191. Dating OS: Why Men are "Uglier" Than Women

Women reliably rate themselves as more attractive than men. Here I go to our biology as source material to explain this mismatch of attraction between the genders.

Back in paper 184, “What Happened to all the Good Men?”, I pondered the huge difference in perception between how men and women rate each other in attractiveness. Once two people meet and express some level of mutual attraction, they then have to initiate what I call bilateral “Sexual Arbitrage”. I literally wrote a paper on Sexual Arbitrage to explain what that is. Essentially both people (assuming you’re outside of California and there’s only two people involved) have to negotiate what they are willing to give and what they want in return.

This Arbitrage is a skill set, and until you get good at it, your “relationships” will fail at this point before they’ve even started. If the man is primarily there for mating, and he’s already gotten that without Arbitrage, he may be reluctant to engage in it. This can be frustrating for women seeking relationships, but failing at Arbitrage is potentially even more frustrating. Note that for men, once they mate their desire to mate drops for a period of time. Thus engaging in Arbitrage during this period can further disadvantage women if mating is all they want to offer during negotiations.

By far the biggest factor in failed Arbitrage in modern times is a failure to self assess one’s value to the person they are negotiating with. If you think what you got is amazing and the other person is only mildly impressed, you are going to ask for too much. AAA game developers also suffer from the same failure to assess their value to consumers and this causes a failure in Arbitrage with gamers (and gamers don’t buy what the dev is selling). The reason is the same, the seller is only focused on what is good for them.

People have a natural tendency to be optimistic when self-assessing. If we were to ask people to self assess on a scale of 1 to 10 then men would generally rate themselves from 3 to 10. If we ask women to do the same thing, they self assess from 8 to 10. If we ask women to assess men from 1 to 10, they rate men from 1 to 5 (93%). Men rate women reliably from 1 to 10 with a very clean bell curve. Some men, if thirsty enough, will pursue someone they rate as a “1”, until they can reduce their thirst. This isn’t relationship seeking behavior, this is biology.

Speaking of biology, this is what dating distribution looks like in the larger mammalian world:

[Ramin Generated]

“X’s” are members of the population that died prior to adulthood.

[AI Generated]

Thus you see this 3 to 1 ratio of adult reproductive females to males in larger mammals. This is biology for almost every mammal on Earth. Typically male rank-seeking behavior leads them to fight/compete/die, and females will not intervene because this ultimately benefits them as they end up with only the strongest mating options.

After the development of agriculture this balance was disrupted because men stopped dying at the normal rate. Risks between the genders normalized. Societal rules had to adapt to require monogamy to keep the males busy/sated even though biologically men and women are not monogamous. Men tend to have multiple partners and women tend to share men. That’s just biology.

Now jump to 2025:

[Ramin Generated]

You can see things have gotten very complicated by 2025. Since men aren’t dying properly, women just ignore the ones they think should be dead. Even some women get ignored, but it’s a much smaller number and this goes against biology. Thanks to modern medicine and nutrition, almost everyone makes it to adulthood.

In Australia, an “advanced” society, infant mortality is 0.3%. In the USA, a “racist” society, infant mortality is determined by your race:

• Asian: 0.35%

• White: 0.45%

• Hispanic: 0.5%

• Native American: 0.9%

• Black: 1.1%

This is still much lower than in pre-historic times when the rates were much higher (over 50% for males). This leaves us with an excess of adult men, which is why men are increasingly seen as undesirable. We cage (jail), kill, and accuse them at much higher rates. In 2025 we also hire them less (-16%) and very few are allowed into colleges (-75%).

We also classify men as “Incels” if they are involuntarily celibate. Just in the USA that’s 20 million adult men between the age of 18 and 60. Yes there are also female incels but as a society we don’t call them that since the term incel is derogatory. If you go to the wikipedia page for “Incel”, right out of the gate men that can’t find partners are equated to domestic terrorists and all sort of other terms I won’t type because then the Algorithm will block me:

I find it upsetting that men are treated this way for an unnatural situation not created by them, which seems determined to “correct” the gender (im)balance by culling males.

