping right on anything that you're not put off by. And again, the men doing this exacerbates the problem - a copulatory ouroboros if you will.
The female perspective is slightly different here. Like I said, the less selective women have already been out of the dating pool a long time. Additionally, women on dating apps experience additional pressure to be selective because men who are dangerous/abusive/predators stay in the dating pool longer. This is explicitly unfair to normal men, but normal men are also out of the dating pool faster on a statistical level. This means that a dating pool selects for more and more picky women, and more and more dangerous men thereby validating the selectivity of the existing women.
[This is not to say that there are not dangerous/abusive/predatory women. There certainly are. But one of the greatest causes of death of pregnant women is the father of the child-to-be murdering her, and one of the greatest causes of death of recently single women is their now-ex murdering her. There is no similar reciprocation i.e. one of the leading causes of death of fathers-to-be is not the mother-to-be murdering him. Maybe financial ruin in child support, but explicitly not death.]
> men who are dangerous/abusive/predators stay in the dating pool longer
Not only this but they can use these apps to find their victims faster and easier than ever before.
> This is explicitly unfair to normal men
I think it's also unfair to women that they have to pick up the extra work that was done by the "community" before. And a loss for social cohesion too.
I am wondering though how someone who just ended a relationship could deal with this scenario? As a male you arguably look like one of the abusers because you're older and looking for a partner and as a female you're seen as less attractive. At the same time you're probably also more picky because of the break-up. Seems like they're the most shit-out-of-luck here regardless of what's between their legs.
I also wonder if this will push us towards being with our "high-school sweethearts" for longer than we would otherwise?
> Maybe financial ruin in child support, but explicitly not death.
Yeah absolutely, I'm personally not aware of the exact numbers for this but I wouldn't be shocked if you're right. Also I'd include things like false accusations, or getting her brothers/father to "take care of" the ex. Also we need to account for things like baby entrapment.
Also men tend to express their aggression physically whereas women tend to express it through reputation destruction. This also partially explains where we are today: women are afraid of male physical repercussions, men are afraid of female societal repercussions. Interestingly, it also mimics a lot of the rhetoric you see about "all males being bad" since it's a form of reputation destruction - whereas the male "comebacks" tend to focus on physical acts of violence that they "could do but won't".
> I think it's also unfair to women that they have to pick up the extra work that was done by the "community" before. And a loss for social cohesion too.
I would argue the community explicitly did not do the work of ousting predators. We are only in this generation or so no longer allowed to rape women if we're married to them. It is still legal for adults to marry children, not in an 18-to-17 way but a 38-to-15 way. Child marriages are overwhelmingly older-male-younger-female.
As for being with high-school sweethearts, that imo is also less and less likely, because more adults are forced to travel for employment (e.g. landing a job in a big city and moving).
I'd like to clarify when I said "community" I wasn't talking exclusively about friend groups (or your mother's friend groups) helping with recommendations and whatnot. I mean the community as a whole - men and women, the bailiffs and the blacksmiths: When you know everyone in your town and most of the people in your neighbouring towns it becomes much easier to know who is a bad person that'll abuse you (or to find out that information).
Yes, I'm pushing back on that because in the past it explicitly legal and normal to abuse women. Women were not allowed to be selective in the first place. So the community explicitly did not perform the protection you are saying. It was only recently illegal to rape your wife.
What I'm trying to say is that the people around us have always shaped who we pair up with - for better or worse - I think losing that is going to have consequences for social cohesion.
It's impossible to say who historically had it worse in general and I don't really believe such discussion is important except for historians. The only thing that dwelling on it will cause is resentment towards people who never perpetrated those crimes.
You pointed out a historical inaccuracy I wished to correct. You were the one that brought up the past and then incorrectly depicted it. You're reading a little too much on this.
Again you're coming at this with such intense anti-male rhetoric - take a step back and look at the problems beyond your own.
Yes I completely agree women DO need to be more careful as they are far more vulnerable and men far more likely to take advantage.
HOWEVER, playing off bad experiences for men as "a bad couple of hours" is just disingenuous. Women can absolutely ruin a mans life and reputation in those "couple of hours" - even worse if they get married and she decides to take him to the cleaners.
Look, I'm not coming at this as some anti-women basher - I see a societal issue that is hurting our men, women, and future. If we want to actually solve that problem the way forward is not increasing the hatred towards men and isolationism of women. We need to come together and not push each other further apart.
> A bad experience for you is a bad couple of hours and a few hundred hours. Ask a woman, what is a bad experience for them?
Playing the situation as though its 0% risk for men and 100% risk for women - making it seem as though only men can be harmful and they are by nature dangerous. Making it sound like no male has ever had a bad experience with women and the onus is completely on the males to fix this situation.
Meanwhile the only men who will listen to this advice are the ones who are already "safe" for women.
Probably the word "intense" shouldn't have been used by me and maybe I'm reading into it too deep.
> It's "do you make their life better than being alone?"
This is a really lovely sentiment and I wish more people approached it like this. I've never set up a dating profile and I don't plan to. But hiding stuff like fish pictures seems a bit over the top, surely if fishing is one of your passions you'd want to end up with someone who at least doesn't judge you for it.
Also keep in mind this approach of making sure your dating profile is "optimised" only works until a large enough %age of men's profiles are "optimised" - then its back to square 1 to figure out how to optimise it further to put yourself at the front of the queue again. We've seen what the SEO arms race has done to search engines, do we really want to do the same thing for dating?
The issue is that you rarely look your best in those pictures, and unless you are explicitly looking to date someone who loves to fish, you aren't showing them how they would integrate into your life.
This is assuming all women and all men are equal parties here in terms of candidate quality. I've used these apps and men are not socialized to present themselves in a visual medium the way women are. I'm not talking men should be putting on makeup, but a shocking number of men don't understand grooming their facial hair to fit their face shape, framing a photo of themselves, etc.
I was with you until you mentioned “brand”. You don’t need your identity to be a “brand”. Even more, it tends to be detrimental, because “story” implies inauthenticity.
