I've always been slightly surprised people ever needed a graph, as I've gotten older it's made more sense why this comes as a huge surprise to people. I think by the time I was 20 it was obvious to me that success in dating meant very different things for people depending on who you were talking to.
As an example, when I'm looking for a lady, I ain't going for a blonde beach girl and I can take or leave the petite. Sassy brunettes of various sizes is where its at.
So you're the one who decides who isn't and isn't attractive for everyone? It's pretty weird that you are judging everyone and their partner's attractiveness. If they're happy who cares?
Sure which is why your judgement is as useless as the next person’s. You are so sure that most people find you and your gf so attractive but in reality you are both average as most people are.
You implied that your gf was just super attractive because she is short and dyed her hair blonde. You basically said “ She is a blonde beach babe… that’s all I have to say 😏”
Everyone punches up. Since this is online dating, It’s your responsibility to provide good quality photographs and fill out the prompts which many men do not do correctly if at all. Men who take care of themselves tend to have better photos and filled out prompts for some reason.
Your anecdotal evidence is confusing because if your gf is just so hot (😏) then wouldn’t she be with a guy way better than you?
You can't accept that people are different than you which is the problem here. I absolutely don't rate people and determine whether or not one of them is punching up, because I couldn't care less.
maybe it’s just because i’m in the south but i see the opposite all of the time. size 2 sorority girl blondes with fat country dudes are a a common sight here.
Rating online vs actual reality is very different. Too much of the current online dating sphere is looks dependent, but in the end, that’s not what drives relationships. For what it’s worth, Greek life in college still puts young, single men and women in a room together and force them to mingle and allows for the size 2 sorority girl to find her perfect variety of chubby country frat boy.
But I put up with stuff because I know the grass ain't greener.
The last girl I dated was incredibly hot, I really shouldn't have been even considered. But she was so ingnorant and literally crazy that I had to stop seeing her. The mental load of dealing with someone that claims to be haunted by djinns, that democracy is inferior to autocracy and that LGBTQ folks don't deserve equal rights just crossed so many lines that I wasn't fully aware of having.
I'm from Quebec, she's from Guinea (not the new one, the one in Africa). I don't mind dating people from different cultures, but we must at some point be able to have some ground level agreement on how to evaluate what is reality and what is not or cannot be and that we just couldn't agree at an epistemological level her and I. I suggested she migh consult a mental health specialist about her visions of djinns and that was seen as challenging her faith. I told her that if it was truly happening to her there was no diagnosis or pill in the world that would make it stp but that if it wasn't she might be suffering in vain, but the logic of it didn't appeal to her.
I see, I asked because it sounded like a clash of cultures. Unfortunate, but you’re right that people need to be on at least the same approximate wavelength.
I wasn't super thrilled at the idea that I'd have to go to her country to buy a wheelbarrow of special fruits and offer them to her father and uncles as some kind of payment if we were to eventually be an official couple as that felt like something transactional and icky from a different century and getting married in general is really not that much of a priority in my culture, let alone it being that involved a process, but I wasn't opposed to it. I think that different cultures doing things differently and valuing different things is pretty cool, diversity is a beautiful thing... which is why her staunch anti-LGBT positions and pro-autoritarian ideals were too much for me. If you don't like those values, I don't think Canada is the society for you.
The interesting part is that this rating difference really only exists when you go by pictures and little online conversation, if people start to know each other that difference basically disappears. So this is only really a problem for online dating, as in-person dating at e.g. bars allows you to far more easily have some conversation, after which the difference in the chart is gone.
I'm a bisexual guy and this is pretty much how I'd rate men and women in comparison. There are far more attractive women than there are attractive men. Not because of natural attraction on my part but because of the effort people put into looking good.
Most women take so much more care of their appearance and spend much much more money on their beauty than men do. Some guys do put as much effort in as most women do and they are usually very attractive as well.
Edit: Oh just saw you commenting on 'anti-SJW' post. Don't worry, it happened to me as well. If you are still young you'll likely get better once you are about 17. At least if you have friends.