Now, to explain the second chart on how Humans mate in 2025. Men are wired to want to mate. As much as possible (quantitative view), with as many partners as possible. They still are able to objectively evaluate their prospects, but will compromise during dry spells. Women can only have so many children and each one takes a lot of work. So they aren’t looking to maximize their effort. They want to maximize the quality of their offspring and thus also their partners.

The chart reflects the women and men that cannot find partners. The rest may say they can’t find partners, but what they really mean is they can’t find relationships. Women in particular have very little difficulty finding casual sexual partners because men are here to provide that service.

Because so few men (~7%) are rated by women as attractive, those men are expected to service ~90% of women. This means the reproductively active men are having many partners. Likewise, this means that women are sharing their partners with many other women. This is biology, doing it’s best to adapt.

Women will almost universally say they want their male partners to be monogamous with them. Because of course they do, that benefits them. Young men (until they figure out how this works) often think when a woman says “I want monogamy” that this applies to the woman also. Of course that’s not the reality that women are creating, and they then blame men for behavior initiated by competing women. And compete they do! With 13 women for every “attractive” man, if a woman wants to have any chance of securing a “monogamous” relationship, then it’s a war zone. The things they will do to try to get an edge over their competing women is a bit mind blowing to me.

It does remind me of what I used to tell my students why steroid use was so common in male athletes. If you are playing football and the guy across from you is shooting up, your choice is to shoot up also to stay competitive, or retire. Or worse, get permanently injured. Women are doing the same thing, but instead of steroids they use make-up, injections, surgeries, drugs, “filters”, PsyOps, whatever it takes.

The red numbers on this chart are perhaps the most interesting, and what require the most explanation. With their quantitative view, men tend to self rate based on how many women want to sleep with them. For women, with their qualitative view, they tend to self rate based on the highest ranked man who will sleep with them. This is why women will usually rank themselves from 8 to 10. If they got with an “8” even once, then they think they can do it again.

Here we run into biology again. Humans up until a few hundred years ago only lived to about 35 years. Humans didn’t need eggs past that age. They really didn’t need eggs past age 30 because what would be the point of giving birth to an orphan? A woman is born with all the eggs she will ever have. She will never make an egg in her lifetime. So at age 40, she’s packing 40.5 year old eggs. By that age those puppies have been jury rigged more than the Millennium Falcon. We haven’t had time to evolve for that scenario and since “genetic quality” doesn’t determine who reproduces anymore (thanks to modern medicine keeping over 99% of us alive to adulthood unless you are black), we have stopped evolving.

Thus men are still wired to chase women sexually who are up to 35 years old. Of course biology finds a way and men are born to serve. 60 year old women can still find mates even though their last egg went down the tubes years ago. But if an “8” was the best they could do in their 20s, when every women in that age range screams “fertile!” to men, an “8” may be unobtanium later in life.

This all comes back to Sexual Arbitrage. Self awareness is critical, and also understanding the needs of your potential customer/partner. The better you understand both sides of the scale, the more likely you are to be able to balance it. Of course that can take years to figure out as it’s a skill. Since women peak in the dating arena at age 26 and men peak at 45, this is one of the few places in life where men have an advantage. They have at least a quarter century to figure out how to “get a good deal” where women will tend to depreciate in the eyes of men way before they realize that their best deals already came and went.

Note that in my scenario, all lesbians will rate themselves “10’s”. All gay men will rate themselves “Busy”. This biological view will apply to 99% of men as they are born to serve the biology of women. Only 1% of people self identify as “asexual”, and I’m somewhere in that very complex and non-binary spectrum. Thus I always dated women twice my age until that became mathematically and biologically impractical. I was dating for companionship and the cognitive/personality traits of my partner. Assuming that the other 99% of men are there for that reason is…a bit optimistic.

Asexuality is a very complex topic that needs it’s own paper, but I’m a bit reluctant to do that as it would involve me getting even more personal than I am already. You will do fine if you apply the sexual model I explain in this paper, unless you are dealing with that rare 1%. They usually won’t disclose that in their dating profile, they will have to trust you a bit first. Trying to “get with them” on the first date is likely the fastest way to fail the trust test.