HIGHLIGHTS

• The socially imposed monogamy thesis falls short on multiple fronts: Polygyny and male-skewed sex ratios don’t reliably produce a surplus of bachelors; increased inequality doesn’t reliably produce more polygyny; and male surpluses don’t reliably produce more violence beyond the simple effect of having more men.

• Polygyny can be sustainable: Population growth combined with spousal age gaps can permit some degree of polygyny without creating a surplus of unmarried men. Female-skewed sex ratios also help.

• Polygyny is rarer than SIM proponents suggest: The level of polygyny portrayed as typical by those advancing the thesis is actually far from it, and the vast majority of mating has been monogamous even in nominally polygynous societies.

• There is no incel violence crisis: Violent crime rates have been collapsing; incel-related deaths are a rounding error compared with other forms of terrorism; sexually inactive men are the least violent; and more single young men doesn’t lead to more terrorism beyond the simple effect of having more young men.

• More unequal societies didn’t produce more polygyny overall: Agriculture created inheritable wealth, increasing the importance of inheritance. Monogamy helped avoid succession conflicts and the dilution of wealth.

• Monogamy has other possible explanations: Biparental care and mate guarding improve offspring survival and paternity certainty; monogamy reduces STI risks; and specialized divisions of labour reduce the value of polygynous households.

• Enforced polygyny: Polygyny is more common in patriarchal societies with arranged marriages; rates of polygyny fall as female education rises; polyamory isn’t de facto polygyny; and, as always, neohypergamy is a cope.

Enforced monogamy

Before his Russian coma adventure and Twitter beef with Elmo, uncs will remember the days when Jordan Peterson was the culture war circus’s main attraction. One of his most notorious controversies erupted after a 2018 New York Times interview where, in the aftermath of the Toronto van attack, he pitched ‘enforced monogamy’:

“He was angry at God because women were rejecting him,” Mr. Peterson says of the Toronto killer. “The cure for that is enforced monogamy. That’s actually why monogamy emerges.”

Critics were quick to seize on the comment, framing it as a call for state-assigned wives to placate incel rage. His defence was that he was referring not to enforcement at gunpoint, but to softer social regulation through monogamous marriage norms – an argument with a theoretical foundation that merits closer examination.

Socially imposed monogamy

The more standard label for this concept is ‘socially imposed monogamy’. Richard Alexander introduced the concept in an effort to explain why monogamy prevailed despite running counter to the reproductive interests of elite men. He argued that by levelling the reproductive playing field, monogamy curbs male competition for mates and limits the expansion of patrilineal clans capable of rivalling the elite. This then encourages cooperation and grants societies an edge in intergroup competition.

Small-scale societies relied on kin ties and familiarity to keep people in line, but once they grew larger and more stratified, these informal social controls lost their grip. Monogamy steps in, puts out the fire, and allows societies to scale up and become economic and innovation powerhouses.

The same logic can be applied to altruism: ‘enforced altruism’ could have effects similar to SIM on social cohesion. Christianity promoted prosocial behaviour beyond kinship networks, later formalized via taxation under the 16th century English Poor Laws.

Joseph Henrich helped popularize the SIM thesis in The WEIRDest people in the world. An earlier paper, The puzzle of monogamous marriage, examines the apparent paradox that monogamy wasn’t forced upon reluctant elites by resentful revolutionaries, but was imposed by the ruling class itself:

Historically, the emergence of monogamous marriage is particularly puzzling since the very men who most benefit from polygynous marriage—wealthy aristocrats—are often those most influential in setting norms and shaping laws. Yet, here we are.

The core argument is straightforward:

We predict that imposing monogamous marriage reduces male reproductive competition and suppresses intra-sexual competition, which shrinks the size of the pool of low-status, risk-oriented, unmarried men. These effects result in (i) lower rates of crime, personal abuse, intra-household conflict and fertility, and (ii) greater parental investment (especially male), economic productivity (gross domestic product (GDP) per capita) and female equality.

The evolutionary logic behind this argument rests on men’s much higher reproductive ceiling: men’s minimum investment in offspring doesn’t extend past ejaculation, while pregnancy locks women into nine months of gestation. Combined with women’s relatively narrow fertility window, this results in a male-biased operational sex ratio – a surplus of men in the mating pool at any given moment. As a result, an unregulated mating market leads to ruthless zero-sum competition over reproductive resources.

Essentially, in a polygynous society, the top dogs hoover up the women and the unmated masses descend into a savage battle royale where they loot, rape, and kill with reckless abandon. With no stake in the future and nothing to lose, men pursue extreme strategies in a last-ditch effort to escape genetic oblivion.

This narrative has spawned a genre of commentary warning about the perils of unpartnered young men.1 Imbalanced sex ratios resulting from son preference and sex-selective abortion have led many to portray China and India in particular as powder kegs primed for a testosterone-fuelled explosion. A similar logic is often applied to Islamist terrorism, where polygyny is blamed for locking large numbers of young men out of marriage, creating fertile ground for recruitment. Jihadist groups exploit this situation with promises of access to sex slaves.

The polygyny thought experiment

The puzzle of monogamous marriage uses more careful framing than most other writings, noting that 85% of human societies merely ‘permitted’ men to take multiple wives. An asymmetric standard is usually applied where the mere allowance of polygyny gets a society labelled polygynous, even if 99% of marriages in that society are monogamous.

It acknowledges that in forager groups, the prevalence of polygyny is limited by resource constraints that restrict the number of men able to support multiple wives, while those who do rarely take more than one extra wife – a dynamic Richard Alexander labelled ‘ecologically imposed monogamy’. It also acknowledges that excess male mortality from hunting and warfare can produce a surplus of women, opening a window for polygyny.

That said, it considerably overstates the typical prevalence of polygyny in a popular thought experiment:

To see why even a small increase in polygyny leads to a substantial increase in men without mates, imagine a society of 40 adults consisting of 20 males and 20 females. Suppose these 20 males vary from the unemployed high-school drop outs to CEOs. Let us assume that the 12 men with the highest status marry 12 of the 20 women in monogamous marriages. Then, the top five men (25% of the population) all take a second wife, and the top two (10%) take a third wife. Finally, the top guy takes a fourth wife. This means that of all marriages, 58 per cent are monogamous. Only men in the top 10 percent of status married more than two women. The most wives that anyone has is four. While this degree of polygyny is not extreme in cross-cultural perspective, it creates a pool of 40 per cent of the male population who are shut out of the marriage market.

Marlowe (2003) is cited in support of this, yet only two of the 36 forager societies sampled show polygyny rates that high, making ‘not extreme’ highly debatable. The average is 12.4% of married men and 20.1% of married women, meaning a supermajority of marriages in nominally polygynous societies are monogamous. The average share of women in polygynous unions is also about 20% across sub-Saharan African countries, reaching as high as 40% in Chad (go figure). On paper, this locks out around 10% of men, or 20% in the most polygynous countries (though these back-of-the-envelope calculations are overly simplistic, as we’ll soon see).

A Quillette piece labels a scenario where 10% of men reach the Muslim limit of four wives ‘modest’ simply because edge cases exist of men with a lot more than four. I trust the flaw here is obvious. Polygyny is uncommon in Muslim countries in the Middle East and North Africa, with on average 1% of people living in polygamous households, though it’s relatively common in West and Central Africa.

Being generous, 10–20% of men being excluded from marriage could be enough to meaningfully fray the social fabric. Still, it’s hard to square the idea that polygyny is highly destabilizing even at modest levels with its continued existence – you’d think polygynous societies would’ve been supplanted by monogamous ones long ago.

Polygynous societies aren't incel factories

The conventional assumption is that simple arithmetic makes it all but inevitable that polygyny will lock men out of marriage. Channelling their inner Terrence Howard, Gaddy and colleagues reach the opposite conclusion. Subnational data from 30 countries between 1969 and 2016 show a positive relationship between polygyny prevalence and the share of men in their 20s who had never married in just 8% of censuses. More damning still, nearly half (46%) showed a negative relationship.

The researchers then compared US counties with documented Mormon polygyny against others in the 1880 census, again finding lower rates of unmarried men in polygynous areas. Local sex ratios didn’t explain this away either, as polygynous counties consistently had fewer unmarried men than other counties with an equivalent ratio of men to women in their 20s.