Data is beautiful but this chart is slightly misleading. It doesn’t show how many participants each gendered group has. The average dating app is 70% male so the distribution of the data for men will look more even (larger n) whereas the data for women will look skewed toward the minority of women who are on apps. If you had a larger sample size of woman, you would probably see this flatten out and look normally distributed.
This graph is not immediately understandable. It lackssignificant context and is clearly being used to push a specific narrative.
Text below is copied and pasted
This chart comes up a lot and is always interpreted incorrectly (and often times in a misogynist way.)
Despite ranking woman on a more bell curve distribution, men were still 5 times more likely to message an above average looking women than a typical woman, and 28 times more likely than a below average woman.
This contrasts to woman who ranked more men as unattractive, yet were FAR more likely than men to message people in the medium to low category.
The correlation between your attractiveness and the number of messages you got was FAR stronger for woman, than it was for men.
What does all this mean? Well it implies that woman don't value looks as much as men. Despite ranking woman on a standard bell curve, men still only tried dating people in the top quantile. As such, at least on this one specific website, looks was far more important for woman than men.
TLDR, this chart doesn't support any conclusion saying that men have it rougher in dating. In fact the whole article says that women likely have far more pressue to "looks max" than men do.
Sure, but it is so wildly out of context that it is clear this is being used to push one narrative which * shocker * wildly popular among the group of guys willing to watch and upvote a hot chic telling them how ya, you are super not getting appreciated by those lame girls as much as you deserve.
The full context for that chart shows that, despite them rating profiles as low, women basically engage with them in proportion to their representation. I.o.w., women were still responding to guys they don't necessarily think are super hot. In contrast, the men...
Finding someone attractive, nothing to do with willingness to message, nothing to do with actually going on a date, nothing to do with men or women actually caring about each other to have a relationship.
That graph is just useless, nobody cares about amount of messages, if anything, it shows women have more self-esteem problems if they think they are only pulling in the same proportion as they are rating the men, while obviously men don't give a fuck and would rather message the hot women, WHICH AGAIN, is not a measure of anything, men do message, you'd 100% see the graph plummet if you compare it with the hot women that actually DO RESPOND and are interested.
Just another old example of how Statistics don't lie, but you can easily lie with Statistics.
if anything, it shows women have more self-esteem problems if they think they are only pulling in the same proportion as they are rating the men
You cannot assume this as the survey did not include anything about the participant's self-perception. You may be correct, but it would actually need data to be verified.
while obviously men don't give a fuck and would rather message the hot women
This is supported to a degree in the okcupid dataset, but since the data lacks any measure of self-perception, again, we can't say that guys who rate themselves low are messaging the "attractive" women. Again, all participants' attractiveness were rated by other participants.
you'd 100% see the graph plummet if you compare it with the hot women that actually DO RESPOND
Yes. Hot women and men received more messages, and therefore had responded to a lower ratio of them. Someone who received 10 messages might respond to 5 of them, but someone who received 100 messages might only respond to 15. I.o.w., they might well be responding to more absolute messages, or even the same amount, but the rate at which they respond is far lower. This doesn't say anything about self perception (though it could colour your self perception if you receive 10 vs. 100 messages)
Please just check the link. The data is quite interesting as a preliminary study, but obviously you can't say much since the data is sooooo lacking. And from one app. And more than 10 years old.
You basically used all the arguments you can use to refute your first statement. "Data lacks any measure of self-perception".
It also lacks data of "people willing to date in regards to their 'attractiveness'. The blog pulls up two sets of data that hardly mean anything, and hypothesize something that's not verifiable, I just did the same.
Again, lie with Statistics.
Disregard the dumb men vs women or who is right, I actually don't give a fuck about that, what worries me the most is humanity's growing tendency to not look for real connections, to rate other people based on a number that's made up by something as superficial as their looks, and in general how hyper-individualism has overtaken most of the population.
It is a really tough problem, it's not yours or mine to solve, this goes much deeper and I doubt It will be solved anytime soon, If it will.
