Again, there seems to be some misunderstanding of what 'Chadopoly' denotes. It's not simply the observation that some men have more sex partners than others, which is unremarkable.
The Chadopoly refers to a monopolization effect: the idea that a small subset of men are monopolizing a disproportionately large share of women, creating an imbalance in the dating market and producing an incel underclass. If a similar ratio is seen among women, then this isn't what's happening.
Whether the ratio is 80/20, 66/33, or 90/10 is beside the point. If 10% of men have 90% of the sex partners within their group, but the same ratio holds for women, there is no Chadopoly any more than there is a Stacyopoly. The most you can say is that they're possibly monopolizing the casual sex encounters, and there are likely more men than women who would like to enter the promiscuous pool.
There's also a lot more to say on the dating app question.
>Only 5% of guys get swipes
There's an important distinction between individual women swiping right on only 5% of profiles and only 5% of male profiles getting swipes.
A recent study that analyzed the first swipes people made found that in terms of within-sex desirability, men tended to swipe up while women actually swiped down slightly - though they note there was lower variability in men's desirability. Actual matches were close in within-sex desirability.
The relatively consistent finding that women’s aesthetic taste tends to be more varied could also be relevant here.
This result was a bit surprising to me because of how a good number of men seem to adopt a serial swiper strategy, doing any necessary filtering after the fact, but maybe this only comes into play after the first swipe or two.
>Likes and replies are vastly concentrated in the top 10-20% of men
Like with sex partners, this isn't sex-specific.
>80% of men are rated “unattractive” by women
This is only really interesting insofar as it influences behaviour, which brings us to the next graph.
>Attractive men get 11x the messages as unattractive men
The same graph shows that the most attractive women get 27x the initial messages of the least attractive women. This graph is slightly misleading though, as the lowest rating means something different for each sex. When you break it down by attractiveness percentile, the effect of attractiveness on message volume is comparable between men and women. The success rate of messages (i.e. replies received) also shows a similar pattern, perhaps being slightly stronger for women.
>In fact, women’s likes follow a power law, with the top percentile of men getting the most, the 95% percentile getting half as much as the top percentile, and likes petering out entirely after the 80th percentile or so
I noticed my Hinge like distribution chart there, which shows that the skew isn't that much stronger for men than women. The match skew on Tinder is also similar by sex. Between-sex inequality in swipes received is high due to men swiping on a lot more profiles on top of the skewed gender ratio of the user base, and women get more matches on average due again to the skewed gender ratio, but within-sex inequality is comparable between each sex.
All this aside, when we consider actual outcomes such as dates, sexual encounters, and relationships, we find no gender imbalance on a population level:
A similar proportion of heterosexual men and women report having had sex with someone they met online in the past year, a similar proportion have had a high number of first dates through online dating in the past year, etc.
So dating apps aren't facilitating Chadopolies, consistent with sexual behaviour data which shows no increasing concentration over time.
I appreciate the link though, and the entertaining post as usual.
Thanks NP - on the "actual outcomes" point, it seems to plug directly into my Chadopoly population here given the base rates? Tinder is 75/25 men / women. If 20% of overall women have met guys through a dating app, approximately all of the women using apps ended up with the top 20% of guys on the app?
And pretty much every app is skewed M/F to a similar degree, sometimes it's 66/33, sometimes it's 70/30, sometimes even as bad as 80/20, but it's generally 2-4x skewed.
Have I misunderstood something?
I mean, I'm not telling you anything you don't know, you go over the same numbers later, but don't see you resolving / addressing that fact.
On the other stuff, I think we basically agree on all the same facts on the ground, and only differ on where we cut a "Chadopoly" definition.
I think being able to truthfully say "20% of men have 66% of all the sex / distinct female partners" is good enough to say it exists, and you have a stricter definition to use the specific word "Chadopoly," but we both largely agree about what's going on in terms of pairing in the real world.
But I think many people of both genders are probably unaware of the 20/66 thing, and would be interested to know about it!
We all know the world is unequal, that many things are power laws. Well, this is one of them. Tinder Gini / inequality is worse than income Gini / inequality:
Probably most interesting to me personally, and not addressed in the article, is that this has probably been happening as long as we've been human.
A full 87% of HG societies have between 5 and 20% of the men practicing polygamy *in modern times,* and given the infamous "80% of women have kids to 40% of men historically" breeding ratio (completely supported by historical genetic analyses going back 150k years: https://imgur.com/JWIsva9 ), it was likely to have been an even bigger factor in the environment of evolutionary adaptiveness.
"Body count Gini" and "Monthly sex incidence Gini" have probably been like this back to the beginning of humanity, which is fascinating.
For all that we think we've evolved and materially changed things with our "civilization" and "iphones" and so on, we're all playing out scripts written over millions of years.
>Tinder is 75/25 men / women. If 20% of overall women have met guys through a dating app, approximately all of the ones on the app ended up with the top 20% of guys on the app?
More than 20% of young women have used online dating before, but about half or slightly below. Regardless, I don't think we can be confident in assuming that all or even most of the men who have dated through dating apps have belonged to the most desirable 20%. For one thing, this would require large mismatches that don't seem realistic on a large scale. For another, the data I shared shows that aside from the imbalances in the gender ratio and swipe rates, outcomes are pretty similar for men and women. The skew in matches is similar, meaning that across the distribution, men and women have roughly the number you'd expect given the difference in population sizes, with perhaps a bit more concentration among the most matched men.
Moreover, the study I linked indicates that when comparing within-sex desirability (measured by swipes received), matches tend to be very closely matched. This means that even with a gender ratio of 4:1, if all women matched up with a man, they would be spread relatively evenly across the 80% of men in terms of desirability, so in each quartile of male desirability, around 3/4 of men would be unmatched. While this might not be exactly how things play out, it's likely closer to the reality than all women who use dating apps dating only the top 20% of men.
>On the other stuff, I think we basically agree on all the same facts on the ground, and only differ on where we cut a "Chadopoly" definition.
It may sound arrogant, but as the Chadopoly expert who 'popularized' the term around here, I think my definition carries a bit more weight. If I say that the concept is wrong, and then somebody else says it's right, I think it's fair to expect the definition to reflect the one of the initial claimer.
>But I think many people of both genders are probably unaware of the 20/66 thing, and would be interested to know about it!
I guess so. I think people might actually be more interested in knowing that a similar ratio exists for women. Many probably don't even realize that it can co-exist with a similar ratio for women because since it's always framed as a one-sided monopolization.
>given the infamous "80% of women have kids to 40% of men historically" breeding ratio (completely supported by historical genetic analyses going back 150k years: https://imgur.com/JWIsva9 )
I'm going to be annoying and say that I don't think this is as airtight as is assumed. We know how simple inferences from the Neolithic bottleneck for example lead to a misleading picture, and that sustained drastic reproductive disparities aren't required to explain it. There are also other plausible mechanisms that can help explain this 40/80 ratio like purifying selection: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3886894/
While I agree that the dating landscape isn't an equal playing field, I'm wary of narratives that it's completely 'broken' or imbalanced in a way that requires a fundamental restructuring of society (not saying you're arguing this). I think this is mostly a cope that distracts from real issues.
> More than 20% of young women have used online dating before,
Yes, but they drop out a lot sooner, right? I think if you did a "months on platform" analysis by gender, it would be a lot closer to the 2-3 men for every women than the 3:2 ratio the lifetime rates suggest.
> The skew in matches is similar, meaning that across the distribution, men and women have roughly the number you'd expect given the difference in population sizes, with perhaps a bit more concentration among the most matched men.
Sorry, the image you linked goes to a dead page that says "that page doesn't exist," could you try a different image host or something?
> I'm going to be annoying and say that I don't think this is as airtight as is assumed. We know how simple inferences from the Neolithic bottleneck for example lead to a misleading picture, and that sustained drastic reproductive disparities aren't required to explain it.
Except that you can see the massive Yamnaya y-chromosome replacement exactly where you expect it historically? Why do you think it surges up to the infamous 17:1 figure after rolling along at 2:1 for so long? It's definitely not purifying selection!
I've seen another argument that tries to say that you can explain this with serial monogamy at a given cadence, with a little simulation to show how the math could work. But this ignores the extant fact on the ground that 87% of HG societies demonstrate polygamy, we have obvious counterfactuals that discredit a serial monogamy scenario. It also ignores all the massive y-chromosome replacement events we affirmatively know have happened historically, and the fact that it's a really common pattern at the small scale in pretty much all pre-contact HG societies.
> While I agree that the dating landscape isn't an equal playing field, I'm wary of narratives that it's completely 'broken' or imbalanced in a way that requires a fundamental restructuring of society (not saying you're arguing this). I think this is mostly a cope that distracts from real issues.
Oh sure, definitely agree there. I outright think it's GOOD that people are pairing up less! I don't want any societal restructuring at all.
I applaud the fact that ~62% (and growing every year) of women are opting out of marriage at the median-and-below, because I legitimately think they had a shitty deal in the 50's, and are genuinely better off single if that's where they want to be.
If the median guy is as bad as the data suggests they are, then in a "what can be, should be destroyed by the truth" way, it's better that people aren't pairing up!
But you know, I'm fully anti-Manosphere and have written a few posts about that.
> Yes, but they drop out a lot sooner, right? I think if you did a "months on platform" analysis by gender, it would be a lot closer to the 2-3 men for every women than the 3:2 ratio the lifetime rates suggest.
Yeah; my point was just that it's not 'approximately all the women on the app' who have dated through it. Or maybe I misunderstood what you meant by that.
>Sorry, the image you linked goes to a dead page that says "that page doesn't exist," could you try a different image host or something?
Hopefully you'll just take my word for it. I might put it in an article at some point.
>Except that you can see the massive Yamnaya y-chromosome replacement exactly where you expect it historically? Why do you think it surges up to the infamous 17:1 figure after rolling along at 2:1 for so long? It's definitely not purifying selection!
We discussed this previously didn't we? The Yamnaya expansion happened at the right tail end of the bottleneck, so can't explain most of it. These papers offer what I think are plausible explanations for the Neolithic bottleneck:
I mention purifying selection as a potential mechanism contributing to the more stable disparity.
>I've seen another argument that tries to say that you can explain this with serial monogamy at a given cadence, with a little simulation to show how the math could work. But this ignores the extant fact on the ground that 87% of HG societies demonstrate polygamy, we have obvious counterfactuals that discredit a serial monogamy scenario.
I mean I don't think it's explained by either system and believe most men in history did reproduce, but I could see serial monogamy among the non-polygamous men potentially having a larger effect. I don't know if that's ruled out by the existence of polygamy.
I will say that while most HG societies practice polygamy to some extent, I haven't seen evidence that a large portion of men are barred from reproduction in most of them. One paper that looked at men who survived to at least 50 in polygamy-practicing Gambian villages found that only 15.8% of men were childless, and (in villages A and B) only 2.1% had never married.
> Yeah; my point was just that it's not 'approximately all the women on the app' who have dated through it. Or maybe I misunderstood what you meant by that.
My point here is that if the "true" ratio is closer to the 2-3 men thing by time on platform, then about half of women install it, get deluged or The Ick, and skedaddle pretty quickly, and the other half stays on. Then that half ends up with the 20% of more successful guys on the platform, leaving the 80% with not much, ie the Chadopoly model.