One possibility they suggest is that polygynous communities enforce stronger marriage norms. Polygyny correlates negatively with gender equality and positively with arranged marriage where female marriages are arranged via brideprice – conditions that push more women to marry. Because most societies maintain a sizeable unmarried population, there is plenty of wiggle room, even if polygyny theoretically excludes some men. Local sex ratios also played a role, reducing the magnitude of the negative coefficients by a median of 18%.

The assumption that polygyny permanently locks out large swathes of men relies on a naive static model. In societies with booming populations, young female cohorts are larger than older male cohorts, generating an ever-expanding supply of marriageable women in each each successive generation. Combined with wide spousal age gaps, this makes it possible for some men to take multiple wives without depriving their peers. It’s never a good idea to rely on infinite growth, but marriage markets may be able to adjust when populations level off. In the end, most men will have their day, even if they have to wait in line.

Gaddy et al.’s model showed that in a stable population without growth, with life expectancy at birth of 45 for men and 50 for women, no age gap between husbands and wives, and all men seeking marriage at age 25, 0.7% of men can sustainably marry 2.5 wives on average. In a population growing 2% annually, with male and female life expectancies of 30 and 38 respectively, and a 10-year age gap at marriage, 52.3% of 45-year-old men can sustainably marry 2.5 wives on average. Even with a male life expectancy of 66 and no female mortality advantage, 12.1% can do so.

Critics may argue that young men are still getting a raw deal and that delayed marriage may increase violence in the interim. As John Hajnal documented, men married relatively late in historical northwestern Europe, and a sizeable fraction of men and women never married. In Western Europe around 1900, about 90% of men and 75% of women aged 20–24 remained single (we must retvrn), falling to 50% of men and 40% of women aged 25–29, and to just over 10% of men and 15% of women aged 45–49. In England, the average age at first marriage for men hovered between 28 and 29 from 1650 to 1799. Given the economic and technological boom that coincided with it, late marriage can’t be inherently ruinous. On the contrary, it may have allowed young adults to accumulate skills and capital, while smaller families increased parental investment per child.

We should also remember that people can marry more than once. Among men who survived to age 50 in two rural polygynous Gambian villages, only 2% had never married, and those who married did so an average of 3.35 times.

Regardless, if polygyny doesn’t reliably produce an army of angry bachelors to begin with, the theory never gets off the ground. Any association between polygyny and violence that exists must operate through different channels.

More men, more marriage?

These findings build on an equally counterintuitive body of research. Much of the research cited in support of the SIM narrative doesn’t examine the relationship between violence and polygyny directly but uses sex ratios, which can be viewed as a proxy for a polygyny‑driven marriage squeeze.

Schacht et al. tested the relationship between the intensity of sexual selection2 and the adult sex ratio (ASR) among 15 small-scale societies, finding a negative relationship between the two. This indicates higher male mating competition in female-biased populations, though the confidence bounds still leave room for a slight upward-sloping regression line. No meaningful pattern emerged for marriage type or stability, nor for subsistence system.

A higher ASR is typically assumed to produce more unmarried men, but Schacht & Kramer tested this assumption using US Census data, finding that men were actually more likely to marry and belong to a family when women were relatively scarce. What’s going on?

A market-based model predicts that in male-biased populations, males should up their parental investment, dampening intrasexual competition and encouraging long-term relationships. On the flipside, in female-biased populations, we should expect a higher rate of uncommitted sex and less relationship stability. This flows from basic market logic: the rarer sex has more bargaining power to achieve their preferred arrangement. When men are oversupplied, they can’t afford to play the field and become more willing to offer commitment to secure a partner.

A relatively consistent pattern emerges across the literature. A study of immigrant flows in the US from 1910–1940 found that higher sex ratios led to higher female marriage rates and lower labour-force participation, while also increasing men’s marriage rates and earnings. Across the life course, female-biased sex ratios correlate with lower marriage rates for men in their 20s but higher marriage rates for men over 34, when men shift their mating effort towards parental investment.

In Post-WWI France, regions with higher male mortality saw more men and fewer women marry. Men were also less likely to marry down in social class, out-of-wedlock births rose, divorce rates fell, and the spousal age gap narrowed. In Post-WWII Russia, male scarcity was accompanied by lower marriage and fertility rates, more nonmarital births, and reduced female bargaining power within marriage.

Hook-ups are more common at colleges with female-biased sex ratios. More women on college campuses lead women to assess campus men and relationships more negatively, go on fewer traditional dates, have a lower likelihood of having had a college boyfriend, and a greater likelihood of being sexually active. Higher male imprisonment rates have also been linked to similar outcomes.

Sex ratios, polygyny, and violence

In a review of the literature on the relationship between sex ratios and violence, Schacht et al. found an even split between studies reporting a positive and a negative effect of male-biased sex ratios.

There does seem to be fairly consistent evidence for the much-discussed China and India, at least. Edlund et al. found that the sex ratio accounts for one-seventh of the rise in crime from the mid-90s to 2005 in China (beyond the effect of more males per se), attributing it to harsher marriage markets. Rape rates didn’t rise with the sex ratio though. The authors estimated this effect would continue as cohorts with even more skewed ratios reach young adulthood. This prediction doesn’t seem to have panned out: homicides have fallen steeply since 2004, despite the sex ratio among young adults only becoming more skewed, reaching 113 males per 100 females among those aged 20–29. This will in part be due to China’s rapidly ageing population.

Diamond-Smith & Rudolph found across six Asian countries that men from region-age brackets with higher ratios of men to women were significantly more likely to report ever having raped a woman (but not a man), having perpetrated intimate partner violence, or having used a weapon. An Indian study also found that a surplus of young males accounted for 35% of the rise in gender-based violence since 1995. Effects on other forms of crime were less robust or absent. Conversely, Schacht et al. found that US counties with male-biased sex ratios had lower rates of homicide, aggravated assault, rape, sex offences, and prostitution.

The considerable empirical ambiguity may largely be a function of the ecological fallacy. Rather than aggregate-level data, Filser et al. looked at individual-level longitudinal Swedish register and police data for the Stockholm metropolitan area (1990–2003, n = 758,498). They found aggregated municipality-level violent offending rates were negatively associated with male-biased sex ratios, while individual-level violent offending was positively associated. Relative to the mean probability, predicted probabilities of male violent offending are 20.7% lower than the mean at a male population share of 46% and increase to a level of 25.3% above the average at a proportion of men of 53%. A significant effect was detected only for intrasexual violence and childless men.

Virtually identical effects showed up for women, which is less easily accounted for by the SIM theory. Male-biased sex ratios also affected non-violent offending, and the effect was in fact stronger among women. The slopes didn’t vary across education and income groups. This pattern of results points more to hidden confounders.

Violence is only one outlet for male competition; others include status striving, wealth accumulation, and displays of skill. US census data from 1910 shows that as the sex ratio of a state increases, the association between socioeconomic status and marriage probability strengthens. Rather than causing pure havoc, competition may also spur economic growth and innovation when taking the form of nonviolent status-seeking. After all, it’s commonly argued that men’s historical achievements were largely motivated by status competition, consciously or otherwise.

Šaffa et al. found mixed support for the intergroup competition model of monogamy. Assault frequency – used as a proxy for internal male competition – was associated with a lower proportion of monogamously married women, but this pattern held only in simpler societies, and its association with normative monogamy was less consistent. Normative monogamy was only marginally associated with intercommunity trade and military organization, while actual monogamy rates weren’t, and assault frequency failed to mediate the relationship.

Violence could just as easily cause polygyny as the reverse. Warfare for the capture of women is associated with polygyny, but such raids aren’t necessarily a symptom of a marriage squeeze; even without one, men may desire additional wives, and capturing women would increase polygyny rates. War can also drive polygyny rather than the reverse by decimating the male population, leaving widows and orphans in need of support. A dramatic example comes from the Syrian civil war, where 30% of marriages in the capital were registered as polygamous in 2015, up from 5% in 2010. You could try to argue that the Syrian uprising that precipitated the war was some kind of incel revolution, but at that point it’s clear this isn’t a serious hypothesis.

Another possibility is that in violent societies, sharing a powerful man who is better equipped to provide resources and protection may be preferable to exclusive access to a weaker one, and large polygynous households may offer protection against violence through a higher number of sons and wider kin networks.

Across countries in UN Population Division data, a surplus of unmarried men aged 15–29 doesn’t affect terrorism or civil war frequency beyond the sheer number of young males; the share who were unmarried had no additional effect. Male-biased sex ratios also failed to show a significant association with political violence. In both cases the effects were if anything negative. When analysing total rather than per capita terrorist attacks and deaths, male-biased sex ratios significantly predicted fewer terrorist deaths; without covariates, fewer attacks too.