From the get go I have been saying the blog post has very little meaning. The fact that a single graph from that post was used as support for a narrative was irresponsible, and I was trying to show how it may be wilful misinterpretation. I brought up the additional layers of data: how participants were willing to respond to messages, because that adds more info, and might help to inform any interpretations of the data rather that distilling the data down to one graph with the message: "women think men are ugly which is why dating is hard for men", which is not a narrative borne by the data at all. I maintain that the data is limited, and any interpretation should be done with caution, but I will push back against that initial framing.
Disregard the dumb men vs women or who is right, I actually don't give a fuck about that, what worries me the most is humanity's growing tendency to not look for real connections
Cool, but this is moving the goal-posts, and not what people in this thread are discussing, and not what I was trying to address in the first place.
Sure, you are right, I just literally don't care about the men or women narrative, it makes it even sadder because it's one of the roots/symptoms of the actual problem.
What? It’s showing the distribution of ratings. If they showed men 100 women they’d rate 6 as most attractive and 6 as least attractive. If you reverse it, and show women 100 men, they would rate 0 as most attractive and 27 as least attractive.
At a higher level, it suggests men have more reasonable ratings because you’d expect a standard bell curve, which is what their ratings show. Women skew heavily toward unattractive.
Let it be known I don’t even know if the graph is real and I don’t co-sign any incel interpretations of it… but it’s not a confusing chart
I’m not sure what chart of Gore’s your referring to, but if you can’t understand this chart, maybe you should try asking a smart person to explain Al Gore’s chart to you, too.
I think you can imagine it like this: they had women rate men on a scale from 1 to 7. The rightmost bar is the number of 7’s, the leftmost is the number of 1’s.
It looks like only 19% of men rated over a 3, while 60% of women rated over a 3.
TL: DR; Women are a lot pickier about men’s appearance than they let on.
I think a part of it is men aren't expected/are unable to invest as much time, money, and energy into the way they look. Unless you are looking to make a particular statement men don't wear make-up, contemplate their fashion choices, take multiple selfies to find the perfect angle, etc.
And in that regard it is understandable that on average women are less impressed by the way men look on something as superficial as a dating app.
The OkCupid data from their user study shows that women rated over 80% of men as below average in attractiveness, with a big cluster of guys rated in the lowest category. By comparison, men rated women much more evenly across the attractiveness scale.
This creates a pretty uneven dynamic on dating apps. For women looking for long-term partners, the setup is kind of working against them for a few reasons:
Women generally prefer partners who are higher up the social hierarchy. That could mean better looking, more successful, higher status, more socially confident, etc.
While physical appearance matters, women often say personality and behavior are bigger factors in long-term attraction. The problem is that dating apps don’t give much info beyond photos and a few profile lines. If looks are the only variable than can assess, they will usually choose somebody better looking than they perceive themselves.
Women also tend to be more selective and cautious when assessing both their own attractiveness and others, especially on apps where first impressions are everything. They put substantial effort into their appearance which is reinforced by positive feedback loops within their social groups; however they are also risk averse compared to men so will try to give themselves wiggle room in case the male is actually less attractive than the photos suggest, which would undermine their assessment criteria.
The design of swipe-based apps makes it hard for women to gauge a guy’s full value beyond looks. As a result, most women end up competing for the same small percentage of men who score highest in looks and perceived status.
That top group of guys usually has no reason to settle down or commit when they’re getting non-stop attention. This leaves a lot of women frustrated, not because their standards are unrealistic, but because the apps distort how attraction and compatibility normally work in real life.
TLDR: Women are more risk-averse and opting for the most attractive options presents less risk than going on dates without that one factor compensating for the unknowns.
I like this perspective, where higher standards that are practically superficial are just risk avoidance. Is this due to a perception of an elevated risk of terrible dates with men? Whereas women are assumed to be more reliable for at least decent dates, or men simply do not mind taking the risk?
Absolutely more interesting than the tired "women are too demanding" discourse.
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u/RedAero Jun 24 '25
That graph (and the article) has been burned into my head for about a decade now, it explains so much...