> We discussed this previously didn't we? The Yamnaya expansion happened at the right tail end of the bottleneck, so can't explain most of it. These papers offer what I think are plausible explanations for the Neolithic bottleneck:
Oh did we? My apologies if I didn't remember. I def appreciate the links, read them with interest.
Yeah, the Yamnaya happened at the tail end, after the infamous 17:1 peak, but obv if societies transitioned to agriculture 1-2k years ago, and we're right on the cusp of mass chariot warfare (as the Yamnaya so ably demonstrate soon after), you'd fully expect these agricultural societies with a density of men and resources to be getting up to what all societies since the beginning of time have got up to - warring on neighbors and taking their women.
And since chariot warfare has just become possible, you could expect a pretty big peak from the few that figured it out before everyone else, even before the Yamnaya. Then the Yamnaya just demonstrate that, but for everybody a little while later, in the historical record.
So your linked papers say something similar in Zeng, right? They say "sure, y chromosome replacement - but have you considered patrilineal kin competition? This could amplify the effect if it's different p-kin groups y chromosome replacing each other!" And sure, yeah.
Then Guyon is like "wait a minute guys, we don't need violence AT ALL here! What if kin groups fission by patrilineal lines, so the ones that succeed are definitionally sorted on p-kin lines and concentrate the y's? I've made a model so overpowered that if you assume this is true, it doesn't even matter if they're random, or patrilineal, or matrilineal, my model forces everyone to fit up to the Karmin reference point! So this is obviously what happened. Oh, and by the way, if anyone does any violence, it amplifies my model by 2.5x, but it wasn't necessary, see - it's so overpowered it can ALWAYS hit the reference, no matter what! Damn I'm good at modeling!"
Which, okay. I mean, sure, fissioning by p-kin lines can also probably explain some of the concentration, but I'm certainly not buying their model. And lets not forget that such fissioning just basically turns into the Zeng dynamic a generation or two later, which is also driven by y chromosome replacement.
But interesting papers, thanks for linking them.
> I mean I don't think it's explained by either system and believe most men in history did reproduce
Yeah, this is probably our crux then - I don't buy that AT ALL. I mean, ~15-30% of men died by violence during HG long-time. Surely a decent chunk of them did so without reproducing? Then the victors in that violence captured their women (it was literally the point of the great majority of HG warfare), and did still more y-chromosome concentration. And we KNOW this, from extensive archaeological evidence, ethnographies, and so on.
> One paper that looked at men who survived to at least 50 in polygamy-practicing Gambian villages found that only 15.8% of men were childless, and (in villages A and B) only 2.1% had never married.
Yeah, this was pretty interesting too.
I don't really buy it as representative of true HG dynamics though, because it's in the 50's - 74, ie after state societies have vastly tamped down / eliminated HG-on-HG violence and warfare and y-chromosome replacement. Which was the driving force in most of HG history for the male / female mismatch in reproduction.
But I think I do buy the general recipe of a bunch of relatively short-lived relationships among even-polygamous HG's. So sure, you have 2 or 3 wives, but you also divorce 2-3 times and get new wives, and those wives go on to other men. I just think they'll largely end up with higher status men as second or third wives if they're still fertile, and only end up with lower status men when most of their fertility is gone.
Also if 40% wifed up via "the Levirate" that's obviously a really egalitarian sorting mechanism that will have distributed wives more widely than a more mutually chosen or competitive dynamic. And back to p-kin points, your brother is probably likely to be closer to your status level (and y-as-measured-by-Karmin) than a random stranger, so still some concentration by status. But certainly less than there would be in a condition where women are involved in choosing their matches to a reasonable extent.
And maybe Levirates were really common! I have no idea, I've got to do some research here. Thanks for sharing!
So yes, both genders lie, but not a ton, it's generally moving numbers up or down by 10-20% - men always lie up, women always lie down.
The gap with women is typically bigger, in the sense that in studies where they hooked them to devices they thought were a lie detector, their numbers rose up to mostly meet the men's numbers, so it's probably something like "men lie 5-10% up and women lie 10-20% down."
Further, both Pew and Aella have done triangulations on survey accuracy, and it's generally pretty decent. Spiegelhalter also goes over a lot of this in his book.
"I aver that we’ve already established the top body count guys are probably better - more attractive, fitter, more social skills, richer, higher prestige, etc, at least within their SES tier."
I feel like this is a really shocking thing to say based on those charts. Those are tiny differentials in very small numbers between men of the highest and lowest status tiers. You're also just assuming that because people pair up in extremely matched looks, SES, and all other tiers *in relationships* that this is also true for one-night stands and casual sex...and that is just not even remotely true. Both men and women just looking to fuck can and usually do dip way below their standards of what they would present to the world as in a relationship and introduce to family and friends.
I think you just can't understand this because you are obviously a guy who is in the top tiers of everything, expects to be in the top tiers of everything, cares about being in the top tiers of everything, and would not yourself bang a chubby, not very attractive, mid-tier SES girl just because you were horny and she was in the mood. That's the case with most guys like you. It is NOT the case with "Chads" who come from every tier and when they're horny they dngaf. You would also assuredly be shocked at what low-level of guys women are willing to have sex with one that one night every two months when she happens to be really horny and not already have a guy she's sleeping with and someone acceptable hits her up. Or that one high a month that she's feeling pissed off at her last boyfriend and looking to go out and get revenge.
The "Chads" -- who are not Chads, they are a minority of random dudes from every tier of looks, charm and SES -- put in an amount of effort and attempts at sex that I just think you would find mindblowing and difficult to comprehend. They are sending out texts and messages and hooks to 70-80 women a day hitting the up...NOT on dating apps, just every girl they know on Facebook, Insta, WhatsApp, and Snap, which includes every girl they ever DID match with on a dating app, and they don't care that 90% of those messages go ignored. They rotate and hit em up once a month or so. They frequently create new profiles with different names and ages to try to get around women who have blocked them. This is a regular practice for like the top 10% libido guys, it's honestly quite obsessive, and would be mindblowing to your average dude. Not only that but they do that FOR YEARS AND DECADES ON END. And they are willing to hit a way wider net of women below and outside a normal guy's "relationship" standards...bigger women, older women, women with 6 kids and three ex-husbands...whatever.
Also, the number who are cheaters and lying about it is easily 95%, not "some portion", it's the vast majority of all of them. Like to the point where ordinary women just assume as the first course of business for any guy in his late 20s or older that first you have to figure out if he's already married or has a serious girlfriend.
I just really think you are not comprehending the level of effort that the sluttiest guys are putting into being slutty. I would tell you to ask a female friend to join one of those "Am I Dating the Same Guy" sites and spend a few hours scrolling in an average mid-tier city like Denver or Houston, and the scales will quickly fall from your eyes. The low-level of the guys on there who are actually banging way more women than you would ever think possible will shock you. But also, it's not like one girl posts a guy and says "does anyone have any red flags?" and it's a normal distribution of responses. It's not. 90% of guys posted, no one has anything to say about at all (including the vast majority of high SES looking guys). Then someone will post a photo of a complete loser who literally took his profile picture in a porta potty on the job site, being like "I'm going on a date with him tonight, any red flags I should know about?" and 75 women will respond with screenshots showing that he's hitting them up or tying to sext them *on the very same day* or setting up ten back-up dates in case one falls through.
Like seriously, just get a female friend to let you scroll through that site for a few hours...they have them in every metro area and usually have a sample size of 100k+ female members...it will give you a much better idea of what goes on and I think you will be surprised at how low women's standards are for casual sex and how insanely over-the-top the tail-end distribution of extreme efforts at being a slut guys make.
Women definitely are not as consistently horny. It is way more hit and miss. They might have a couple nights in a two-month period where they have the motivation, energy, and libido to go out and bang a random guy. But if you're the "Chad" who is constantly hitting them up the way they do, you hit those random women, and that's why it's easy to fill those numbers up.
> I feel like this is a really shocking thing to say based on those charts. Those are tiny differentials in very small numbers between men of the highest and lowest status tiers.
I think we're basically looking at the same picture, believe it or not.
You look at it and say "hey, you don't have to be a 6' 6" high income CEO / Doctor with abs to rack up a big body count."
And sure, I mean, obviously right? But are there quality signals? There are! Are high body count guys more attractive, taller, higher income, often even more educated?
They are - here's a cut I just pulled that compares the top quintile by body count with the lower ones. We clearly see signal on attractiveness, height, income, prestige, and college degree, and stratification on having more generally "good" things versus the next quintiles.
> Both men and women just looking to fuck can and usually do dip way below their standards of what they would present to the world as in a relationship and introduce to family and friends.
I buy this for men, sure. Lots of men lower standards for easy sex. I buy it less for women. Sure, it happens - certainly a woman might sleep with a guy she wouldn't marry, or even want a relationship with. Sure on some nights when she's particularly horny, she may go home with a loser, because he's there in front of her and made it easy.
But I think in the aggregate, this isn't the dominant mode for female pairing, even for casual sex. The fact that women are *on average* more selective for both sex and relationships is a gigantic effect size seen both in the literature and in real life in countless different ways.
> The "Chads" -- who are not Chads, they are a minority of random dudes from every tier of looks, charm and SES -- put in an amount of effort and attempts at sex that I just think you would find mindblowing and difficult to comprehend.
> I just really think you are not comprehending the level of effort that the sluttiest guys are putting into being slutty.
Sure, these guys definitely exist, I think we both agree on that. I think where we might disagree is on how successful they are, on average, and on what percent of high body count men they are. It sounds like you think they're a big proportion of the guys with high body counts, that complete loser porta-potty dudes are some huge chunk of them. If that were true, we wouldn't see signals by income, prestige, attractiveness, height, college degrees, etc, though.
Sure, they definitely exist. But they're not most of them. They're not even 50% of them, probably less than 20%, for the signals to still show through like they do in the graph I just shared.
Lol, we are definitely seeing different things. I'm a little confused by your chart because the title at the top says it is comparing too versus bottom quintile, while the code for the bars says top versus next quintile. Those are very different things bc one would be comparing a guy at the 90th percentile to one at the 10th, while the other would be comparison the top 90th percentile to one at the 70th. Though perhaps in this case it actually makes not much difference because the tail is so skewed in numbers from the average and median.
Regardless, I just don't think these small differences say the same thing you do. *Of course* people who have attractive qualities like being good looking, not obese, tall, having a good job will have WAYYYY more opportunities than anyone else, and you should expect that given those opportunities, they will have higher numbers. But actually, these are not very big numbers differences. Considering that by ordinary reason a top percentile attractive person should have literally an almost infinite number of opportunities than a bottom person, I would expect to see a much bigger skew, and to me this tells me that top guys are actually a lot pickier than you would expect based on what evo psych says.
Idk, I can think through every guy I've known that has a body count above 50, and not a single one is top 10% of anything, not even too third in most cases and sometimes not top half. But they are all very outgoing, extraverted, don't care about rejection, and extremely horny.
> I'm a little confused by your chart because the title at the top says it is comparing too versus bottom quintile
Yeah sorry, it's the top quintile, quintile 5, compared to the bottom 4 quiintiles, all the next quintiles. The fact there's that big a separation there across all those things is a HUGE signal.
You think these effects are small, but over a population of hundreds and thousands, it's a ridiculously strong signal. Think how varied a population is - that quintile has all the nonstop harassers you mentioned, all the porta potty guys, all the opportunists who said the right thing to the right woman that one night, and so on. For us to see signals that big on various quality metrics through an entire population is a staggeringly large signal.