It may be that becoming a guerrilla or a terrorist or the factors that lead to it lead to singleness rather than the reverse. Women may be reluctant to opt into such a precarious lifestyle; men may be reluctant to drag women or children into it; fugitives have fewer opportunities to meet women; and factors like mental illness or poverty could predispose men to both bachelorhood and political violence. Given the small fraction of men who become radical actors, their impact on young male singleness would be minimal.

Another problem with the incel terrorists narrative is that most young men who join terrorist groups are too young to reliably assess their long-term prospects of remaining single, if such calculations are even possible. Most are below the average age at which men in their community marry.

The incel angle

Why are pundits like Jordan Peterson and Louise Perry sounding the alarm on polygyny when it’s already outlawed in Western societies, and no serious movement exists to undo this? The subtext isn’t subtle: modern dating is just an unofficial form of polygyny, reviving dormant mating dynamics and producing similarly disastrous consequences. Various commentators explicitly retrofit the SIM framework to their distorted vision of the contemporary dating landscape.

Long before the current moral panic, Roger Devlin’s 2006 Sexual utopia in power – a manifesto that repackaged traditional hypergamy into the modern neohypergamy framework – was already issuing warnings about the threat posed by a burgeoning cohort of sexually excluded men:

Simple prudence dictates that we give some consideration to the situation of these men. In societies where polygamy is openly practiced (e.g., in Africa and the Muslim world), young bachelors tend to form gangs which engage in antisocial behavior: “it is not good for man to be alone.”

As the most dangerous group globally, low-status bachelors are a matter of public concern:

The reason their sexual situation is a legitimate matter for public concern is that “the devil makes work for idle hands.” Poor, low-status bachelors are the most vice-, crime-, and violence-prone group in societies everywhere. No one has ever discovered a better way of employing their time and energies than by making fathers of them.

At the same time, it’s conceded that this isn’t happening, with a quip that if they were forming gangs they’d be killing it:

What have the bachelors been doing with themselves all these years? So far, in the West, they have not been forming criminal gangs. (They would probably be more attractive to women if they did: everyone seems to have heard stories about men on death row being besieged with offers of marriage from bored, thrill-seeking females.)

A common criticism is that the manosphere and incel communities misappropriate evolutionary psychology to lend credibility to their worldview. I wouldn’t go as far as Daniel Conroy-Beam, who suggests that his colleagues have blood on their hands for failing to address this misappropriation. I don’t even think evolutionary psychology research is all that central to incel ideology, regardless of how many papers their wiki cites. But this isn’t to say they’re off the hook: when evolutionary psychologists address incels, more often than not they reinforce the core premises of their ideology, even while wringing their hands over it.

The piece Societies should not ignore their incel problem argues that online incel communities are ‘just one expression of young male syndrome’.3 It argues that young male syndrome arises partly from ‘hypergyny’, in which women tend to marry up in wealth or status; this intensifies the competition among poorer men, pushing them to ‘engage in risky and violent status-seeking strategies and adopting misogynistic and sexist views of women’. The authors cite sex ratio imbalances and polygyny as exacerbating young male syndrome, while suggesting that ‘dating apps may create a similar effect’. They explicitly claim that polygyny breeds violence in both its official and ‘de facto’ forms: ‘Polygyny—legal or de facto—compounds the Incel problem and elevates interpersonal violence, theft, and property crime’. Finally, they argue that income inequality amplifies young male syndrome and the prevalence of incels by ‘concentrating sexual attention on fewer, wealthier men’.4

A piece titled Analyzing Incels through the lens of evolutionary psychology denounces incels for misrepresenting the field, stating that ‘Incels often selectively co-opt findings from evolutionary psychology, sometimes distorting them, to fuel their misogynistic worldview’.

Yet in a section titled ‘MISUSE OF EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY BY INCELS’, the author nevertheless grants that incels are correct in their core claims about the sexual marketplace and that enforced monogamy would solve their problems:

It would be a mistake to say that all Incels’ claims are false. Indeed, in a large-scale survey looking at trends in sexual relationships from 2010 to 2018, authors found the number of persons between the ages of 18 and 24 who claimed to be virgins increased for men but not for women (Ueda, Mercer, Ghaznavi, & Herbenick, 2020).5 Women, on average, do prefer men with socioeconomic success, socially dominant and who are physically attractive (Buss, 1988, 1989; Hatfield & Sprecher, 1995; Li et al., 2011; Shackelford et al., 2005; Walter et al., 2020). Polygynous societies better approximate our modern online dating world in which people are often dating more than one person at a time, at least casually (see Kunst, 2019).6 Polygynous societies tend to demonstrate greater mating success variance for men than women (Brown, Leland, & Mulder, 2009). Thus, the Incels calls for a more traditional, monogamist society would, in theory, improve their chances of finding a mate.

The problem is that there’s not enough nuance, you see:

The problem is not that Incels’ are wrong in their observations (at least for those pursuing the scientific literature), they are inflexible or superficial in how they apply evolutionary principles. They fail to consider alternative explanations or the complexity of human behavior.

When posters do cite respected literature, they do so without considering alternative explanations (for instance, whether the information on romantic preferences represent long versus short term mating strategies).

The reaction to these harsh truths is the problem:

Incels tend to treat female choice as wanton and coldhearted instead of driven by the same evolutionary pressures that drive their preferences to have sex with a “Stacy.”

They will agree that preferences are hardwired by evolution, but that does little to soften the emotional response to the perception that those preferences have doomed them to genetic death. People understand that cancer isn’t agentic, but that doesn’t stop them from hating it.

Another piece, by Miriam Lindner, purports to ‘make sense of senseless violence’, bringing up several incel massacres:

The most notorious examples of mass violence committed with explicit reference to incel ideology in the United States and Canada include the 2014 Isla Vista (California) killing, the 2018 Toronto van attack, the 2020 Toronto machete attack, and the 2021 Atlanta spa shootings.

Lindner interprets these incidents as manifestations of young male syndrome:

I posit that it is the psychology engaged in “bare branches” or “young male syndrome” of violent gangs, militias, and private armies, found in other cultures and historical moments, which is activated here. The societal disadvantages of too many unmated men are well-documented: their presence, especially in areas with a high sex ratio (more men than women) is associated with higher rates of crime, including violent crime.

She extends YMS logic to ‘the effective polygyny of the sexual marketplace’:

The effective polygyny of the sexual marketplace is defined by men who can effectively monopolize sexual access. When status or other attributes that women value in a mate vary highly across men, some men will gain sexual access to women while others are missing out (Henrich, Boyd, & Richerson, 2012). This creates intense competition and increases men’s inclination to use risky tactics to secure a mate. In non-WEIRD societies, polygyny increases intra-sexual competition and is positively associated with domestic violence.

It isn’t obvious why a handful of lone-wolf attacks over the course of a decade calls for a grand explanation. The perpetrators were aged 22, 25, and 21 – ages at which sexual inexperience has never been historically unusual, even if being a virgin at 25 remains somewhat rare (5–10%). When Elliot Rodger carried out his rampage in 2014, the virginity rate had yet to noticeably change, sitting at about 17.5% for men and women aged 18–24 in the 2013–15 NSFG. By the time Alek Minassian carried out his attack in 2018 and Jake Davison his in 2021, the virginity rate had risen slightly, but it hadn’t undergone the massive surge that would be required to make the trend a meaningful explanatory factor.

Aside from ‘young male syndrome’, the incel killers shared an actual medical diagnosis: Asperger’s syndrome. They fit the profile of typical school shooters; had they been high school students in 1999, they might’ve carried out a school shooting instead. Even to the extent that incel identification was a factor, we have to ask how much of it was a reaction to sexual circumstances versus exposure to radicalizing stimuli online. If the latter played the larger role, then the violence is less directly attributable to young male syndrome per se. Since the overwhelming majority of virgin men in this age range aren’t violent – let alone mass murderers – celibacy alone explains remarkably little.

Lindner claims that monogamy is ‘the ultimate coalitional tactic that favors low-status men’, and that ‘recent trends toward de facto polygyny’ create ‘an ecology that makes unmated men ready to accept incel beliefs’. She seems quite ready to accept incel beliefs herself, citing all the classic meme stats in support of the neohypergamy narrative.7 I’ve addressed them at length elsewhere, so will skip the preamble. She talks about modern technology creating echo chambers that deprive communities of feedback while amplifying their viewpoints, yet she contributes to that amplification herself. She complains about exposure to incel-related content on YouTube serving as a gateway into the community, yet produces incel-related content herself. Like the previous author, she wants to have her cake and eat it too.

