Tuesday, August 21, 2018

Do 20% of Men "Get" 80% Of All Heterosexual Sex?


That's the kind of belief incel online sites spread:

“OK, we’ve all seen the statistic that in a competitive dating environment 20% of the guys are having 80% of the sex,” reads one post on r/TheRedPill, which goes on to claim, (emphasis theirs):
For every ten girls who are getting laid this week, eight of them are fucking just two guys.
If you’re not one of those two guys, there’s a 75% chance that you’re not getting laid at all. Only 20% of men fall into the category of “not alpha but still getting some”.
The haves and have-nots live in two different worlds. This is not a sliding scale situation where incremental improvement yields incremental returns. You either have more pussy than you know what to do with or you’re incel. There’s very little middle ground.
That’s what the 80/20 rule means. You really, really want to be one of the 20%.

That whole quote is so weird*.  Why does the second principle of the incel sites seem to always be this spreading of doom and gloom "statistics" which prove that nothing can be done, that no woman will ever fuck them, whatever they do?

The first principle, of course, is that the state of involuntary celibacy (being a male incel**) is caused by the disgusting shallowness, lookism and general perfidy of the whole womankind, all billions of us.

And that is the truly dangerous principle, but the second one also produces a lot of grief and suffering among men who probably wouldn't have to be incels if they realized that pussies are attached to real human beings who like to be viewed as people before pussies.  Instead, they are told that Everything  Is Hopeless.

So where did that 80/20 rule come from?  The linked article suggests that it applies the Pareto principle to sex:

One of the most repeated ideas on incel forums is a particular interpretation of the Pareto principle, which theorizes that in many cases, 80 percent of effects come from 20 percent of the causes. In economics, it’s often used to predict power structures (e.g., the richest 20 percent control 80 percent of the income). Replace money with sex, and you’ve essentially got the incel rallying cry.
But I have found no evidence that the Pareto distribution would fit human heterosexual behavior of the kind incels fret about.

And existing evidence on sexual behavior suggests that the reality is much less cruel toward the imaginary 80% of "non-alpha" males in the sexual supermarkets the incels also imagine to exist:

As Rebecca Goldin, a professor of mathematics at George Mason University and the director of STATS, noted, there really isn’t all that much data about who’s having sex with whom and how often. But, she said, “There is some limited data that refutes the poster’s claims, depending on interpretation.”
First off, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about 56 percent of women and 59 percent of men have had sex by the time they finish high school. And, as Goldin pointed out, “If the sexually active teen women were choosing a largely overlapping set of young men to have sex with (eight women going with two guys), one would expect many fewer guys to have had sex than women.”
And if roughly the same number of heterosexual women and men are sexually active and you apply the Pareto principle, it would work out to eight women having sex with two men, yet also two women having sex with the other eight men. If it were true that most women were choosing just a few partners, the remaining women would need to have many partners.
“In other words, the statement, ‘If you’re not one of those two guys, there’s a 75 percent chance that you’re not getting laid at all. Only 20 percent of men fall into the category of ‘not alpha but still getting some,’ is not correct,” she said.

Bolds are mine.

Goldin goes on to note that men and women in long-term relationships, such as marriage, might well have more sex (when counted as times per week, say) than those men and women who are not in long-term relationships, partly, because it's much easier to arrange.  But in the incel world sex is sold in some weird supermarkets, not enjoyed in loving relationships.

And that is very sad.  The incels don't need the online sites where they gather***.  They need some real therapy which would allow them to see women as human beings.

That would be the win-win outcome, because it would enable the incels to find loving partners and because it would reduce the amount of online misogyny.


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* First is the question where that statistics comes from which the rest of this post addresses.

Second is the question of definitions:

 Two men (out of ten) are assumed to fuck eight women (out of ten) in one week, but the remaining two women are not assumed to fuck the remaining eight men in one week, but only one man each.  This is an asymmetry, probably because it's assumed that the 80/20 rule applies.  But it's unclear if sex is counted in numbers of partners or in numbers of intercourse (or whatever stands in its place)

Third, is the nutty idea that there are only two kinds of heterosexual men:  Those who have more pussy than you know what to do with (freeze and can, of course) and those who have zero pussy for the rest of their miserable lives.  This assumption clearly clashes with any kind of reality I have visited.

Fourth is the question what a "competitive" dating environment might be.  Some sort of a boxing ring? 

Fifth, and most importantly, the whole quote reeks of the view that women are not people but things, like slabs of beef, for sale in the dating supermarkets, and that those slabs of beef should be distributed more fairly among the consumers.

**  The online incels do not care about women, probably because they hate women, so they spend no time worrying about female incels.  As I have written before, women are probably much more likely to be involuntarily celibate than men, because women live longer and are more likely to outlive their partners.

***  As I have written before, the incel online sites resemble those anorexia sites where anorexics met to encourage each other not to eat.  In other words, visiting the incel sites will make the visitors more miserable and less mentally healthy.