> Regardless, I just don't think these small differences say the same thing you do. *Of course* people who have attractive qualities like being good looking, not obese, tall, having a good job will have WAYYYY more opportunities than anyone else, and you should expect that given those opportunities, they will have higher numbers. But actually, these are not very big numbers differences.
Yeah, we disagree here then. These are huge differences at a population level. They're pretty giant differences at a body count level too - the difference between "40" vs "1-10" across all the other quintiles.
> Idk, I can think through every guy I've known that has a body count above 50, and not a single one is top 10% of anything, not even too third in most cases and sometimes not top half. But they are all very outgoing, extraverted, don't care about rejection, and extremely horny.
Yeah, but now think of them compared to the entire population. You're like everyone else reading Substack - your social groups are extremely selected. You're already interacting with basically a top quintile slice of humanity, probably a top 5-10%, the great majority of people you know and work with likely have college or post-baccalaureate degrees, etc.
The people you know are ALREADY crazy selected.
Like as an example, are 80% of the people you know fat?
Do 70% of them not have a degree?
How many of them make ~$60k a year, the literal median?
How many of the men are 5' 9" or shorter?
The median American is basically obese - it's not quite there, it's at the 44th percentile or something, but it's getting there in another 10 years or so.
So basically, short, obese, ugly, dumb, non-degreed, and poor. Sounds like your social circles? No?
Because those are the genuine medians, meaning ~50% of people are below THAT.
On going over this a second time, I found another flaw with your analysis, and it's basically your core thesis:
"My argument here will be an overall volume argument - specifically, we have to account for where all the female partners are coming from, because male sex drives are crazy high compared to what they actually get in real life (in the data, 2-4x higher total body count on average for homosexual men vs heterosexual men), so hetero sex is generally rate-limited by women to roughly 1/4 to 1/2 of what men demonstrate that they want when free to act without that rate limit."
Nuance pill kind of picked this up, in noting that the same distributions were seen male & female, which is not consistent with a world in which women are rate-limiting men. But also you could see this recognizing your assumptions behind assuming men have a "2-4X higher total body count," which is based on a comparison of gay men to heterosexual men.
And the problem there is that data on gay men is skewed based on social stigma; male homosexuality is still pretty heavily stigmatized in many communities. And male bisexuality is even more stigmatized, in part due to this stigma; gay men generally stigmatize bi men as 'secretly gay,' while homophobic cultures also code bisexuality as 'gay' as well. To the point that data analysis of 'men who have sex with men' has to code all men who report sexual encounters with other men separately from those who identify as 'gay' or 'bisexual.'
That matters here because what the Spanberger data shows basically that libido has a Pareto distribution, if we measure high libido by body count or frequency. So we would expect that apply to homosexual men as well! Except that, with libido being a Pareto distribution, and under significant social pressure-- low-libido gay men are heavily incentivized to identify as straight. Which would skew averages quite a bit. If half the population of low-libido men who experience homoeroticism 'prays the gay away' and calls themselves straight-- then the frequency averages for men who do openly identify as gay would be much higher. They further probably to some degree exhibit Pareto distribution, with the average being significantly raised by a small population engaged in high-libido activity.
Also that would be consistent with the idea that gay men with high libidos have more motivation to identify as gay-- their libido. So if libido for homoerotic activity is actively a significant factor that differentiates between the population that 'prays the gay away' and openly comes out as gay, then we would expect the body counts to
So using the gay-to-hetero to estimate a rate-limiting effect supposedly enforced by women is just not consistent in the world in which we know male homosexuality is heavily socially punished. Also, given that female homosexuality is not similarly stigmatized, we also can't use comparisons between, say, the male and female homosexual populations, because there is a demonstrable difference between the social treatment of both parties for homoerotic expression.
And, again, as Nuance Pill points out-- both the male and female populations demonstrate this Pareto distribution in your data-- which is not what we would expect in a world where women were rate-limiting high libido men. If women were rate-limiting, we would expect high-libido women in the fat tail of the distribution to have higher body counts. They would also have higher frequency. Under a rate-limiting hypothesis-- they could find high libido men and just-- not impose the rate limiting. But your data doesn't show that among the women's distribution. It shows that basically both genders have more or less the same distribution. That is not consistent with a hypothesis of women rate-limiting men.
> If half the population of low-libido men who experience homoeroticism 'prays the gay away' and calls themselves straight-- then the frequency averages for men who do openly identify as gay would be much higher.
Yes, but even in this maximally bifurcated scenario, you'd expect gay men to end up at 1.5x the body count of straight men, not 2-4x.
And I'm surprised you think that women don't rate limit men on sex - it's a pretty strong signal in the literature that male sex drives are intrinsically higher than female sex drives.
The meta-analysis Frankeback et al (2022) shows us that the AVERAGE man is at the 75th percentile of female libido!
You can't tell me men aren't rate limited by women, every single bit of evidence and data points to that being true, from multiple different triangulations, whether they be literature, gay men, or top quintile men.
> And, again, as Nuance Pill points out-- both the male and female populations demonstrate this Pareto distribution in your data-- which is not what we would expect in a world where women were rate-limiting high libido men.
No, actually, they have pretty different distributions. The bottom 3 body count quintiles are pretty similar across men and women, then 4th quintile is 13 men / 5 women and the top quintile is 40 men / 15 women by body count.
What does that mean? It means exactly that the bottom 3 quintiles of men are being rate limited!
>Yes, but even in this maximally bifurcated scenario, you'd expect gay men to end up at 1.5x the body count of straight men, not 2-4x
That's just consistent with the the rate of men who experience homoeroticism opting out of identifying as gay / acting on it is probably higher than half, maybe even much higher. In the Pareto distribution, the modal is 0 or 1, so low libido 'gay' men are cutting a lot of the 0's and 1's out of the mean, likely even some of what would otherwise be 2's, 3,'s etc. Basically as n approaches zero the likelyhood stigma will exclude him from the population rises. Asexual gay men likely just either identify as asexual straights or just don't come out of the closet. It's not just some majority of n=1 missing, it's n=2, and some n=3 missing. So compared to a population with no missing n=1s, you would actually expect the mean to be more than 2x, and up to 4x is not numerically unreasonable.
Also this whole analysis depends on the assumption that gay and straight men have similar libidos. It may in fact be the case that homoeroticism is a function of libido, where higher libido features higher odds of experiencing homoeroticism. For example there's a disproportionate number of bi men in the ENM community compared to general pop.
Re: Women as rate-limiters:
I'm not saying zero rate limiting, but there is some number between zero and 100% where the gatekeeping is not significant enough to prevent a motivated man from attaining a desired number of partners/sex frequency; in other words the restricting function is not sufficiently influential to restrict behavior at a significant margin.
Thought of in market dynamic terms: the group women who attempt to apply gate-keeping are not a sufficient enough majority of the total pool of available women for them to exercise 'pricing' control. So like with oil and OPEC, they can only raise the price if there are no competitors able to clear the market at a lower price-- such as US frackers and Canadian oil sands. They can drive the price down by releasing their reserves, but they cannot use their market power to force prices up once the price level becomes profitable for US suppliers to drill new wells. In women and rate-limitnig, the role of the frackers is played by the high libido women themselves.
Moreover, this also is a factor of stigma and social influence, as are pretty much all of your markers:
>The meta-analysis Frankeback et al (2022) shows us that the AVERAGE man is at the 75th percentile of female libido!
Frankeback's data is global; so yes, globally the effect of social repression of women's sexuality is quite large. You will get a very different number on reported libido from women in, say, conservative Islaamic communities, vs. women in someplace sexually liberal such as the US or Britain. There are other confounding factors as well-- sex educators commonly write articles highlighting that women even in liberal countries are more likely to be on medications which lower or inhibit libido, such as antidepressants.
Libido is also tricky in that it's effects may not be perceived as sex-related among culturally repressed groups. For example the Victorian women for whom the vibrator was invented to treat the symptoms of 'hysteria' really did not believe this relief was sexual in nature. It seems counter-intuitive, but the core thing to remember here is that female orgasm is very different physiologically and neurologically from male orgasm. So yeah-- social effects matter a lot, which is why there can be vastly different reported figures between two culturally different populations.
Similarly, disparities in masturbation rates and reported desire for more sexual partners are similarly culturally modulated.
Women are more heavily stigmatized for masturbating, plus they have physiological differences wherein they have extreme difficulty experiencing orgasm, and may need external tools they may or may not have access to. So comparing the two is a factitious route of estimating libido, as desire for sex, desire for orgasm, and ease of achieving all these are seperate things and confounding factors.
By contrast, men's virility and masculinity is socially signaled by their external display of libido, so again, it would make sense that men are over-reporting their own desired number of partners, and may even have internalized that over-reporting as a matter of gender conditioning. Seriously, dude, your own data just got done showing you how little sex most men actually have-- that alone should tell you that men talk a much, much bigger game than they actually play.
>No, actually, they have pretty different distributions
They are different distributions at the lower end for body count, but as you've already covered in other places, women are likely to under-report body count in self-report data, and men are likely to over-report in body count in self-report data. If you hook them up to scary looking machines and tell them they're on a lie detector, then body count numbers start to converge. So correcting for self-report data those disparities would shrink. What is striking is that past about 10, the fat tail looks similar. And that's consistent with the social pressure for a woman to keep her number low; women reporting above 10-12 have less motivation to lie, and so that data looks pretty well matched for small sample size. Probably still impacted by over-reporting on men's part. As a check-- your frequency numbers look pretty well matched.
And again, the counterproposal her is not that there is zero rate-limiting. But the Chadopoly model of such rate-limiting is that there is Carnegie Steel and Rockefeller Oil levels of market control going on. But what's actually probably more the case is there is a 'weak OPEC' level of rate-limiting-- not enough to actually price anyone out of the market, but enough to raise prices marginally.
> And again, the counterproposal her is not that there is zero rate-limiting. But the Chadopoly model of such rate-limiting is that there is Carnegie Steel and Rockefeller Oil levels of market control going on. But what's actually probably more the case is there is a 'weak OPEC' level of rate-limiting-- not enough to actually price anyone out of the market, but enough to raise prices marginally.
Sorry, I guess I'm not understanding your model here? Or maybe where our models diverge?
I may be off, but it sounds to me like you're saying something like:
"Okay, 80% of men have low partner counts because they have low libido, and just basically shacked up with whoever and didn't try. The reason nobody has any sex pace Spiegelhalter is that basically nobody wants it. Now all the guys with actual libidos? They try, and they're mostly successful! Women don't rate limit them, so basically any guy of any quality or set of attributes can rack up a body count as long as they put effort in. They're not Chads, they're just regular dudes."
And here I don't understand where you say "okay, some rate limiting might be happening, but only a little bit" fits in.
Okay, so my model is:
"80% of men have low body counts because they are filtered out. The median man would LIKE to have much more sex, both from a partners and a monthly sex perspective, and I point to gay / meta analyses / women filtering data as support of this. The reason nobody is having any sex per Spiegelhalter is that women have much lower sex drives and rate limit - the great majority of men would like more, but they're rate limited by women, and can't. Now the guys that DO have a lot of sex are able to do that because they pass more "quality filters" and aren't rate limited by women as much. And these are our Chads / Chuds."
Okay. So why I think my thing:
So, if we assume libido is normally distributed, the 50th percentile man being at the 75th percentile is CRAZY high. That means 44% of men are at the female 80th percentile, 28% are at the 90th percentile, and a full 17% are at the 5th percentile.