Then there’s Mads Larsen, whose output barely attempts to conceal its bias, gladly citing sources that undercut its own claims while creating deceptive charts engineered for social media virality. Ironically, he produced a piece advocating not for monogamy but for polygyny, based on the premise that men are already ‘marginalized by unofficial polygyny’ anyway, so society may as well embrace the real thing.

You’d think that if genuine concern existed over young men adopting these ‘misogynistic’ and ‘fatalistic’ views, there would be a modicum of scrutiny directed at these claims. Mads Larsen proved he was capable of running the GSS data, yet chose not to impartially test the neohypergamy hypothesis but instead to produce misleading propaganda in support of it. To be fair, one ‘evolutionary sociologist’ did push back a bit: ‘Alas, sometimes, evolutionary psychologists themselves seem to actively enable these caricatures’. At this point, ‘sometimes’ is generous. Then again, they’re hardly alone. These ideas can no longer be referred to as the preserve of ‘the manosphere’. They’re widespread even among those who are otherwise nominally critical of it. Opposition to the manosphere is less about the underlying beliefs than the grievance industry built around them or the abrasive rhetoric used to promote them.

On some level, it makes sense that evolutionary psychologists are reinforcing the neohypergamy narrative, as there are a number of influential theories within evolutionary research that at least on the surface point in that direction: Trivers’ parental investment theory; Bateman’s principle; greater male desire for sexual variety; the dual-mating hypothesis; and the related good genes theory. To many, neohypergamy may seem like an intuitive extension of these ideas, and a strong focus on the ‘MCFC’ model naturally creates an epistemic bias in its favour. Some may even feel vindicated: ‘We saw this coming all along!’

Where is the incel crime wave?

In response to the backlash to the enforced monogamy suggestion, Jordan Peterson cited a couple of studies, including The competition–violence hypothesis: sex, marriage, and male aggression, which found that ‘men who transition to a monogamous, or less competitive, mode of sexual behavior (fewer partners since last wave), reduce their risk for violence’. Sexually inactive men were the least violent, while the most promiscuous men were the most violent. But hang on – Peterson is citing this to argue that ‘the dangerousness of frustrated young men has to be regulated socially’. Is monogamy needed to prevent incel violence, or Chad thuggery?

Many similar findings point in the same direction:

• Risk behaviours such as alcohol and drug use, physical fighting, carrying weapons, and dating violence are associated with a higher number of sex partners.

• Adolescents involved in fights in the past month are more likely to have had sexual intercourse and multiple partners.

• Adolescents with an earlier sexual debut are more likely to engage in delinquency in the following year, and vice versa.

• Men who identify as more sexually coercive report greater self-perceived mating success and more extensive sexual histories.

• Rapists are more likely to report having had 20 or more sex partners, engaging in substance abuse, and belonging to gangs.

This constellation of behaviours is often said to represent a fast life-history strategy. It also overlaps with the Dark Triad, which is associated with violent crime, substance use, a more short-term mating orientation, and a higher partner count. One study found that early childhood unpredictability predicts a faster life-history strategy in adulthood, characterized by more sex partners, risky behaviour, aggression, delinquency, and criminal involvement. Another found that early life stress, fast life-history traits, and an antagonistic outlook towards others predict higher psychopathy, which in turn predicts more unrestricted sociosexual attitudes.

You could argue that this shows the strategy works, and if the environment promotes this kind of competition, we should expect a spike in these destructive behaviours – yet what we observe in reality is precisely the opposite. Violent, property, and drug crime rates have plummeted among both juveniles and adults.

The violent felony arrest rate for Californians aged 18–22 dropped by more than 50% from 1994 to 2019, even as the rate for adults in their late 30s and older increased. Among those born in 1993 or later, the violent felony arrest rate is 20–25% lower than in previous generations. This decline was driven by fewer unique individuals entering the justice system, as the number of arrests per violent offender actually saw a slight uptick.

Clearance rates have also fallen, meaning police are solving a smaller percentage of crimes, but not enough to account for most of the crime decline, nor can this account for the especially sharp drop in juvenile and young adult crime.8

A question that shouldn’t be overlooked is at what ages should we expect incel-related crime to be concentrated. It was never the case that most men aged 18–22 were married. A better window might be the mid- to late-20s, when testosterone is still high and anxiety about finding a partner begins to set in. Either way, it doesn’t look like an incel crime wave is materializing.

Incel-related attacks also pale in comparison to other forms of terrorism. A 2024 report from the Global Network on Extremism and Technology estimated that since 2014, incel-connected attacks were responsible for some 50 deaths worldwide, and this includes more tenuously connected cases such as Christopher Harper-Mercer and Nikolas Cruz.

Between 2016 and 2025 in the US, the CSIS attributed 112 deaths to right-wing attacks, 82 to Jihadist attacks, 13 to left-wing attacks, 4 to ‘ethnonationalist’ attacks, and 2 to other attacks. Incel attacks were coded as right-wing terrorism, but they would’ve only made up a small fraction of that total. Between 2013 and 2024, there were over 56,000 recorded Islamic terror attacks worldwide, leading to over 200,000 deaths. Of course, many of those warning about young male syndrome effectively equate these to incel attacks.

This mismatch between theoretical expectations and reality has motivated some to question why:

Throughout her paper, Lindner provides robust evidence for what is known in the evolutionary psychology literature as the Young Male Syndrome, i.e., the tendency for surplus populations of unpartnered young men to disproportionately harm society due to increased status striving and risk-taking behaviors in pursuit of mates (Wilson & Daly, 1985). Yet there has been no spike in violence corresponding with increasing rates of sexlessness (Pinker, 2012, 2018; Räsänen, 2023). Given what we know about the Young Male Syndrome, the more puzzling question is, why is there not more incel violence?

A common explanation is that men are placated by digital distractions, with porn and video games simulating sexual success and competition. Although exaggerated by meme stats and falsely perceived as gendered, there has been a real sexual decline. As we’ve seen though, sexually inexperienced men tend to be the least violent. Even when considering possible selection effects, this is strongly suggestive that sexlessness doesn’t meaningfully raise the risk of violence.

There’s nothing unique about sexual activity trends – youths dropping alcohol and cigarettes just isn’t treated as catastrophic, and it’s harder to spin into a culture war narrative. It’s worth considering how much of the crime decline simply reflects a broader decline in real-life socializing, which naturally cuts off opportunities for conflict. Online disputes rarely escalate into physical violence because – for better or worse – you can’t reach through a screen to strangle your interlocutor.

A recurring trope in the neohypergamy and broader male crisis mythos is the alleged exodus of sexless men from society, but young male NEET rates have remained relatively stable across the US and Europe. Even if an exodus were happening, the average worker holds little to no bargaining power, which only continues to shrink. Most people aren’t economically essential, and modern problems have grown too complex to solve by simply throwing raw manpower at them. To the extent that sexual reward acts as an underlying biological driver for innovation, it likely functions implicitly – similar to how the ‘ultimate evolutionary purpose’ of sex is reproduction, yet it’s still pursued without a conscious intent to reproduce.

Alternative solutions to the monogamy puzzle

Monogamy is increasingly framed as an unnatural aberration. It only seems natural because it has been maintained over generations by the hegemony of Christian morality. Alongside woke polyamorists who see it as a barrier to sexual utopia, many on the right – especially of a more ‘dissident’ persuasion – now view it as artificial too. The only difference is that its artificiality is seen as a virtue. Some Christians use this narrative as an opportunity to evangelize. This may sound counterintuitive, seeing as Genesis presents one man and one woman as the original marital ideal, with a man and his wife becoming ‘one flesh’, but polygyny can be read as a consequence of humanity’s fallen nature, and therefore ‘natural’ in the sense that humans are predisposed to sin. The Old Testament features figures like David and Solomon with numerous wives and concubines, though it’s telling that this was a frequent source of turmoil. On this reading, enforced monogamy can be seen as a restoration of God’s intended order, or something to that effect.

Just how much of a puzzle is monogamy? Monogamy is fairly atypical among mammals, being practiced by under 10% of species, but it’s less unusual among primates: a good 30% are socially monogamous, including gibbons, which are reasonably close relatives. Still, the African apes that are the closest relatives of humans are either polygynous (gorillas) or polygynandrous (chimps and bonobos) and live in social groups, so it’s not unreasonable to infer that the last common ancestor of hominins was nonmonogamous too. It’s also true that there is no consensus about how monogamy, whether evolved or socially imposed, originated. What are some other mechanisms by which monogamy may have evolved, either biologically or culturally?

