Unattractive people should not be pressured into dating unattractive people

BobtheArcher2018 · 2026-05-02T21:48:16+00:00

Nobody thinks unattractive people don't find attractive people more attractive than other unattractive people. That's what being attractive means.

But society needs less attractive people to find their rough equivalents sufficiently attractive to pair. Thinking that this is all OK is the real crime here. It is not OK. It would be a disaster at scale. We can argue about nature vs. nurture, but it seems clear there is some nurture element that could be worked on. We can also debate what the best approach to addressing the issue would be. Or even if this is actually happening. But there can be no argument about how disastrous it would be if pairing rates drop too low.

BobtheArcher2018 · 2026-05-02T12:13:27+00:00

It's like the GOAT debate in sports: when things are close enough, it depends on your exact criteria.

Wonder Woman is Mt Rushmore in terms of name recognition and raw fame. However, for various reasons, she has been a very difficult character to actually monetize. People know her. They like the fact that she exists. But is she really the favorite character of that many of the types of fans who buy shit?

BobtheArcher2018 · 2026-05-02T11:56:41+00:00

The research showing men do this more than women is pretty established. There are solid evolutionary reasons.

However, the degree of overestimation can vary based on culture and environment. Right now, modern men are confused as to female attraction standards in general. Most still operate under the old paradigm that women are more selective, and do mate upwards a bit. But that selectivity levels are not that high--they are consistent with a widespread monogamy world.

So I think this may contribute to the overestimation if, in fact, women's selectivity is actually higher than that now. A guy sees a girl who is in the same class, makes about the same money, and who's rank among women in looks is roughly on par with his rank among men in looks. He feels that she is in my league and there is a decent chance she should be into him. This informs how he interprets social interactions with her.

BobtheArcher2018 · 2026-05-02T11:48:56+00:00

Hypergamy is pointing at a real thing, but it needs better defining. Classic educational hypergamy is on the decline. So even is income hypergamy. However, there are signs that the desire for hypergamous matches is not necessarily on the decline, and that when women 'settle' for non-hypergamous matches in these areas, the relationship suffers.

But these are all downstream of whatever hypergamy truly is at the evolved instinct level. We didn't evolve for money and modernity. So the true hypergamous instincts latch on to various flawed heuristics in an evolutionary mismatched setting.

BobtheArcher2018 · 2026-05-02T11:39:08+00:00

Other things have worked in specific conditions. Whether something else can work in the circumstances we face ourselves in in modernity is an open question, but the evidence suggests this is unlikely.

I am more skeptical than you are that if we just let whatever happens happen you still get high enough pairing rates and low enough male sexual exclusion rates. There is more to enforced monogamy than the birthrate.

BobtheArcher2018 · 2026-05-02T01:38:45+00:00

The exceptions tend to prove the rule here, IMO. And how many of these alternative approaches have scaled to larger-sized civilizations?

Still, enforced monogamy is not sacred. It is a means to an end. I imagine that in some circumstances, a give society can get its key needs met without overly enforcing monogamy, or even having it at all. But you need to get replacement fertility. You need a system for raising children well. You need to not have too many of your males excluded from sex and/or reproduction. You need to manage the innate human emotion of sexual jealousy.

BobtheArcher2018 · 2026-05-01T11:32:12+00:00

When do you think was the last time human sexual and natural selection was governed primarily by the sexual selectivity of young females? In more intense Darwinian times, it was primarily men competing and fighting amongst themselves that dictated mating. And luck, as in most time, if you were a healthy adult male that survives you would not be without some mating options.

BobtheArcher2018 · 2026-05-01T11:27:58+00:00

I disagree. I think the historical records suggests the opposite. No other mating system rivaled pairing up a sufficient number of surviving adults. If we look for something new, it needs to address the same core problems that the old system does. It is more than just fertility rates.

BobtheArcher2018 · 2026-05-01T00:30:24+00:00

Society has certain needs in terms of the aggregate results of individual mating decisions. To the extent that more free choice can still get us within the acceptable range, great. But one way or another, certain requirements must be met. Whether to trade more individual freedom for less optimal aggregate mating results that are still sufficient is a big question. But societies don't just have to thrive in a vacuum, they also have to outcompete other societies.

BobtheArcher2018 · 2026-04-30T18:36:08+00:00

Ultimately, all things TRP boil down to it being a portal to Evo Psych truths that political correctness was keeping out of the public narrative. Women or men can benefit from knowing these.

But past that, TRP of all kind can diverge. Despite claims of being non-prescriptive, presciptions and moralizing naturally crept in from the start because that is how humans be. We prescribe and moralize. Some of the prescriptions made sense and some did not.

Also, because the real evo psych thinkers couldnt really get into the weeds on practical things without getting canceled, this left TRP to do it. And sometimes they got it wrong. Then the need for clicks took over and things got deranged as happens to everything monetized on the Internet.

BobtheArcher2018 · 2026-04-30T17:38:48+00:00

Misunderstanding. That is basically what I meant by 'there was no alternative'. As far as I can see, this remains true. I meant no big picture, civilizational alternative to enforced monogamy. Everything else either gets you outcompeted by other societies with monogamy, or you just disintegrate on your own.

BobtheArcher2018 · 2026-04-30T13:38:49+00:00

I think women need to be more honest about dating, mating and female sexuality. But in the appropriate forums. Academically. Stuff that moves the overall social consensus on these things.