Remember we had to go up to the 5th percentile of women to get an 80th percentile male body count?
There's literally 3.4 men there at that libido level for every woman!
This is the same ratio as dating apps! Tinder is 75 / 25 men / women. And what do dating apps feature? Crazy power laws and filtration. Only 30% of women on apps will abide a less-than-top-decile height as just one example. When the ratios are skewed like this, women's selectivity goes ever higher, because their market value increases in that supply / demand environment, as we'd expect! So the ones that win that contest are more selected, because of supply / demand dynamics. Chads, in other words.
Like if males and females had equal libidos, why would the distributions of body count be so different? Why would 71% of guys want more sex than they're getting? I agree nobody is having sex, but I think it's because women rate limit, not because men wouldn't like more.
On your Standard Oil point, yeah I agree - 5% of dudes are NOT getting 80% of the women. But I've never tried to support that take, I've always been at a "let's just prove there's actually a power law here" and that it's pretty unbalanced and indeed, there is, and it is.
EDIT - and just to be clear, I think this rate limiting thing is probably our crux. If you think it basically doesn't happen and I think it's the single biggest factor shaping the landscape, the differences in our world models then shake out from that point on.
And there's so many reason to think it's real!
Basic evolution - females have the expensive gametes and pay much bigger prices for sex = much more selective in sex. It's basically foundational at the "biology of sex" root.
Also just the 5% / 17% fact! It's generally established that women can basically have arbitrary amounts of sex if that's what they wanted. But of course they DON'T want that, and that's why they're unhappy with dating apps too - the thing they can easily get there, and that men would love to have, isn't valued by them. And the thing they actually want, "an enduring high commitment relationship from a high quality man," is harder than ever to get there, because of selection effects and these dynamics.
EDIT 2 - I think an interesting test case of your "libido's are normally distributed and status doesn't matter for men" would be male musicians, actors, and athletes. When men max out status, the great majority of them rack up HUGE body counts.
But we wouldn't necessarily expect that if libido were normally distributed, right? If it were actually a "most men just have no libido" thing, we'd expect only the top 10-20% of successful male athletes, actors, and musicians to have huge body counts.
Instead, it's probably like 66% - 80% of them. Arguing that when there IS no rate limit, the base male libido is more than high enough to rack up some serious counts, because so it goes for the majority of non-rate limited men. Are there Lebrons who are totally monogamous? Yeah, definitely - but they're like 10-20%.
You’re comparing lifetime sexual partners, but then switch to yearly numbers to estimate total ‘weird’ sex populations— even when your presented data *has* lifetime reported data. (Quick aside— better term than ‘wierd’ is just ENM: ethically non-monogamous, covering swingers, poly, and non-monogamous bdsm kinksters who all practice consensual non-monogamy). Also you weirdly switch to women when estimating the population (weren’t we talking about men and Chads)? And again, information on the men is in the shown tabulation of data!
Per your own Hebernick reported data: on a lifetime basis, 6.3 percent of men have ever gone to a swingers party, and 4.3 have ever been to a bdsm party or dungeon. So even accepting your 50% bds split, that is 2.15%!
The Hebernick data is almost 10 years old, and then the Levin data is almost 15 years old. And that’s important to note because the Hebernick data clearly shows age stratification, with younger people showing higher participation. For 25-29 year olds, Hebernick shows lifetime participation for men at 6.3% for attending swingers events and 5.6% for bdsm events; for women the lifetime number is 12% and 10.2%, respectively! And that’s just 2 years after the first 50 Shades movie released, a few years, pretty much at the tail end of it’s run on the NYT best seller list. Hebernick’s age stratification shows that there is an effect the de-stigmatizing of ENM communities that increases participation. Also, it kind of shows Swinging skews older, for people in their 40s and 50s.
So no— 2012 data isn’t a good sample date for estimating how common poly is either. That 4% in 2012 is now likely a bigger number in 2026.
But even taking your 2012 4% number for poly, using the lifetime Hebernick numbers:
You call this ‘not a huge amount’ but remember this is the context of total population. So 11.8% number would mean 59% of the 20% of the population with high body counts are ENM. In other words the larger majority of people with high body counts are ENM, using Hebrnick’s lifetime data. Or 35.7% if we’re using the 33% cutoff you were using earlier. Even using your own 6.5% number, 6.5/20=32.5%, and 6.5/33=19.7% — still pretty significant fractions of the high body count population; even by your own number that would mean ENM men are ⅓ to ⅕ of the high body count men population.
But if we’re talking the 25-29 age range— then it’s 6.3 + (5.6/2) + 4 = 13.1% of men. If we follow your lead and flip over to women, it would be 12 + (10.2/2) + 4 = 21.1%! In other words ⅕ of all 25-29 year old women are ENM according to lifetime figures in Hebernick’s data!
And that is before adding in patrons of sex workers.
Then we get to considering how many non-Chads who are non-ENM in your 20-33% population. Because Hebernick’s age stratification should remind us that there’s a difference between a 28 year old with a 30+ body count and a 55 year old with a 30+ body count. A 55 year old monogamous bachelor who has averaged one new girlfriend every year would count in that 30+ body count elite. Are we counting 50-something lifetime bachelors as ‘Chad?’
Then we cross over to the frequency data; you show that there’s good reason to believe high body count population is likely to be high frequency— but you do not show the reverse. This is a ‘all ducks are birds, but not all birds are ducks’ kind of thing. Yes, ducks have a high probability of being birds, but that does not mean the average bird is a duck, or that ducks are a majority of the bird population. Ducks may well be a significant percentage of the bird population, but that does not mean ducks are representative of the greater majority of birds.
There’s good reason to think there are plenty of vanilla monogamous couples in the high frequency population. Like the Catholic or Mormon families with gaggles of kids. The Catholic couple who ‘do the Lord’s work’ every night and twice on Sunday are high frequency by your metric. Couples trying to conceive and doing it 4-6 times a week are in your high frequency population. It also makes sense that high-libido people are likely to marry other high libido people (and to divorce low libido partners).
So a basic assumption that the majority of the high frequency population is just regular monogamous people with average body counts, then again— ENM folk are a significant portion of the cross section of the population that are both high body count AND high frequency.
Finally, you give up the ghost when you start embracing a tier-based argument. If now we have tier-Chads— such that low-income low-looks Chad is just Chad for his tier, but still high body count and high sex frequency— then we do not have a Chadopoly. The Chad myth is specifically that you need to be high income and high looks to be Chad. The existence of significant numbers of unemployed losers cheating on their wives to get high body counts more or less disproves the Chad myth all on its own. There is not a Chadopoly if you have to posit a mid-tier Chad being Chad with mid-tier women. That is just libido having a normal distribution, and high libido men of each tier actually finding a way to express that libido.
‘Don’t be a poor slob, learn to take decent profile pics’ is not really advice for a world in which the Chadopoly actually existed. All you’re really showing is that men who put in effort rack up body counts and frequency— in other words, the amount sex you’re having and the number of sex partners is really more a function of (a) putting in effort, and (b) willingness to sleep with women of your own ‘tier.’
That is not the Chadverse, that’s a real world where sex is not so heavily gate-kept by women that actual high-libido men can’t find partners to satisfy those libidos. In fact given Hebernick’s data, it would suggest that the best strategy for success for high libido men is just to pursue ethical non-monogamy of some form, and seek partners who are also ethically non-monogamous.
I think you're assuming a symmetry and persistence in ENM that is simply not true.
I can literally show in the data that women aren't doing ENM in large numbers.
In terms of symmetry, do you know what percentile woman has an 80th percentile male body count? 93 - 95th percentile. The distributions aren't symmetrical, and nowhere near enough women are doing ENM to round out a top quintile of men's partners.
It is nowhere near 12%, and it can't be ENM as the source of most of these partners, because only 5-7% of women even match a top quintile male body count!
So if there's only 6% of these women, where do the 20% of men get the rest of the body count? From normies.
And once again, the reason to consider women's incidence rather than men's, is because women rate limit men, and I went over a selection of the extensive evidence for that in a reply to your other comment.
> Then we get to considering how many non-Chads who are non-ENM in your 20-33% population. Because Hebernick’s age stratification should remind us that there’s a difference between a 28 year old with a 30+ body count and a 55 year old with a 30+ body count. A 55 year old monogamous bachelor who has averaged one new girlfriend every year would count in that 30+ body count elite. Are we counting 50-something lifetime bachelors as ‘Chad?’
Sure, we are - I also did cuts by 18-28yo men, and I did this internally in the jupyter in several places, and it didn't really materially change the story. But if you want me to do a particular cut I didn't show, happy to do it.
> Then we cross over to the frequency data; you show that there’s good reason to believe high body count population is likely to be high frequency— but you do not show the reverse.
No, I showed this, it was this graph, selected on sex frequency only:
And indeed, they have notably higher body counts and notably higher partners in last year! As we'd expect.
> There’s good reason to think there are plenty of vanilla monogamous couples in the high frequency population. Like the Catholic or Mormon families with gaggles of kids.
The data doesn't really bear this out - if anything monthly sex incidence seems to decrease by attendance:
> Finally, you give up the ghost when you start embracing a tier-based argument. If now we have tier-Chads— such that low-income low-looks Chad is just Chad for his tier, but still high body count and high sex frequency— then we do not have a Chadopoly. The Chad myth is specifically that you need to be high income and high looks to be Chad.
I don't know how many of my other posts you've read, but I've pretty much always articulated and endorsed the "tier" schema, it's what the data supports from pretty much every cut people can do.
You and NP seem to want to be really persnickety about the use of the word "Chadopoly." I've said several times at the beginnings of these posts I consider 20 / 66% good enough to declare "Chadopoly." You don't agree, that's fine, but this is just a definition thing - define your terms, I've done it every time I talk about it.
> in other words, the amount sex you’re having and the number of sex partners is really more a function of (a) putting in effort, and (b) willingness to sleep with women of your own ‘tier.’
No, I actually disagree here. Most of the "tiers" we can cut are economic or occupational prestige based. Men don't care about that in their short term sexual partners at all! Men pretty much only care about attractiveness.
I'd be willing to bet that the men racking up high body counts are also doing better than average by attractiveness too.
And I don't believe it's a matter of just putting effort in, which is a necessary but not sufficient condition - I think they also have to be good looking / fit / good social skills / good drug hookup / whatever to get there, as I've articulated many times.
> In fact given Hebernick’s data, it would suggest that the best strategy for success for high libido men is just to pursue ethical non-monogamy of some form, and seek partners who are also ethically non-monogamous.
Sure, I think we agree here. But good luck to those men! I think it's a lot rarer than you do.
Again, there seems to be some misunderstanding of what 'Chadopoly' denotes. It's not simply the observation that some men have more sex partners than others, which is unremarkable.
The Chadopoly refers to a monopolization effect: the idea that a small subset of men are monopolizing a disproportionately large share of women, creating an imbalance in the dating market and producing an incel underclass. If a similar ratio is seen among women, then this isn't what's happening.
https://nuancepill.substack.com/i/146920484/do-statistics-support-the-8020-rule-in-dating
Whether the ratio is 80/20, 66/33, or 90/10 is beside the point. If 10% of men have 90% of the sex partners within their group, but the same ratio holds for women, there is no Chadopoly any more than there is a Stacyopoly. The most you can say is that they're possibly monopolizing the casual sex encounters, and there are likely more men than women who would like to enter the promiscuous pool.
There's also a lot more to say on the dating app question.