One farm, one woman

The puzzle of monogamous marriage states that ‘under conditions in which men vary substantially in status, polygynous pair-bonding is a likely outcome of both male and female mating choices’.

Kanazawa & Still similarly argue:

If resource inequality among men is great, women choose to marry polygynously and the polygynous institution of marriage emerges. If resource inequality among men is small, women choose to marry monogamously and the monogamous institution of marriage emerges. The theory explains the historical shift from polygyny to monogamy as a result of the gradual decline in inequality among men.

Essentially, when the gap between a rich and poor man becomes large enough, women opt for the harem. When the gap is small, becoming a second wife would be a bad economic decision.

Even though polygyny is typically concentrated among wealthy, high-status men, Ross et al. showed that despite having the highest wealth inequality, agrarian societies in the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample (SCCS) had the lowest polygyny rates (measured by wives with co-wives).

Analysing the same dataset, Minocher et al. found inconsistent associations between stratification, wealth inequality and polygyny. While the highest level of wealth inequality predicted higher polygyny than the lowest level, the highest level of stratification9 strongly predicted lower polygyny, and both cultural constraints and actual rates of polygynous men decline as societal complexity grew.10

In line with these findings, von Rueden & Jaeggi found that the correlation between male status and reproductive success didn’t vary by a society’s subsistence type, and Ross et al. (2023) found across 90 nonindustrial societies that male reproductive variance was no higher in agricultural societies, though it also wasn’t higher in polygynous societies.

What resolves this paradox? Fortunato & Archetti hypothesized that intensive agriculture and the inheritance of resources across generations favoured monogamous nuclear families. As elite landowners amassed wealth, the share of men able to clear the polygyny threshold may simultaneously shrink. For wealthy men, collecting wives like Pokémon isn’t necessarily a winning strategy; dividing inherited land dilutes its value and dampens each heir’s prospects. When a polygynous patriarch dies, inheritance disputes can trigger civil war between co-wives and half-brothers, similar to when an authoritarian leader dies and there is a power struggle over succession. This may have incentivized women to trade exclusivity for exclusive paternal investment.

Rising population density and land value force the creation of individual property rights. In turn, land privatization strongly predicts monogamy, regardless of how concentrated wealth is. Access to land available for expansion encourages polygyny, while land scarcity constrains it. Accordingly, polygyny is much rarer in plough-farming agricultural societies with private property and highly gendered divisions of labour than long-fallow agricultural societies with communal land tenure and more land available for expansion. Female agricultural contribution positively correlates with polygyny rates; when land becomes scarce, extra hands and thus extra wives lose value.

The puzzle of monogamous marriage observes: ‘After the origins of agriculture, as human societies grew in size, complexity and inequality, levels of polygynous marriage intensified, reaching extremes in the earliest empires whose rulers assembled immense harems’. Even if polygyny didn’t increase as an overall proportion of marriages, extreme harems were made possible only by concentrated wealth and a large pool of women, supported by agricultural surpluses and large-scale conquest and enslavement. Agricultural population growth expanded the tax base and enabled states to field larger armies. Further expansion and slave acquisition could create a snowball effect.

In this sense, the agricultural revolution may have intensified polygyny, but it doesn’t necessarily follow that an unprecedented mass of ordinary men died alone. Rulers surrounded by massive harems may evoke vivid imagery, but in an empire of millions, even a harem of 10,000 women would be a tiny drop in the broader mating pool. The impact would be diluted further still after accounting for many concubines being war captives and the historically brutal male mortality rates. Of course other high ranking men may often tend to take multiple wives too, but it can’t simply be assumed that the overall polygyny rate was higher than in small-scale societies just because some men had a lot more partners. One could still argue that royal sexual excess provoked some degree of jealousy, but whether it was enough to destabilize empires is another matter.

Dads matter too

A shared feature of polygynous species is that males don’t invest much if anything in their children, instead putting all their energy into chasing tail and defending their territory or harem. Monogamous species tend to have biparental care because male investment can strongly affect offspring survival. Marlowe showed that societies with more paternal care and male subsistence contributions had less polygyny. At the same time, while paternal investment was lowest among horticulturalists, who are almost the most polygynous, it was highest among pastoralists, who are also relatively high in polygyny. This may be because polygyny can result either from the polygyny threshold, as with pastoralists and their livestock, or harem defence, as with horticulturalists, where wealth inequality is low, females do most of the subsistence labour, and polygyny is a result of intrasexual competition for status detached from wealth.

The human brain has inordinate caloric demands, and babies are helpless for a long period of development, raising the value of dads. Having at least one relative apart from the mother consistently improves the survival rates of children, though a review found that dads in particular may be somewhat overrated, as only a third of studies found they even had an effect. It may be that the benefits aren’t just direct provisioning but also manifest in teaching children skills and making them more marriageable and more likely to continue their legacy. The evidence here seems similarly mixed. One study compared adults among the highly monogamous Bolivian Tsimane whose dad died when they were 0–9 or 10–19 with those whose dad survived until they were 20 in five outcomes: height, BMI, age of first birth, chance of ever reproducing by 30 (male) or 25 (female), and total kids and surviving kids for your age. Out of ten tests, only women whose dad died before age 10 had slightly lower BMI as adults, and this effect disappeared after controlling for family.

Another study found that among Australian Aborigines, boys are forced to go through initiation ceremonies before they can marry. Boys with dads had earlier initiations, and having a dad or father-figure made initiation much more likely at any given age, as fathers are responsible for paying for and arranging the ceremony. Earlier initiation was also associated with having a kid and having more kids. So in some societies, a father’s primary role may be to help their sons navigate the social hierarchy. A study of an Indian city found that when dads died at 11–15 instead of staying alive until 25, the offspring ended up less educated, with a lower income, cheaper weddings, and they married a poorer, less-educated spouse, even comparing kids from similar socioeconomic backgrounds. In this age range, exams decide if you go to college. If dad dies early, relatives might have time to adopt the kid and cover fees. So if success depends on inherited wealth and dad’s death lowers your status, it may reduce marriage prospects.

Male food contribution has also been shown to enhance female reproductive success through a younger age at weaning and a higher fertility rate. Men can help offset the mother’s childcare burden, allowing some resources to be reallocated towards reproduction. One hypothesis observes that carrying babies is energy intensive, and if dads help carry kids, mothers save energy and can eat more and forage better. Additionally, less constant nipple contact means less breastfeeding and ovulation returning faster, which in turns leads to a shorter interbirth interval, increasing the chance of future offspring. There are a number of potential ways dads can help out that aren’t just bringing home the bacon.

Meat provider, or meat shield?

A big problem that any paternal investment model faces when explaining monogamy is that investing into offspring that you don’t have high certainty are yours is dicey. You might get cucked when you’re out hunting. Once again, sex ratios factor in: multiple mating is more rational when women are abundant, while forgoing pursuing additional partners and guarding one is more rational when women are scarce. Menopause and long lifespans create a skewed operational sex-ratio. This would incentivize men to guard their partner against competitors, raising paternity certainty and creating the conditions for the selection of ‘good dads’. Grandma helping feed the kids also helps shorten interbirth intervals, raising the payoff of sticking around. The paternal care strategy only outperforms the mate guarding strategy when there are high benefits to paternal care and low rates of cuckoldry.

So did paternal care arrive after or before monogamy? Lukas & Clutton-Brock found in a phylogenetic analysis that among socially monogamous species, paternal care evolved after monogamy about half the time, while in the rest they both appeared simultaneously. They also found that in 41% of socially monogamous species, there was no indication of paternal care at all.

Rather than a sense of paternal devotion, monogamy may have arisen from an inability of males to defend access to multiple females who aren’t densely clustered enough or that are too catty towards each other, making sticking to one and guarding her the superior strategy. Monogamy evolves more commonly among species that depend on high quality but low density diets, e.g. meat and fruit, and is rarer among herbivores. Historical changes in diet towards scattered food may have pushed women to forage over larger areas and reduced the number living close together. The increased energy consumed by larger brains meant each square mile of land could support fewer people than before. Each women would need a larger amount of foraging territory to secure enough resources. In these conditions, dominant males wouldn’t be able to successfully guard a harem from rivals like a Gorilla can.