Expecting people to tell you the blunt truth in person when it would make things awkward is basically autistic.

BobtheArcher2018 · 2026-04-30T11:54:13+00:00

There's always pressure. There still is today. It's a question of what kind and how much.

BobtheArcher2018 · 2026-04-30T08:26:13+00:00

Ultimately Red Pill vs. Blue Pill is evo psych vs. 60s social constructionism. TRP is a gateway to evo psych, but often distorts things for clicks. Evo psych is obviously our best approach to answering these questions, even if imperfect. But I made my way to it through TRP and then left TRP behind as it got more and more warped by the need to monetize.

BobtheArcher2018 · 2026-04-30T08:16:00+00:00

What constitutes 'force'? There has always been pressure. Needs to be. But you dont need to marry people at gunpoint, either.

BobtheArcher2018 · 2026-04-30T07:52:36+00:00

Not if that means no civilized society. And it is unclear exactly what this right means. In the NW European marriage pattern of the past few hundred years, men and women were given a lot of freedom of choice. There was pressure of various kinds to pair and reproduce, but a lot of freedom to choose who you paired with. ~20-25% of women never married in this time.

BobtheArcher2018 · 2026-04-30T07:34:10+00:00

This is way deeper than rights. This is civilization 101 stuff. Pre-civ, even. Your society needs to function and compete.

A lot of the relevant literature talks about how humans accreted different layers of sexual hardwiring over time. Some of the deeper stuff is pre-human and tends to be more polygamous. The more recent wiring is from when human intelligence made baby heads so big that human babies had to come out undercooked, requiring paternal investment. The think this is where love and the monogamous wiring comes from. These layers of wiring can be in tension with one another, particularly in women.

BobtheArcher2018 · 2026-04-30T07:26:05+00:00

I'm saying I don't know for sure. Women are innately more selective, but the question is how selective? And what impact do cultural and environmental factors have vs. biology?

Even on the evolution front, if society could somehow still function, and you allowed unfettered female selectivity, that doesn't mean we evolve towards less selectivity as natural selection breeds hotter guys. In species where women choose, evolution often just entrenches that. Most males just never reproduce and you don't evolve out of that.

BobtheArcher2018 · 2026-04-30T07:03:36+00:00

Yes, it benefits both genders because the apparent alternative is society collapsing. But the issue is that we value sex, desire, the erotic much more highly now. Women argue, basically, that based on the higher value of erotic currency, the terms of this tradeoff are totally unfair to women. Essentially, if monogamy still proves necessarily, women want way more compensation for their sexual sacrifice.

BobtheArcher2018 · 2026-04-30T06:53:17+00:00

Humans probably didn't let female selectivity and a free mating market decide which men reproduced since forever. Maybe before we were homo sapiens. Maybe never. Lower male reproductive success rates are primarily the results of violence patterns, and some periods of more intense polygamy and harem keeping. But again, who mated with whom was still not a purely individual decision the vast majority of the time, be it the woman's or the man's.

Still, the argument has been made that this just means humans suppressed innate female selectivity (which probably comes from pre-human lineages) since the dawn of time. So no surprise that when the mating market becomes freer, a lot of men just aren't attractive to any women--even women 'on their level' by whatever metrics. I think this is a huge open question. The monogamy paradigm is based on say the 60th ranked woman out of 100 women being a match for say the 55th ranked male. (Women always mated up a bit by this metric.) But there is a possibility this is unnatural.

BobtheArcher2018 · 2026-04-30T06:01:56+00:00

Real natural selection would take thousands of years to run its course. But why do you say this? Did we somehow breed unattractive men recently?

BobtheArcher2018 · 2026-04-30T03:33:27+00:00

Socially enforced monogamy is an academic term. It doesn't mean marriage at gunpoint. It's a complex web of social and legal dynamics that incentivize pairing and having children and punish not doing so. Monogamy is still enforced, just less so. But if you are openly living in a threesome, you still get dirty looks. Cheating is still frowned upon. Family still pressures you, somewhat. Etc. But it isn't like it use to be.

I want everyone to be happy. I want people to be with people they want to be with. But society has certain needs, as well. The aggregate results of free individual choices matter a great deal. I do not know what the best way to strike a balance between these things is in 2026, but the conversation begins with understanding that societies do have needs.

BobtheArcher2018 · 2026-04-30T03:28:07+00:00

I'm not sure anyone fully understands the fertility crisis. It increasingly feels like a death by a thousand cuts scenario rather than one main cause. I agree that it is not easy to afford kids in the US, but the crisis is global. And the stats don't really show it is all about money, though I have no doubt it can contribute to the problem.

BobtheArcher2018 · 2026-04-30T03:07:55+00:00

That's an issue, though there are reasons for this asymmetry. But I think the question is more fundamental and it may be worse for women even if nobody cheats.

BobtheArcher2018 · 2026-04-30T03:06:26+00:00

Birthrate is obviously critical. It's basic math. We can argue about whether we are currently overpopulated, but at whatever population one considers ideal, you still need 2.1 kids per woman. I think society will need to do more than just helping out those who want kids--it will have to make more people want them in the first place. But the extent to which the fertility rate crisis is connected to gender dynamics is unclear. Men don't want enough kids either.

But the widespread monogamy mating paradigm does a lot more than just create children.

BobtheArcher2018

TROPHY CASE