>Only 5% of guys get swipes
There's an important distinction between individual women swiping right on only 5% of profiles and only 5% of male profiles getting swipes.
A recent study that analyzed the first swipes people made found that in terms of within-sex desirability, men tended to swipe up while women actually swiped down slightly - though they note there was lower variability in men's desirability. Actual matches were close in within-sex desirability.
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0327477
The relatively consistent finding that women’s aesthetic taste tends to be more varied could also be relevant here.
This result was a bit surprising to me because of how a good number of men seem to adopt a serial swiper strategy, doing any necessary filtering after the fact, but maybe this only comes into play after the first swipe or two.
>Likes and replies are vastly concentrated in the top 10-20% of men
Like with sex partners, this isn't sex-specific.
>80% of men are rated “unattractive” by women
This is only really interesting insofar as it influences behaviour, which brings us to the next graph.
>Attractive men get 11x the messages as unattractive men
The same graph shows that the most attractive women get 27x the initial messages of the least attractive women. This graph is slightly misleading though, as the lowest rating means something different for each sex. When you break it down by attractiveness percentile, the effect of attractiveness on message volume is comparable between men and women. The success rate of messages (i.e. replies received) also shows a similar pattern, perhaps being slightly stronger for women.
>In fact, women’s likes follow a power law, with the top percentile of men getting the most, the 95% percentile getting half as much as the top percentile, and likes petering out entirely after the 80th percentile or so
I noticed my Hinge like distribution chart there, which shows that the skew isn't that much stronger for men than women. The match skew on Tinder is also similar by sex. Between-sex inequality in swipes received is high due to men swiping on a lot more profiles on top of the skewed gender ratio of the user base, and women get more matches on average due again to the skewed gender ratio, but within-sex inequality is comparable between each sex.
All this aside, when we consider actual outcomes such as dates, sexual encounters, and relationships, we find no gender imbalance on a population level:
https://nuancepill.substack.com/i/144276579/actual-outcomes-through-online-dating
A similar proportion of heterosexual men and women report having had sex with someone they met online in the past year, a similar proportion have had a high number of first dates through online dating in the past year, etc.
So dating apps aren't facilitating Chadopolies, consistent with sexual behaviour data which shows no increasing concentration over time.
I appreciate the link though, and the entertaining post as usual.
Thanks NP - on the "actual outcomes" point, it seems to plug directly into my Chadopoly population here given the base rates? Tinder is 75/25 men / women. If 20% of overall women have met guys through a dating app, approximately all of the women using apps ended up with the top 20% of guys on the app?
And pretty much every app is skewed M/F to a similar degree, sometimes it's 66/33, sometimes it's 70/30, sometimes even as bad as 80/20, but it's generally 2-4x skewed.
Have I misunderstood something?
I mean, I'm not telling you anything you don't know, you go over the same numbers later, but don't see you resolving / addressing that fact.
On the other stuff, I think we basically agree on all the same facts on the ground, and only differ on where we cut a "Chadopoly" definition.
I think being able to truthfully say "20% of men have 66% of all the sex / distinct female partners" is good enough to say it exists, and you have a stricter definition to use the specific word "Chadopoly," but we both largely agree about what's going on in terms of pairing in the real world.
But I think many people of both genders are probably unaware of the 20/66 thing, and would be interested to know about it!
We all know the world is unequal, that many things are power laws. Well, this is one of them. Tinder Gini / inequality is worse than income Gini / inequality:
https://imgur.com/a/YaMCJvJ
Hence my article here.
Probably most interesting to me personally, and not addressed in the article, is that this has probably been happening as long as we've been human.
A full 87% of HG societies have between 5 and 20% of the men practicing polygamy *in modern times,* and given the infamous "80% of women have kids to 40% of men historically" breeding ratio (completely supported by historical genetic analyses going back 150k years: https://imgur.com/JWIsva9 ), it was likely to have been an even bigger factor in the environment of evolutionary adaptiveness.
"Body count Gini" and "Monthly sex incidence Gini" have probably been like this back to the beginning of humanity, which is fascinating.
For all that we think we've evolved and materially changed things with our "civilization" and "iphones" and so on, we're all playing out scripts written over millions of years.
>Tinder is 75/25 men / women. If 20% of overall women have met guys through a dating app, approximately all of the ones on the app ended up with the top 20% of guys on the app?
More than 20% of young women have used online dating before, but about half or slightly below. Regardless, I don't think we can be confident in assuming that all or even most of the men who have dated through dating apps have belonged to the most desirable 20%. For one thing, this would require large mismatches that don't seem realistic on a large scale. For another, the data I shared shows that aside from the imbalances in the gender ratio and swipe rates, outcomes are pretty similar for men and women. The skew in matches is similar, meaning that across the distribution, men and women have roughly the number you'd expect given the difference in population sizes, with perhaps a bit more concentration among the most matched men.
https://ibb.co/9k9xPPs
Moreover, the study I linked indicates that when comparing within-sex desirability (measured by swipes received), matches tend to be very closely matched. This means that even with a gender ratio of 4:1, if all women matched up with a man, they would be spread relatively evenly across the 80% of men in terms of desirability, so in each quartile of male desirability, around 3/4 of men would be unmatched. While this might not be exactly how things play out, it's likely closer to the reality than all women who use dating apps dating only the top 20% of men.
>On the other stuff, I think we basically agree on all the same facts on the ground, and only differ on where we cut a "Chadopoly" definition.
It may sound arrogant, but as the Chadopoly expert who 'popularized' the term around here, I think my definition carries a bit more weight. If I say that the concept is wrong, and then somebody else says it's right, I think it's fair to expect the definition to reflect the one of the initial claimer.
>But I think many people of both genders are probably unaware of the 20/66 thing, and would be interested to know about it!
I guess so. I think people might actually be more interested in knowing that a similar ratio exists for women. Many probably don't even realize that it can co-exist with a similar ratio for women because since it's always framed as a one-sided monopolization.
>given the infamous "80% of women have kids to 40% of men historically" breeding ratio (completely supported by historical genetic analyses going back 150k years: https://imgur.com/JWIsva9 )
I'm going to be annoying and say that I don't think this is as airtight as is assumed. We know how simple inferences from the Neolithic bottleneck for example lead to a misleading picture, and that sustained drastic reproductive disparities aren't required to explain it. There are also other plausible mechanisms that can help explain this 40/80 ratio like purifying selection: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3886894/
While I agree that the dating landscape isn't an equal playing field, I'm wary of narratives that it's completely 'broken' or imbalanced in a way that requires a fundamental restructuring of society (not saying you're arguing this). I think this is mostly a cope that distracts from real issues.
> More than 20% of young women have used online dating before,
Yes, but they drop out a lot sooner, right? I think if you did a "months on platform" analysis by gender, it would be a lot closer to the 2-3 men for every women than the 3:2 ratio the lifetime rates suggest.
> The skew in matches is similar, meaning that across the distribution, men and women have roughly the number you'd expect given the difference in population sizes, with perhaps a bit more concentration among the most matched men.
Sorry, the image you linked goes to a dead page that says "that page doesn't exist," could you try a different image host or something?
> I'm going to be annoying and say that I don't think this is as airtight as is assumed. We know how simple inferences from the Neolithic bottleneck for example lead to a misleading picture, and that sustained drastic reproductive disparities aren't required to explain it.
Except that you can see the massive Yamnaya y-chromosome replacement exactly where you expect it historically? Why do you think it surges up to the infamous 17:1 figure after rolling along at 2:1 for so long? It's definitely not purifying selection!
I've seen another argument that tries to say that you can explain this with serial monogamy at a given cadence, with a little simulation to show how the math could work. But this ignores the extant fact on the ground that 87% of HG societies demonstrate polygamy, we have obvious counterfactuals that discredit a serial monogamy scenario. It also ignores all the massive y-chromosome replacement events we affirmatively know have happened historically, and the fact that it's a really common pattern at the small scale in pretty much all pre-contact HG societies.
> While I agree that the dating landscape isn't an equal playing field, I'm wary of narratives that it's completely 'broken' or imbalanced in a way that requires a fundamental restructuring of society (not saying you're arguing this). I think this is mostly a cope that distracts from real issues.
Oh sure, definitely agree there. I outright think it's GOOD that people are pairing up less! I don't want any societal restructuring at all.
I applaud the fact that ~62% (and growing every year) of women are opting out of marriage at the median-and-below, because I legitimately think they had a shitty deal in the 50's, and are genuinely better off single if that's where they want to be.
If the median guy is as bad as the data suggests they are, then in a "what can be, should be destroyed by the truth" way, it's better that people aren't pairing up!
But you know, I'm fully anti-Manosphere and have written a few posts about that.
> Yes, but they drop out a lot sooner, right? I think if you did a "months on platform" analysis by gender, it would be a lot closer to the 2-3 men for every women than the 3:2 ratio the lifetime rates suggest.
Yeah; my point was just that it's not 'approximately all the women on the app' who have dated through it. Or maybe I misunderstood what you meant by that.
>Sorry, the image you linked goes to a dead page that says "that page doesn't exist," could you try a different image host or something?
Hopefully you'll just take my word for it. I might put it in an article at some point.
>Except that you can see the massive Yamnaya y-chromosome replacement exactly where you expect it historically? Why do you think it surges up to the infamous 17:1 figure after rolling along at 2:1 for so long? It's definitely not purifying selection!
We discussed this previously didn't we? The Yamnaya expansion happened at the right tail end of the bottleneck, so can't explain most of it. These papers offer what I think are plausible explanations for the Neolithic bottleneck:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-04375-6
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-47618-5
I mention purifying selection as a potential mechanism contributing to the more stable disparity.
>I've seen another argument that tries to say that you can explain this with serial monogamy at a given cadence, with a little simulation to show how the math could work. But this ignores the extant fact on the ground that 87% of HG societies demonstrate polygamy, we have obvious counterfactuals that discredit a serial monogamy scenario.
I mean I don't think it's explained by either system and believe most men in history did reproduce, but I could see serial monogamy among the non-polygamous men potentially having a larger effect. I don't know if that's ruled out by the existence of polygamy.
I will say that while most HG societies practice polygamy to some extent, I haven't seen evidence that a large portion of men are barred from reproduction in most of them. One paper that looked at men who survived to at least 50 in polygamy-practicing Gambian villages found that only 15.8% of men were childless, and (in villages A and B) only 2.1% had never married.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/48776428_Height_and_reproductive_success_how_a_Gambian_population_compares_to_the_West
> Yeah; my point was just that it's not 'approximately all the women on the app' who have dated through it. Or maybe I misunderstood what you meant by that.
My point here is that if the "true" ratio is closer to the 2-3 men thing by time on platform, then about half of women install it, get deluged or The Ick, and skedaddle pretty quickly, and the other half stays on. Then that half ends up with the 20% of more successful guys on the platform, leaving the 80% with not much, ie the Chadopoly model.
> We discussed this previously didn't we? The Yamnaya expansion happened at the right tail end of the bottleneck, so can't explain most of it. These papers offer what I think are plausible explanations for the Neolithic bottleneck:
Oh did we? My apologies if I didn't remember. I def appreciate the links, read them with interest.
Yeah, the Yamnaya happened at the tail end, after the infamous 17:1 peak, but obv if societies transitioned to agriculture 1-2k years ago, and we're right on the cusp of mass chariot warfare (as the Yamnaya so ably demonstrate soon after), you'd fully expect these agricultural societies with a density of men and resources to be getting up to what all societies since the beginning of time have got up to - warring on neighbors and taking their women.