Still, this explanation may fall short for a group-living species like humans. While this study failed to find evidence that infanticide risk drove the evolution of monogamy, another study came to the opposite conclusion: male infanticide was the only factor that consistently preceded social monogamy among primates, and socially monogamous species had much lower male infanticide rates.11

This would explain the high rate of monogamy among primates relative to other mammals: long lactation and infant dependency periods resulting from big brains made babies especially vulnerable to being snuffed out. When lactation lasts longer than gestation, females often delay the return of oestrus to reduce the chance of having to nurse two infants at once. Killing an unweaned infant can terminate lactational suppression, speeding up the mother’s return to fertility. In species like gorillas and lemurs infanticide accounts for a large proportion of infant deaths. While both monogamous and polygynous men have the capacity to guard their women, men will multiple wives will generally have a harder time of it.

Biparental care has the added effect of shortening lactation length, further reducing infanticide risk and increasing the number of offspring able to be produced. Males can also help guard against food theft, which makes it worthwhile for females to dig out plant foods and share them with him. Females may offer continued reproductive access in exchange for bodyguard services, and the paternity certainty afforded by this setup may have then created the conditions for paternal care to to be selected for. This has also been argued vis-à-vis cooking, which was generally handled by women and which advertises the presence of food to outsiders. Men could hunt the meat then get their wife to cook them a nice meal under his and perhaps his crew’s protection.

Without weapons, beefcakes have a big upper hand in guarding their women. When spears enter the picture, smaller men have a much better chance at killing or warding off bigger men. Bows would have levelled the playing field further still. With less variation in fighting ability comes less variation in monopolization ability.

Germ theory of polygyny

Pathogen stress is among the most robust predictors of polygyny. Some scholars have interpreted this as reflecting the importance of ‘good genes’ that signal pathogen resistance, either through indicators of genetic diversity or masculine features that act as ‘costly signals’ of the ability to withstand the immunosuppressive effects of high testosterone. In disease-ridden environments, sharing access a parasite-resistant man might be a safer bet than relying on a single provider.

Studies testing this theory haven’t had stunning success. One study found that testosterone increased perceived dominance but not attractiveness in male faces. Another found the same, and even facial dominance wasn’t significant after applying controls. This aligns with research showing an ambivalent association between facial masculinity and attractiveness in men.

Some other studies worth mentioning:

• McIntosh et al. (2017): women preferred bearded and more masculine faces, but neither pathogen and ectoparasite exposure nor self-reported pathogen disgust influenced these preferences.

• Zaidi et al. (2018): taller people had more masculine faces, but this was the same for men and women, which doesn’t support facial masculinity being a male ornament, as these tend to be more sensitive to growth in males. Heterozygosity at the major histocompatibility complex (MHC), a genetic marker of immunity, was associated with height but not facial masculinity.

• Saribay et al. (2021): contrary to predictions, priming with higher pathogen prevalence lowered preferences for masculinized faces. Resource scarcity weakly strengthened these preferences.

• Hakkarainen et al. (2021): a positive relationship between facial attractiveness and MHC heterozygosity was found, but this was no longer significant in females when controlling for multiple testing or in males when controlling for age and fat content.

• Fieder & Huber (2023): a very small negative association between genome-wide homozygosity (a measure of inbreeding) and facial attractiveness was found, explaining <0.15% of the variance and not surviving correction for multiple testing. MHC homozygosity wasn’t associated with facial attractiveness.

So neither facial masculinity nor attractiveness is clearly linked to pathogen resistance, which was the leading explanation for the link between polygyny and pathogen stress. It’s possible a clearer link exists in environments with greater pathogen prevalence, but even in Africa, which has the highest historical and contemporary pathogen prevalence, more masculine male faces aren’t rated as more attractive.

Access to a wealthy male’s resources may outweigh the direct paternal care of a poor male in pathogen-rich environments. A third variable could be driving a spurious relationship, though Minocher et al. controlled for a number of confounders and the effect persisted.

Chad-transmitted infections

Another model of monogamy selection focuses on STI prevention. In small hunter-gatherer groups without group competition, disease outbreaks penalize polygynists, but limited chains of transmission mean that stochasticity tends to quickly extinguish STIs, and the surviving polygynists return to dominance through higher fertility. In dense agricultural settlements, STIs can more readily become endemic in polygynist groups. One man can infect multiple wives, those wives can leave and infect another man, and the chain continues. Monogamists can take advantage of this depopulation to enforce monogamy on the remaining polygynists, and a growing number of monogamists creates a positive feedback loop.

Another model suggests that monogamous norms may be most beneficial when STI prevalence is intermediate, where the threat is enough to motivate them but not so out of control that it’s a lost cause. Fatal STIs may promote monogamy more strongly than sterilizing ones, which make monogamy costly by tying people to infertile partners.

Harems got outsourced

Dow & Eff found that a more specialized division of labour predicted higher rates of monogamy. When production happens at the household level, polygynous families provide more labour specialization, higher productivity, and wider kin networks. Once complex economic markets emerge, these advantages are diminished. With the Industrial Revolution, extra farmhands no longer expanded household wealth, and the strategy flipped to investing in fewer, more skilled children rather than dispersing resources across many. As states began effectively crack down on crime, women also became less reliant on the physical protection that polygynous households once provided.

Laura Betzig connected the rise of SIM to the specialized division of labour that followed from industrialization. Elites became dependent on the cooperation of the expert class, giving the latter greater bargaining power to demand concessions, including restrictions on polygyny. The obvious rejoinder is that monogamy far predated the Industrial Revolution.12 Even prior to industrialization, elites needed commoners to man their armies, and this could also prompt concessions. If anything, it would make more sense for highly valued specialists to be rewarded with the resources and status to join the polygynous elite themselves. Beyond that, there’s no documented historical evidence that this kind of dynamic gave rise to SIM.

Monogamy from below

Male chimps are known to band together to overthrow the alpha. Could socially imposed monogamy have arisen through bottom-up revolts? An obstacle to this is the free-rider problem: unmarried men wouldn’t need to endure the risk of joining a coalition to benefit from greater access to wives. Such coalitions would be more viable in small-scale societies where free riders are easier to spot and there aren’t strong security forces that can easily crush them. We don’t see higher rates of monogamy in small-scale societies, but a defender of the model could always argue this reflects a selection bias, with monogamous societies being more likely to scale up.

There are also no documented historical examples of coalitions forming to overthrow a polygynous elite. Those motivated to join such coalitions would come from a limited subset of the population, since as we’ve seen, widespread polygyny is rare. Coalition members would also be less powerful in terms of status, resources, and perhaps physicality. It’s rare for those at the bottom of society to have the ability to launch successful rebellions on their own. A coalition might have more traction if the goal is merely to restrict massive hoarding, as there are more potential beneficiaries.

The role of Christianity

Kevin MacDonald13 critiqued Alexander’s thesis that SIM was a necessary antecedent to state formation, pointing out that numerous historical civilizations (China, India, Aztecs & Incas, the Muslim world) practiced polygyny yet survived for centuries. At times, polygynous societies conquered monogamous ones, as in the Muslim conquest of the Byzantine Empire, and the Mongol conquests of Eastern Europe. MacDonald attributes the West’s adoption of monogamy largely to the historical accident that was Emperor Constantine’s conversion to Christianity. The medieval Church opposed polygyny and concubinage, permitted remarriage only after widowhood, and marginalized illegitimate children. He diverges from many evolutionary psychologists by stressing that SIM doesn’t require an evolutionary explanation and is underdetermined by evolutionary theory. Even accepting SIM as the victor of cultural evolution, how exactly monogamy was established and maintained isn’t adequately addressed by SIM theorists.

In societies the West colonized or conquered, authorities and missionaries imposed or promoted monogamy. Others chose to adopt it as part of a broader modernization package, sometimes referred to as Developmental Idealism. This cultural diffusion doesn’t necessarily demonstrate the adaptiveness of monogamy; some aspects of Western culture may be incidental rather than drivers of its success.

Monogamy predated both Christianity and Greco-Roman civilization. The earliest documented example of what can reasonably be interpreted as institutionalized monogamy comes from Ancient Mesopotamia. Babylon’s Code of Hammurabi (c. 1754 BC) stipulated that a man could take a second woman14 only in the event that the first suffered from serious illness or infertility, and even then he remained obliged to support her. In Ancient Egypt, polygyny was mostly an elite privilege driven by the need to secure male heirs and political alliances, and also just to flex.

