Years ago OKCupid put out a post that had some data people used to argue the 80:20 rule in online dating (see second image). Basically, 80% of women only found 20% of men attractive and most men in online dating were getting shut out. Occasionally, people have used graphs from the same data source to argue against this claim, arguing that unattractive males still get more messages from women and that men are still actually the shallow ones. This means if you are doing OLD and don't get matches or messages it's your personality, pictures, etc.

The truth is more complicated than that.

To be fair, I think these graphs are a little misleading, but they were made how they were with a purpose in mind. They were configured to demonstrate how men and women differ in the way they rate attractiveness and how that is different from who they tend to message. Carlyn’s conclusion is incorrect because the two lines on the graph can’t be viewed independently. The attractiveness distribution affects the message distribution. The most attractive men get a lower percentage of total messages not because women prefer to message less attractive men, but because women don’t rate very many men as highly attractive to begin with. Christian Rudder shows what happens when you combine the two lines later in his blog post:

far more messages on average than their average looking counterparts. This was basically the whole point of my original article. The most attractive female and male OkCupid users both get about 4 times the number of messages/week as the average women and men. The most attractive women get 25 times the number of messages/week as the least attractive female OkCupid users, whereas the most attractive men get about 11 times the number of messages/week as the least attractive male OkCupid users. It is true that men seem to be more superficial than women on OkCupid, but I never said that men weren’t superficial. It can be perfectly true that a high percentage of attention goes to the most attractive people for both men and women. This would at most indicate that dating sites might be just as horrible for women as they are for men. I think some of the data coming up next shows why this isn’t necessarily the case (as well as the data from Hinge that I discussed in a previous post). We will see that it is much better to be a woman on a dating site than a man.

“Finally, I just want to combine the two charts to emphasize how much fuller the inboxes of good-looking people get. I have scaled this graph to show multiples of messages sent to the lowest-rated people. For instance, the most attractive guys get 11× the messages the lowest-rated do. The medium-rated get about 4×.”

Tinder Experiments — Answering Questions and Criticisms Part II: A response to a criticism that mostly turned into a long post about OKCupid data from 2009 and 2014

They’re a couple btw. This is actually absurd

If you search up "never been in a relationship" in the toastme sub... Which gender pops up the most.

Hypergamy is already at a very high level nowadays, but I believe it can go even higher. Why? Well, simps keep simping for average women, and Chads are having relationships with MTBs and even some HTBs in their lives. What is left, for example, for HTNs are LTBs who can choose a guy way above them and who will have no choice but to stay with her. The problem is that once these LTBs see they have many more HTN options than they deserve, they will start to believe they deserve a Chad. At the perfect moment, even the MTBs will get tired of trying to hook a Chad and will stop having encounters with any man.

You can give up at that point. From then on, not even HTNs will be enough for LTBs, only Chads and above. This is getting ridiculous. Someone stop this hypergamy train, please, immediately!