And since chariot warfare has just become possible, you could expect a pretty big peak from the few that figured it out before everyone else, even before the Yamnaya. Then the Yamnaya just demonstrate that, but for everybody a little while later, in the historical record.
So your linked papers say something similar in Zeng, right? They say "sure, y chromosome replacement - but have you considered patrilineal kin competition? This could amplify the effect if it's different p-kin groups y chromosome replacing each other!" And sure, yeah.
Then Guyon is like "wait a minute guys, we don't need violence AT ALL here! What if kin groups fission by patrilineal lines, so the ones that succeed are definitionally sorted on p-kin lines and concentrate the y's? I've made a model so overpowered that if you assume this is true, it doesn't even matter if they're random, or patrilineal, or matrilineal, my model forces everyone to fit up to the Karmin reference point! So this is obviously what happened. Oh, and by the way, if anyone does any violence, it amplifies my model by 2.5x, but it wasn't necessary, see - it's so overpowered it can ALWAYS hit the reference, no matter what! Damn I'm good at modeling!"
Which, okay. I mean, sure, fissioning by p-kin lines can also probably explain some of the concentration, but I'm certainly not buying their model. And lets not forget that such fissioning just basically turns into the Zeng dynamic a generation or two later, which is also driven by y chromosome replacement.
But interesting papers, thanks for linking them.
> I mean I don't think it's explained by either system and believe most men in history did reproduce
Yeah, this is probably our crux then - I don't buy that AT ALL. I mean, ~15-30% of men died by violence during HG long-time. Surely a decent chunk of them did so without reproducing? Then the victors in that violence captured their women (it was literally the point of the great majority of HG warfare), and did still more y-chromosome concentration. And we KNOW this, from extensive archaeological evidence, ethnographies, and so on.
> One paper that looked at men who survived to at least 50 in polygamy-practicing Gambian villages found that only 15.8% of men were childless, and (in villages A and B) only 2.1% had never married.
Yeah, this was pretty interesting too.
I don't really buy it as representative of true HG dynamics though, because it's in the 50's - 74, ie after state societies have vastly tamped down / eliminated HG-on-HG violence and warfare and y-chromosome replacement. Which was the driving force in most of HG history for the male / female mismatch in reproduction.
But I think I do buy the general recipe of a bunch of relatively short-lived relationships among even-polygamous HG's. So sure, you have 2 or 3 wives, but you also divorce 2-3 times and get new wives, and those wives go on to other men. I just think they'll largely end up with higher status men as second or third wives if they're still fertile, and only end up with lower status men when most of their fertility is gone.
Also if 40% wifed up via "the Levirate" that's obviously a really egalitarian sorting mechanism that will have distributed wives more widely than a more mutually chosen or competitive dynamic. And back to p-kin points, your brother is probably likely to be closer to your status level (and y-as-measured-by-Karmin) than a random stranger, so still some concentration by status. But certainly less than there would be in a condition where women are involved in choosing their matches to a reasonable extent.
And maybe Levirates were really common! I have no idea, I've got to do some research here. Thanks for sharing!
Don’t know if I missed something in your essay — but what if everyone is simply lying?
The blokes exaggerate, and the birds are coy?
Oh yeah, thanks for calling this out.
So yes, both genders lie, but not a ton, it's generally moving numbers up or down by 10-20% - men always lie up, women always lie down.
The gap with women is typically bigger, in the sense that in studies where they hooked them to devices they thought were a lie detector, their numbers rose up to mostly meet the men's numbers, so it's probably something like "men lie 5-10% up and women lie 10-20% down."
Further, both Pew and Aella have done triangulations on survey accuracy, and it's generally pretty decent. Spiegelhalter also goes over a lot of this in his book.
Aella:
https://aella.substack.com/p/how-your-survey-responder-lies
Pew:
https://www.pewresearch.org/methods/2023/09/07/assessing-the-accuracy-of-estimates-for-u-s-adults/
Oh, and maybe this obsession with who’s getting your fair share is another part of the “1%” rich obsession?
Suddenly, people have discovered that life isn’t fair and the rewards are far from evenly distributed. It’s absurd, really.
"I aver that we’ve already established the top body count guys are probably better - more attractive, fitter, more social skills, richer, higher prestige, etc, at least within their SES tier."
I feel like this is a really shocking thing to say based on those charts. Those are tiny differentials in very small numbers between men of the highest and lowest status tiers. You're also just assuming that because people pair up in extremely matched looks, SES, and all other tiers *in relationships* that this is also true for one-night stands and casual sex...and that is just not even remotely true. Both men and women just looking to fuck can and usually do dip way below their standards of what they would present to the world as in a relationship and introduce to family and friends.
I think you just can't understand this because you are obviously a guy who is in the top tiers of everything, expects to be in the top tiers of everything, cares about being in the top tiers of everything, and would not yourself bang a chubby, not very attractive, mid-tier SES girl just because you were horny and she was in the mood. That's the case with most guys like you. It is NOT the case with "Chads" who come from every tier and when they're horny they dngaf. You would also assuredly be shocked at what low-level of guys women are willing to have sex with one that one night every two months when she happens to be really horny and not already have a guy she's sleeping with and someone acceptable hits her up. Or that one high a month that she's feeling pissed off at her last boyfriend and looking to go out and get revenge.
The "Chads" -- who are not Chads, they are a minority of random dudes from every tier of looks, charm and SES -- put in an amount of effort and attempts at sex that I just think you would find mindblowing and difficult to comprehend. They are sending out texts and messages and hooks to 70-80 women a day hitting the up...NOT on dating apps, just every girl they know on Facebook, Insta, WhatsApp, and Snap, which includes every girl they ever DID match with on a dating app, and they don't care that 90% of those messages go ignored. They rotate and hit em up once a month or so. They frequently create new profiles with different names and ages to try to get around women who have blocked them. This is a regular practice for like the top 10% libido guys, it's honestly quite obsessive, and would be mindblowing to your average dude. Not only that but they do that FOR YEARS AND DECADES ON END. And they are willing to hit a way wider net of women below and outside a normal guy's "relationship" standards...bigger women, older women, women with 6 kids and three ex-husbands...whatever.
Also, the number who are cheaters and lying about it is easily 95%, not "some portion", it's the vast majority of all of them. Like to the point where ordinary women just assume as the first course of business for any guy in his late 20s or older that first you have to figure out if he's already married or has a serious girlfriend.
I just really think you are not comprehending the level of effort that the sluttiest guys are putting into being slutty. I would tell you to ask a female friend to join one of those "Am I Dating the Same Guy" sites and spend a few hours scrolling in an average mid-tier city like Denver or Houston, and the scales will quickly fall from your eyes. The low-level of the guys on there who are actually banging way more women than you would ever think possible will shock you. But also, it's not like one girl posts a guy and says "does anyone have any red flags?" and it's a normal distribution of responses. It's not. 90% of guys posted, no one has anything to say about at all (including the vast majority of high SES looking guys). Then someone will post a photo of a complete loser who literally took his profile picture in a porta potty on the job site, being like "I'm going on a date with him tonight, any red flags I should know about?" and 75 women will respond with screenshots showing that he's hitting them up or tying to sext them *on the very same day* or setting up ten back-up dates in case one falls through.
Like seriously, just get a female friend to let you scroll through that site for a few hours...they have them in every metro area and usually have a sample size of 100k+ female members...it will give you a much better idea of what goes on and I think you will be surprised at how low women's standards are for casual sex and how insanely over-the-top the tail-end distribution of extreme efforts at being a slut guys make.
Women definitely are not as consistently horny. It is way more hit and miss. They might have a couple nights in a two-month period where they have the motivation, energy, and libido to go out and bang a random guy. But if you're the "Chad" who is constantly hitting them up the way they do, you hit those random women, and that's why it's easy to fill those numbers up.
> I feel like this is a really shocking thing to say based on those charts. Those are tiny differentials in very small numbers between men of the highest and lowest status tiers.
I think we're basically looking at the same picture, believe it or not.
You look at it and say "hey, you don't have to be a 6' 6" high income CEO / Doctor with abs to rack up a big body count."
And sure, I mean, obviously right? But are there quality signals? There are! Are high body count guys more attractive, taller, higher income, often even more educated?
They are - here's a cut I just pulled that compares the top quintile by body count with the lower ones. We clearly see signal on attractiveness, height, income, prestige, and college degree, and stratification on having more generally "good" things versus the next quintiles.
https://imgur.com/IpxpgxC
> Both men and women just looking to fuck can and usually do dip way below their standards of what they would present to the world as in a relationship and introduce to family and friends.
I buy this for men, sure. Lots of men lower standards for easy sex. I buy it less for women. Sure, it happens - certainly a woman might sleep with a guy she wouldn't marry, or even want a relationship with. Sure on some nights when she's particularly horny, she may go home with a loser, because he's there in front of her and made it easy.
But I think in the aggregate, this isn't the dominant mode for female pairing, even for casual sex. The fact that women are *on average* more selective for both sex and relationships is a gigantic effect size seen both in the literature and in real life in countless different ways.
> The "Chads" -- who are not Chads, they are a minority of random dudes from every tier of looks, charm and SES -- put in an amount of effort and attempts at sex that I just think you would find mindblowing and difficult to comprehend.
> I just really think you are not comprehending the level of effort that the sluttiest guys are putting into being slutty.
Sure, these guys definitely exist, I think we both agree on that. I think where we might disagree is on how successful they are, on average, and on what percent of high body count men they are. It sounds like you think they're a big proportion of the guys with high body counts, that complete loser porta-potty dudes are some huge chunk of them. If that were true, we wouldn't see signals by income, prestige, attractiveness, height, college degrees, etc, though.
Sure, they definitely exist. But they're not most of them. They're not even 50% of them, probably less than 20%, for the signals to still show through like they do in the graph I just shared.
Lol, we are definitely seeing different things. I'm a little confused by your chart because the title at the top says it is comparing too versus bottom quintile, while the code for the bars says top versus next quintile. Those are very different things bc one would be comparing a guy at the 90th percentile to one at the 10th, while the other would be comparison the top 90th percentile to one at the 70th. Though perhaps in this case it actually makes not much difference because the tail is so skewed in numbers from the average and median.
Regardless, I just don't think these small differences say the same thing you do. *Of course* people who have attractive qualities like being good looking, not obese, tall, having a good job will have WAYYYY more opportunities than anyone else, and you should expect that given those opportunities, they will have higher numbers. But actually, these are not very big numbers differences. Considering that by ordinary reason a top percentile attractive person should have literally an almost infinite number of opportunities than a bottom person, I would expect to see a much bigger skew, and to me this tells me that top guys are actually a lot pickier than you would expect based on what evo psych says.
Idk, I can think through every guy I've known that has a body count above 50, and not a single one is top 10% of anything, not even too third in most cases and sometimes not top half. But they are all very outgoing, extraverted, don't care about rejection, and extremely horny.
> I'm a little confused by your chart because the title at the top says it is comparing too versus bottom quintile
Yeah sorry, it's the top quintile, quintile 5, compared to the bottom 4 quiintiles, all the next quintiles. The fact there's that big a separation there across all those things is a HUGE signal.
You think these effects are small, but over a population of hundreds and thousands, it's a ridiculously strong signal. Think how varied a population is - that quintile has all the nonstop harassers you mentioned, all the porta potty guys, all the opportunists who said the right thing to the right woman that one night, and so on. For us to see signals that big on various quality metrics through an entire population is a staggeringly large signal.