A cultural phylogenetic analysis15 of Indo-European-speaking societies reconstructed ancestral marriage systems and concluded that the common ancestor of these societies (Proto-Indo-European and possibly Proto-Indo-Hittite) was likely monogamous. This pushes the origins of normative monogamy back into prehistory (c. 4000–7000 BC).

Monogamy was hardly unique to Indo-European societies: of the 27 societies in the SCCS that prescribe monogamy, only six are Indo-European, and these cultures developed normative monogamy independently of Christian influence.

Dow & Eff found that spatial and linguistic cultural transmission predicted the incidence of monogamy, but religious transmission didn’t. In many cases, religious values may function as post-hoc justifications for behaviour rather than causes of it, and SIM may have simply spread to regions already primed for monogamy. Still, polygamy is significantly more common among Muslim than Christian communities in sub-Saharan Africa, which suggests that religious norms do make a difference. The authors also failed to find an effect of societal scale (while SIM theories associate monogamy with social complexity) or political participation (which would arguably occur alongside mating concessions). Modernization had at most a weak independent effect. It’s worth mentioning that monogamy was measured as the share of married women in monogamous unions, which isn’t quite the same as whether monogamy is formally prescribed.

When it comes to SIM, the SCCS shows that monogamy is socially imposed in 46% of large states, 26% of smaller states, and just 10% of small-scale societies, which is at least consistent with the theory. In modern times, legal polygyny is concentrated in Africa and the Middle East, so it’s no surprise that polygynous societies are generally less liberal, poorer, more corrupt, and militarily weaker. But that’s a long way from proving that polygyny causes these outcomes. And even if violence declined alongside the spread of monogamy, parallel trends such as state formation and institutional development may have done most of the heavy lifting.

Is monogamy natural?

It’s debatable to what extent these mechanisms predict monogamy rather than polygyny; some may simply predict a shift away from promiscuity toward pair bonding, regardless of the particular arrangement. Polygynous marriages can be stable and produce multiple children with each wife, so pair bonding may be more important than monogamy per se in setting the stage for paternal care. The degree to which these mechanisms are biological or cultural also varies. In Dow & Eff, the cultural channels predicting the diffusion of monogamy were those also more likely to transmit genes (compared to religion), which is at least weakly suggestive of a genetic basis for monogamy.

Environmental conditions can impose monogamy without genetically reducing polygynous inclinations, which remain beneficial if the right opportunity arises. Evidence for the persistence of these urges can be seen in men’s greater desire for sexual variety. But the existence of pair bonding and jealousy among humans suggests monogamy has deep roots. Women’s extended sexuality may also exist to reinforce pair bonding. Still, while pair bonding is generally more indicative of monogamy than polygyny, it’s not a perfect indicator.16 Extrapair paternity rates also tend to be quite low, though extrapair mating is a frequent occurrence in many socially monogamous species regardless.

This doesn’t mean humans evolved to be strictly monogamous. But for most men and women throughout history, monogamy with a desirability-matched partner was probably the best deal in town. A recent study examined sibling data derived not from both pre-industrial societies and ancient DNA from archaeological sites, including Bronze Age and Neolithic sites. Exclusive lifetime monogamy would produce only full siblings, while random mating would produce mostly half-siblings. Full sibling rates in the human sample clustered closely with those seen among socially monogamous mammals and were far higher than those among non-monogamous mammals.

The notion that agriculture led to mass polygyny owes a lot to the widespread myth that only 1 in 17 men reproduced during the Neolithic bottleneck. As addressed here, the two leading explanations for this bottleneck are violent competition between patrilineal kin groups and reproductive variance between patrilineal segmentary systems. For a brief recap, storable agricultural wealth and land created inheritable property, giving rise to patrilineal inheritance and creating targets worth raiding and defending.

The first explanation posits that war between patrilineal clans wiped out entire Y-chromosome lineages, while female lineages persisted through exogamy or absorption by victors. Numerous episodes of dramatic sex-biased replacements exist in history, such as in Iberia between ~2500 and ~2000 BC, where Bronze Age steppe pastoralists replaced 40% of the total ancestry and virtually 100% of the native Y-chromosomes.

The second explanation focuses on patrilines splitting once they reach a certain size. Differences in reproductive success between these groups cause some to peacefully die out over time, a process accelerated by uneven access to resources and status. In 18^th and 19^th century China, high-status patrilines became dominant not through outbreeding or exterminating competitors, but by maximizing their offspring’s odds of surviving to adulthood and marrying.

These mechanisms can produce marked reductions in genetic diversity without relying on extreme, sustained reproductive ratios. Male lines simply need to be lost at higher rates than female ones over time, leaving no trace in the genetic record. It’s a cumulative effect. The bottleneck lifted as societies evolved into centralized states, where standing armies replaced clan warbands, urbanization and long-distance trade facilitated gene flow, and interclan feuds would be stamped out.

The apparent gap outside this period also likely overstates things, confounded by factors such as patrilocality and female exogamy, long-term variance in reproductive success, and purifying selection that bias genetic inferences. The anthropological data on pre-industrial societies and ancient DNA offer a more direct glimpse into historical mating patterns than inferences drawn from surviving lineages.

Does monogamy need enforcing?

Enforced monogamists argue that polygyny aligns with both male and female preferences, with male desire for sexual variety and female hypergamy causing human mating to default to alpha male harems in the absence of enforced monogamy.

Both stated and revealed preferences point to low female inclinations to share a husband. In a 2019 YouGov Poll, 68% of men and 83% of women said they’d prefer between 0–1 spouses if polygamy was legalized in the US, with another 10% and 9% stating they don’t know. In a 2023 YouGov poll, 24% of men and 16% of women stated they strongly or somewhat supported legalizing polygamy. In a heterosexual sample from the UK, 39% of men and 5% of women said they’d be open to a polygynous relationship, with 17.2% of men and 8.8% of women saying they were unsure.

Polygamy was banned in Turkey under the 1926 Turkish civil code. This was not some incel manifesto, but part of a wave of secularizing reforms designed to replace Sharia law. Women’s rights activists had criticized polygamy for decades leading up to the ban. Likewise, the newly formed People’s Republic of China banned polygamy and concubinage with the passage of the 1950 New Marriage Law. In addition, arranged marriage and child betrothal were banned, women were granted the right to initiate divorce, and the husband could now join the wife’s family. These changes were justified on the grounds of gender equality and the abolition of the feudal patriarchal system.

In 2008, Iraq passed a law making it so that men can only take a second wife, and no more, when the first is unable to have children or suffers from a disease. Many Kurdish politicians viewed it as an attempt to appease feminists, who saw it as a victory: ‘”We didn’t win totally but we will keep fighting to have full banishment of polygamy in Iraq,” said Jiwan Ahmed, press officer for the Women Freedom Organization of Kurdistan’. Before the polygamy prohibition was extended to Muslims, 85% of Muslim women polled in India wanted it to be banned. Ironically, Muslims often blame feminism for turning women against polygyny, while white sharia types blame it for enabling de facto polygyny.

It’s often implied that the existence of prohibitions on polygamy is a testament to how dominant and destructive it is in their absence. When polygamy was banned in Turkey, polygyny was only practiced at a rate of about 2% in Istanbul; in early modern China, it was only 1–2%, so it was probably low when it was banned there too. Polygamy was banned in Albania in 1928; in 1918, 5% of marriages were polygamous. So clearly, polygamy doesn’t have to be widespread for bans to be considered warranted, even if the circumstances may have been different further in the past. These low rates, along with cases such as Egypt, also make it harder to attribute Western dominance to enforced monogamy, especially if nominally monogamous societies involved significant de facto polygyny, as Betzig argues.

We hear a lot about enforced monogamy, but what about enforced polygyny? The puzzle of monogamous marriage raises an important fact: normative monogamy reduces spousal age gaps and gender inequality. Polygyny is more common in more patriarchal societies. Women tend to have little say in these marriages; among forager societies, polygyny is associated with arranged marriage, but only where female marriages are arranged via bride price. Polygyny is practiced less by more educated women, and has declined in Africa with rising female autonomy. They don’t use their newfound freedom to join harems. This doesn’t mean women are off the hook completely; it has been suggested that women may have helped uphold patriarchy and polygyny because the higher reproductive ceiling of sons makes male inheritance systems advantageous for wealthy parents and even female kin.