> Regardless, I just don't think these small differences say the same thing you do. *Of course* people who have attractive qualities like being good looking, not obese, tall, having a good job will have WAYYYY more opportunities than anyone else, and you should expect that given those opportunities, they will have higher numbers. But actually, these are not very big numbers differences.
Yeah, we disagree here then. These are huge differences at a population level. They're pretty giant differences at a body count level too - the difference between "40" vs "1-10" across all the other quintiles.
> Idk, I can think through every guy I've known that has a body count above 50, and not a single one is top 10% of anything, not even too third in most cases and sometimes not top half. But they are all very outgoing, extraverted, don't care about rejection, and extremely horny.
Yeah, but now think of them compared to the entire population. You're like everyone else reading Substack - your social groups are extremely selected. You're already interacting with basically a top quintile slice of humanity, probably a top 5-10%, the great majority of people you know and work with likely have college or post-baccalaureate degrees, etc.
The people you know are ALREADY crazy selected.
Like as an example, are 80% of the people you know fat?
Do 70% of them not have a degree?
How many of them make ~$60k a year, the literal median?
How many of the men are 5' 9" or shorter?
The median American is basically obese - it's not quite there, it's at the 44th percentile or something, but it's getting there in another 10 years or so.
So basically, short, obese, ugly, dumb, non-degreed, and poor. Sounds like your social circles? No?
Because those are the genuine medians, meaning ~50% of people are below THAT.
Good thread it never began for you if your not lean maxing and surgery maxing
On going over this a second time, I found another flaw with your analysis, and it's basically your core thesis:
"My argument here will be an overall volume argument - specifically, we have to account for where all the female partners are coming from, because male sex drives are crazy high compared to what they actually get in real life (in the data, 2-4x higher total body count on average for homosexual men vs heterosexual men), so hetero sex is generally rate-limited by women to roughly 1/4 to 1/2 of what men demonstrate that they want when free to act without that rate limit."
Nuance pill kind of picked this up, in noting that the same distributions were seen male & female, which is not consistent with a world in which women are rate-limiting men. But also you could see this recognizing your assumptions behind assuming men have a "2-4X higher total body count," which is based on a comparison of gay men to heterosexual men.
And the problem there is that data on gay men is skewed based on social stigma; male homosexuality is still pretty heavily stigmatized in many communities. And male bisexuality is even more stigmatized, in part due to this stigma; gay men generally stigmatize bi men as 'secretly gay,' while homophobic cultures also code bisexuality as 'gay' as well. To the point that data analysis of 'men who have sex with men' has to code all men who report sexual encounters with other men separately from those who identify as 'gay' or 'bisexual.'
That matters here because what the Spanberger data shows basically that libido has a Pareto distribution, if we measure high libido by body count or frequency. So we would expect that apply to homosexual men as well! Except that, with libido being a Pareto distribution, and under significant social pressure-- low-libido gay men are heavily incentivized to identify as straight. Which would skew averages quite a bit. If half the population of low-libido men who experience homoeroticism 'prays the gay away' and calls themselves straight-- then the frequency averages for men who do openly identify as gay would be much higher. They further probably to some degree exhibit Pareto distribution, with the average being significantly raised by a small population engaged in high-libido activity.
Also that would be consistent with the idea that gay men with high libidos have more motivation to identify as gay-- their libido. So if libido for homoerotic activity is actively a significant factor that differentiates between the population that 'prays the gay away' and openly comes out as gay, then we would expect the body counts to
So using the gay-to-hetero to estimate a rate-limiting effect supposedly enforced by women is just not consistent in the world in which we know male homosexuality is heavily socially punished. Also, given that female homosexuality is not similarly stigmatized, we also can't use comparisons between, say, the male and female homosexual populations, because there is a demonstrable difference between the social treatment of both parties for homoerotic expression.
And, again, as Nuance Pill points out-- both the male and female populations demonstrate this Pareto distribution in your data-- which is not what we would expect in a world where women were rate-limiting high libido men. If women were rate-limiting, we would expect high-libido women in the fat tail of the distribution to have higher body counts. They would also have higher frequency. Under a rate-limiting hypothesis-- they could find high libido men and just-- not impose the rate limiting. But your data doesn't show that among the women's distribution. It shows that basically both genders have more or less the same distribution. That is not consistent with a hypothesis of women rate-limiting men.
> If half the population of low-libido men who experience homoeroticism 'prays the gay away' and calls themselves straight-- then the frequency averages for men who do openly identify as gay would be much higher.
Yes, but even in this maximally bifurcated scenario, you'd expect gay men to end up at 1.5x the body count of straight men, not 2-4x.
And I'm surprised you think that women don't rate limit men on sex - it's a pretty strong signal in the literature that male sex drives are intrinsically higher than female sex drives.
The meta-analysis Frankeback et al (2022) shows us that the AVERAGE man is at the 75th percentile of female libido!
https://gwern.net/doc/psychology/2022-frankenbach.pdf
Men masturbate at the 85th percentile female rate!
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8346327/
71% of men say they wish they were getting more sex!
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9794105/
You can't tell me men aren't rate limited by women, every single bit of evidence and data points to that being true, from multiple different triangulations, whether they be literature, gay men, or top quintile men.
> And, again, as Nuance Pill points out-- both the male and female populations demonstrate this Pareto distribution in your data-- which is not what we would expect in a world where women were rate-limiting high libido men.
No, actually, they have pretty different distributions. The bottom 3 body count quintiles are pretty similar across men and women, then 4th quintile is 13 men / 5 women and the top quintile is 40 men / 15 women by body count.
What does that mean? It means exactly that the bottom 3 quintiles of men are being rate limited!
https://imgur.com/a/0Zih5o2
>Yes, but even in this maximally bifurcated scenario, you'd expect gay men to end up at 1.5x the body count of straight men, not 2-4x
That's just consistent with the the rate of men who experience homoeroticism opting out of identifying as gay / acting on it is probably higher than half, maybe even much higher. In the Pareto distribution, the modal is 0 or 1, so low libido 'gay' men are cutting a lot of the 0's and 1's out of the mean, likely even some of what would otherwise be 2's, 3,'s etc. Basically as n approaches zero the likelyhood stigma will exclude him from the population rises. Asexual gay men likely just either identify as asexual straights or just don't come out of the closet. It's not just some majority of n=1 missing, it's n=2, and some n=3 missing. So compared to a population with no missing n=1s, you would actually expect the mean to be more than 2x, and up to 4x is not numerically unreasonable.
Also this whole analysis depends on the assumption that gay and straight men have similar libidos. It may in fact be the case that homoeroticism is a function of libido, where higher libido features higher odds of experiencing homoeroticism. For example there's a disproportionate number of bi men in the ENM community compared to general pop.
Re: Women as rate-limiters:
I'm not saying zero rate limiting, but there is some number between zero and 100% where the gatekeeping is not significant enough to prevent a motivated man from attaining a desired number of partners/sex frequency; in other words the restricting function is not sufficiently influential to restrict behavior at a significant margin.
Thought of in market dynamic terms: the group women who attempt to apply gate-keeping are not a sufficient enough majority of the total pool of available women for them to exercise 'pricing' control. So like with oil and OPEC, they can only raise the price if there are no competitors able to clear the market at a lower price-- such as US frackers and Canadian oil sands. They can drive the price down by releasing their reserves, but they cannot use their market power to force prices up once the price level becomes profitable for US suppliers to drill new wells. In women and rate-limitnig, the role of the frackers is played by the high libido women themselves.
Moreover, this also is a factor of stigma and social influence, as are pretty much all of your markers:
>The meta-analysis Frankeback et al (2022) shows us that the AVERAGE man is at the 75th percentile of female libido!
Frankeback's data is global; so yes, globally the effect of social repression of women's sexuality is quite large. You will get a very different number on reported libido from women in, say, conservative Islaamic communities, vs. women in someplace sexually liberal such as the US or Britain. There are other confounding factors as well-- sex educators commonly write articles highlighting that women even in liberal countries are more likely to be on medications which lower or inhibit libido, such as antidepressants.
Libido is also tricky in that it's effects may not be perceived as sex-related among culturally repressed groups. For example the Victorian women for whom the vibrator was invented to treat the symptoms of 'hysteria' really did not believe this relief was sexual in nature. It seems counter-intuitive, but the core thing to remember here is that female orgasm is very different physiologically and neurologically from male orgasm. So yeah-- social effects matter a lot, which is why there can be vastly different reported figures between two culturally different populations.
Similarly, disparities in masturbation rates and reported desire for more sexual partners are similarly culturally modulated.
Women are more heavily stigmatized for masturbating, plus they have physiological differences wherein they have extreme difficulty experiencing orgasm, and may need external tools they may or may not have access to. So comparing the two is a factitious route of estimating libido, as desire for sex, desire for orgasm, and ease of achieving all these are seperate things and confounding factors.
By contrast, men's virility and masculinity is socially signaled by their external display of libido, so again, it would make sense that men are over-reporting their own desired number of partners, and may even have internalized that over-reporting as a matter of gender conditioning. Seriously, dude, your own data just got done showing you how little sex most men actually have-- that alone should tell you that men talk a much, much bigger game than they actually play.
>No, actually, they have pretty different distributions
They are different distributions at the lower end for body count, but as you've already covered in other places, women are likely to under-report body count in self-report data, and men are likely to over-report in body count in self-report data. If you hook them up to scary looking machines and tell them they're on a lie detector, then body count numbers start to converge. So correcting for self-report data those disparities would shrink. What is striking is that past about 10, the fat tail looks similar. And that's consistent with the social pressure for a woman to keep her number low; women reporting above 10-12 have less motivation to lie, and so that data looks pretty well matched for small sample size. Probably still impacted by over-reporting on men's part. As a check-- your frequency numbers look pretty well matched.
And again, the counterproposal her is not that there is zero rate-limiting. But the Chadopoly model of such rate-limiting is that there is Carnegie Steel and Rockefeller Oil levels of market control going on. But what's actually probably more the case is there is a 'weak OPEC' level of rate-limiting-- not enough to actually price anyone out of the market, but enough to raise prices marginally.
> And again, the counterproposal her is not that there is zero rate-limiting. But the Chadopoly model of such rate-limiting is that there is Carnegie Steel and Rockefeller Oil levels of market control going on. But what's actually probably more the case is there is a 'weak OPEC' level of rate-limiting-- not enough to actually price anyone out of the market, but enough to raise prices marginally.
Sorry, I guess I'm not understanding your model here? Or maybe where our models diverge?
I may be off, but it sounds to me like you're saying something like:
"Okay, 80% of men have low partner counts because they have low libido, and just basically shacked up with whoever and didn't try. The reason nobody has any sex pace Spiegelhalter is that basically nobody wants it. Now all the guys with actual libidos? They try, and they're mostly successful! Women don't rate limit them, so basically any guy of any quality or set of attributes can rack up a body count as long as they put effort in. They're not Chads, they're just regular dudes."
And here I don't understand where you say "okay, some rate limiting might be happening, but only a little bit" fits in.
Okay, so my model is:
"80% of men have low body counts because they are filtered out. The median man would LIKE to have much more sex, both from a partners and a monthly sex perspective, and I point to gay / meta analyses / women filtering data as support of this. The reason nobody is having any sex per Spiegelhalter is that women have much lower sex drives and rate limit - the great majority of men would like more, but they're rate limited by women, and can't. Now the guys that DO have a lot of sex are able to do that because they pass more "quality filters" and aren't rate limited by women as much. And these are our Chads / Chuds."
Okay. So why I think my thing:
So, if we assume libido is normally distributed, the 50th percentile man being at the 75th percentile is CRAZY high. That means 44% of men are at the female 80th percentile, 28% are at the 90th percentile, and a full 17% are at the 5th percentile.
Remember we had to go up to the 5th percentile of women to get an 80th percentile male body count?
There's literally 3.4 men there at that libido level for every woman!
This is the same ratio as dating apps! Tinder is 75 / 25 men / women. And what do dating apps feature? Crazy power laws and filtration. Only 30% of women on apps will abide a less-than-top-decile height as just one example. When the ratios are skewed like this, women's selectivity goes ever higher, because their market value increases in that supply / demand environment, as we'd expect! So the ones that win that contest are more selected, because of supply / demand dynamics. Chads, in other words.
Like if males and females had equal libidos, why would the distributions of body count be so different? Why would 71% of guys want more sex than they're getting? I agree nobody is having sex, but I think it's because women rate limit, not because men wouldn't like more.
On your Standard Oil point, yeah I agree - 5% of dudes are NOT getting 80% of the women. But I've never tried to support that take, I've always been at a "let's just prove there's actually a power law here" and that it's pretty unbalanced and indeed, there is, and it is.
EDIT - and just to be clear, I think this rate limiting thing is probably our crux. If you think it basically doesn't happen and I think it's the single biggest factor shaping the landscape, the differences in our world models then shake out from that point on.
And there's so many reason to think it's real!
Basic evolution - females have the expensive gametes and pay much bigger prices for sex = much more selective in sex. It's basically foundational at the "biology of sex" root.
Also just the 5% / 17% fact! It's generally established that women can basically have arbitrary amounts of sex if that's what they wanted. But of course they DON'T want that, and that's why they're unhappy with dating apps too - the thing they can easily get there, and that men would love to have, isn't valued by them. And the thing they actually want, "an enduring high commitment relationship from a high quality man," is harder than ever to get there, because of selection effects and these dynamics.
EDIT 2 - I think an interesting test case of your "libido's are normally distributed and status doesn't matter for men" would be male musicians, actors, and athletes. When men max out status, the great majority of them rack up HUGE body counts.
But we wouldn't necessarily expect that if libido were normally distributed, right? If it were actually a "most men just have no libido" thing, we'd expect only the top 10-20% of successful male athletes, actors, and musicians to have huge body counts.
Instead, it's probably like 66% - 80% of them. Arguing that when there IS no rate limit, the base male libido is more than high enough to rack up some serious counts, because so it goes for the majority of non-rate limited men. Are there Lebrons who are totally monogamous? Yeah, definitely - but they're like 10-20%.
Data foul!
You’re comparing lifetime sexual partners, but then switch to yearly numbers to estimate total ‘weird’ sex populations— even when your presented data *has* lifetime reported data. (Quick aside— better term than ‘wierd’ is just ENM: ethically non-monogamous, covering swingers, poly, and non-monogamous bdsm kinksters who all practice consensual non-monogamy). Also you weirdly switch to women when estimating the population (weren’t we talking about men and Chads)? And again, information on the men is in the shown tabulation of data!
Per your own Hebernick reported data: on a lifetime basis, 6.3 percent of men have ever gone to a swingers party, and 4.3 have ever been to a bdsm party or dungeon. So even accepting your 50% bds split, that is 2.15%!
The Hebernick data is almost 10 years old, and then the Levin data is almost 15 years old. And that’s important to note because the Hebernick data clearly shows age stratification, with younger people showing higher participation. For 25-29 year olds, Hebernick shows lifetime participation for men at 6.3% for attending swingers events and 5.6% for bdsm events; for women the lifetime number is 12% and 10.2%, respectively! And that’s just 2 years after the first 50 Shades movie released, a few years, pretty much at the tail end of it’s run on the NYT best seller list. Hebernick’s age stratification shows that there is an effect the de-stigmatizing of ENM communities that increases participation. Also, it kind of shows Swinging skews older, for people in their 40s and 50s.
So no— 2012 data isn’t a good sample date for estimating how common poly is either. That 4% in 2012 is now likely a bigger number in 2026.
But even taking your 2012 4% number for poly, using the lifetime Hebernick numbers:
5.6% (swingers) + 2.2% (bdsm) + 4% (poly) = 11.8%!
You call this ‘not a huge amount’ but remember this is the context of total population. So 11.8% number would mean 59% of the 20% of the population with high body counts are ENM. In other words the larger majority of people with high body counts are ENM, using Hebrnick’s lifetime data. Or 35.7% if we’re using the 33% cutoff you were using earlier. Even using your own 6.5% number, 6.5/20=32.5%, and 6.5/33=19.7% — still pretty significant fractions of the high body count population; even by your own number that would mean ENM men are ⅓ to ⅕ of the high body count men population.
But if we’re talking the 25-29 age range— then it’s 6.3 + (5.6/2) + 4 = 13.1% of men. If we follow your lead and flip over to women, it would be 12 + (10.2/2) + 4 = 21.1%! In other words ⅕ of all 25-29 year old women are ENM according to lifetime figures in Hebernick’s data!
And that is before adding in patrons of sex workers.
Then we get to considering how many non-Chads who are non-ENM in your 20-33% population. Because Hebernick’s age stratification should remind us that there’s a difference between a 28 year old with a 30+ body count and a 55 year old with a 30+ body count. A 55 year old monogamous bachelor who has averaged one new girlfriend every year would count in that 30+ body count elite. Are we counting 50-something lifetime bachelors as ‘Chad?’
Then we cross over to the frequency data; you show that there’s good reason to believe high body count population is likely to be high frequency— but you do not show the reverse. This is a ‘all ducks are birds, but not all birds are ducks’ kind of thing. Yes, ducks have a high probability of being birds, but that does not mean the average bird is a duck, or that ducks are a majority of the bird population. Ducks may well be a significant percentage of the bird population, but that does not mean ducks are representative of the greater majority of birds.
There’s good reason to think there are plenty of vanilla monogamous couples in the high frequency population. Like the Catholic or Mormon families with gaggles of kids. The Catholic couple who ‘do the Lord’s work’ every night and twice on Sunday are high frequency by your metric. Couples trying to conceive and doing it 4-6 times a week are in your high frequency population. It also makes sense that high-libido people are likely to marry other high libido people (and to divorce low libido partners).
So a basic assumption that the majority of the high frequency population is just regular monogamous people with average body counts, then again— ENM folk are a significant portion of the cross section of the population that are both high body count AND high frequency.
Finally, you give up the ghost when you start embracing a tier-based argument. If now we have tier-Chads— such that low-income low-looks Chad is just Chad for his tier, but still high body count and high sex frequency— then we do not have a Chadopoly. The Chad myth is specifically that you need to be high income and high looks to be Chad. The existence of significant numbers of unemployed losers cheating on their wives to get high body counts more or less disproves the Chad myth all on its own. There is not a Chadopoly if you have to posit a mid-tier Chad being Chad with mid-tier women. That is just libido having a normal distribution, and high libido men of each tier actually finding a way to express that libido.
‘Don’t be a poor slob, learn to take decent profile pics’ is not really advice for a world in which the Chadopoly actually existed. All you’re really showing is that men who put in effort rack up body counts and frequency— in other words, the amount sex you’re having and the number of sex partners is really more a function of (a) putting in effort, and (b) willingness to sleep with women of your own ‘tier.’
That is not the Chadverse, that’s a real world where sex is not so heavily gate-kept by women that actual high-libido men can’t find partners to satisfy those libidos. In fact given Hebernick’s data, it would suggest that the best strategy for success for high libido men is just to pursue ethical non-monogamy of some form, and seek partners who are also ethically non-monogamous.
> 5.6% (swingers) + 2.2% (bdsm) + 4% (poly) = 11.8%!
I think you're assuming a symmetry and persistence in ENM that is simply not true.
I can literally show in the data that women aren't doing ENM in large numbers.
In terms of symmetry, do you know what percentile woman has an 80th percentile male body count? 93 - 95th percentile. The distributions aren't symmetrical, and nowhere near enough women are doing ENM to round out a top quintile of men's partners.
It is nowhere near 12%, and it can't be ENM as the source of most of these partners, because only 5-7% of women even match a top quintile male body count!
So if there's only 6% of these women, where do the 20% of men get the rest of the body count? From normies.
And once again, the reason to consider women's incidence rather than men's, is because women rate limit men, and I went over a selection of the extensive evidence for that in a reply to your other comment.
> Then we get to considering how many non-Chads who are non-ENM in your 20-33% population. Because Hebernick’s age stratification should remind us that there’s a difference between a 28 year old with a 30+ body count and a 55 year old with a 30+ body count. A 55 year old monogamous bachelor who has averaged one new girlfriend every year would count in that 30+ body count elite. Are we counting 50-something lifetime bachelors as ‘Chad?’
Sure, we are - I also did cuts by 18-28yo men, and I did this internally in the jupyter in several places, and it didn't really materially change the story. But if you want me to do a particular cut I didn't show, happy to do it.
> Then we cross over to the frequency data; you show that there’s good reason to believe high body count population is likely to be high frequency— but you do not show the reverse.
No, I showed this, it was this graph, selected on sex frequency only:
https://imgur.com/a/4keUfW5
And indeed, they have notably higher body counts and notably higher partners in last year! As we'd expect.
> There’s good reason to think there are plenty of vanilla monogamous couples in the high frequency population. Like the Catholic or Mormon families with gaggles of kids.
The data doesn't really bear this out - if anything monthly sex incidence seems to decrease by attendance:
https://imgur.com/a/opPsZid
And everyone is explicitly average by denom:
https://imgur.com/a/q5woBtH
> Finally, you give up the ghost when you start embracing a tier-based argument. If now we have tier-Chads— such that low-income low-looks Chad is just Chad for his tier, but still high body count and high sex frequency— then we do not have a Chadopoly. The Chad myth is specifically that you need to be high income and high looks to be Chad.
I don't know how many of my other posts you've read, but I've pretty much always articulated and endorsed the "tier" schema, it's what the data supports from pretty much every cut people can do.
You and NP seem to want to be really persnickety about the use of the word "Chadopoly." I've said several times at the beginnings of these posts I consider 20 / 66% good enough to declare "Chadopoly." You don't agree, that's fine, but this is just a definition thing - define your terms, I've done it every time I talk about it.
> in other words, the amount sex you’re having and the number of sex partners is really more a function of (a) putting in effort, and (b) willingness to sleep with women of your own ‘tier.’
No, I actually disagree here. Most of the "tiers" we can cut are economic or occupational prestige based. Men don't care about that in their short term sexual partners at all! Men pretty much only care about attractiveness.
I'd be willing to bet that the men racking up high body counts are also doing better than average by attractiveness too.
And I don't believe it's a matter of just putting effort in, which is a necessary but not sufficient condition - I think they also have to be good looking / fit / good social skills / good drug hookup / whatever to get there, as I've articulated many times.
> In fact given Hebernick’s data, it would suggest that the best strategy for success for high libido men is just to pursue ethical non-monogamy of some form, and seek partners who are also ethically non-monogamous.
Sure, I think we agree here. But good luck to those men! I think it's a lot rarer than you do.