Polygyny is likely more reproductively beneficial to polygynous men than women. A study cited by The puzzle of monogamous marriage found that among Mormons in the 19^th century US, while wealthy men had more wives and offspring on average, as well as more offspring surviving to age 15, the offspring per wife of poor men had a higher chance of surviving. This indicates that it can benefit the wealthy men, but it’s more complicated for women. Another study found no evidence for a dilution effect but that marrying at an older age, marrying older men, and co-wife conflict reduced the fertility of polygynous women in 19^th century Utah. On the other hand, one study found that women who chose to marry high-status men polygynously exchanged fertility for more reproductive success for their offspring. Another study of rural Ethiopians found that first wives of polygynously married men had more reproductive success than monogamously married women and second or third wives, whose children had lower weight and height. They also married at a younger age and attracted higher brideprice. Women in polygamous marriages are also at greater risk of intimate partner violence and depression.

A first wife is incentivized to enforce monogamy, even if subsequent wives might benefit from joining a wealthy man’s household. Polygyny also tends to lower women’s social status. As such, wealthy women were important early patrons of the Christian Church. Christian morality gave women a tool to police their husbands’ sexual behaviour and protect their exclusive claim to his wealth and inheritance.

Despite this, monogamy is often framed as a patriarchal institution, including by a strain of feminist critique, at least when compulsory. Monogamy is accused of making women economically dependent on male breadwinners and responsible for unpaid labour. The proposed alternative isn’t polygamy but ‘consensual nonmonogamy’, meaning polyamory and open relationships. Another talking point is the sexual double standard, whereby male infidelity is said to be more tolerated. Red pillers generally say the same, but that it’s because women see men who can cheat as higher value.

Friedrich Engels famously said in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State that the inception of monogamous nuclear family marked the ‘world-historical defeat of the female sex’. Similar to the argument discussed earlier, his argument is about private property and inheritance, but with monogamy imposed on women rather than being more of a mutual deal: men were intent on guaranteeing paternity to pass on their property and consolidate their class status. Engels wasn’t imagining monogamy replacing polygyny but rather a system of group marriage with communal sex and childrearing.

Of course, we’re dealing with two different polygynies: one real, if often exaggerated and misunderstood, and one a delusion. To briefly dismantle the neohypergamy cope: there is no increasing sexual concentration among the most promiscuous men and partner distributions remain virtually identical between young men and women; dating apps are not facilitating sexual inequality; the singleness gender gap among young adults was heavily exaggerated by the sacred Pew survey and is not growing, with age gaps and a slight male surplus fully explaining the real gap of 10–15%.

For those in the neohypergamy movement, promiscuity carries both ‘hypergamous’ and polygynous connotations, so any perceived rise in promiscuity is treated as equivalent to a rise in de facto polygyny. Even if an enforced monogamist concedes that marital polygyny is associated with more male-dominated social structures, the de facto polygyny fantasy remains conceptually tethered to feminism and the sexual revolution.

The neohypergamy movement sometimes frames women as delighting in the fruits of mass promiscuity and de facto polygyny, while at other times they’re hapless victims of their own hypergamous choices. Either way, it demands a return to a patriarchal order, with enforced monogamous marriage as the cure. Even if monogamy is currently a feature of the least patriarchal societies, it’s true that they were once both more patriarchal and more monogamous in the sense of higher marriage rates and likely less promiscuity,17 and the historical imposition of monogamy by the Church and ruling elites can be reasonably understood as an expression of patriarchy.

If women would rather share an elite man than settle for an average one, polygyny could also work as a response to imagined mass promiscuity and its imagined effects on birth rates, but monogamy is typically preferred for its sexual egalitarianism, even when enforced monogamists otherwise preach the necessity and virtue of hierarchy.

Are enforced relationships desirable for either party though? The manosphere often stresses the importance of ‘true desire’ and portray being a ‘beta provider’ as the worst possible fate, so it wouldn’t be a real remedy even if it ‘solved’ neohypergamy.

Polyamory =/= polygyny

The Quillette article finishes by asking, ‘if polyamory is on the rise, will this lead to a less egalitarian and cohesive society, one threatened by an underclass of incels, only partially sated by VR porn? Will a coming collapse of Western monogamy bring the whole edifice of modern Western civilization down with it?’

This is working off the assumption that polyamory is comparable to polygamy, so that polyamory is tilted heavily towards polygyny over polyandry, with high-status males ‘monopolizing’ the women. But we shouldn’t necessarily expect them to be without many of the conditions that facilitate polygyny in preindustrial societies (arranged marriage, economic dependence, wives as economic assets on farms). Polyamory hasn’t typically been seen as being reserved for the cream of the crop, either.

A survey conducted by Open Source Psychometrics Project of 5,043 users in 2015 found that 8.9% of men and 4.9% of women were currently polyamorous, and 7.9% of men and 7.1% of women used to be. I downloaded the data and limited it to heterosexuals, finding that 7.9% of men and 3.5% of women were, rising to 4.9% when including bisexual women. This survey isn’t representative of the general population, but this doesn’t necessarily affect the gender balance. A 2025 YouGov poll found that 12% of men had been in either a polyamorous or open relationship compared to 6% of women. YouGov data on British people shows more men reporting being currently or previously in a polyamorous relationship, though there’s no way to filter by sexual orientation. Only 1% of adults were in polyamorous relationships, and 2% had been in the past, rising to about 4% and 3% for 18–24s. A study using a US Census based quota sample of single adults found that men were about twice as likely to have engaged in polyamory than women, as were less-educated people, contradicting the idea that it’s reserved for high-status men, assuming education is considered a status marker.

If this relatively rare practice is going to be used as a justification for enforcing monogamy, it doesn’t seem like the de facto polygyny angle is valid. If women and desirable men were desperate to form harems together, you’d think that the polyamory rates would be a bit higher and that there would be evidence that more women than men were engaging in it. Is it still not normalized enough? If mass polygyny were the natural human mating system, it seems implausible that the institution of marriage would be needed to mediate it.

The woke politics of the neohypergamy movement

There has been a burst of academic activism around incels and the neohypergamy narrative, with the same talking points and meme stats tirelessly repeated beat for beat. Joona Räsänen, author of the brief but widely circulated Sexual loneliness: A neglected public health problem? that relied on two misleading meme stats, recently wrote the Introduction to the Special Issue on Discrimination and Ethics in Dating and Sex. He argues that Tinder, and perhaps even dating preferences in general, are a ‘problem for justice’ and that dating apps demand ‘public and political concern’. Mads Larsen’s recent piece made heavy use of the terms ‘marginalization’ and ‘discrimination’. The right attacked it as woke leftist propaganda, but their criticism was directed not at this but at the proposed solution to declining fertility of state-incentivized single motherhood.

The neohypergamy movement has clear parallels with the woke movement, sharing a framework of systemic inequality and oppression and proposing a form of DEI as the solution. Incels are painted at once as the gravest threat to society and its biggest victims. While the movement has its roots in the far right, there’s nothing inherently leftist about the psychology or logic underlying the woke framework. Beyond this, some on the left see it as an opportunity to improve outreach to young men. It also tends to appeal to ‘heterodox centrists’ who see it as a politically incorrect truth. This broad appeal across the political spectrum contributes to the formidable cultural force of the narrative.

Social attitudes towards incels have noticeably shifted. A survey found that incels overestimate how much society blames them for their problems and underestimate public sympathy. Unfortunately this also makes people more receptive to the neohypergamy narrative, as though supporting them requires affirming their worldview. People’s opposition to ‘the manosphere’ is superficial and instantly evaporates when its core views are presented more palatably.

The stakes are high: aside from violence and instability, neohypergamy is blamed for a host of social ills, from collapsing fertility rates to the meme that young men are ‘dropping out’ en masse. It’s not something that can reasonably be expected to remain a politically neutral account of reality; its logic naturally points towards policy intervention. Soft social enforcement wouldn’t realistically be enough to curtail what are supposedly natural mating dynamics amplified and made more discreet by technology.

Enough people believe in neohypergamy with enough conviction that its filtering into mainstream political discourse is a near inevitability. It’s already moderately mainstream, and it’s set to become a major fixture of an increasingly groyperized right. More likely than direct disenfranchisement are indirect measures such as banning contraception, withdrawing childcare subsidies,18 penalizing singledom to push people into marriage, and banning dating apps and possibly social media for good measure. Even then, there’s no guarantee that women would suddenly choose to pair up with men they weren’t interested in before, so enforcing monogamy alone might not be enough.

Conclusion

SIM isn’t a totally ridiculous hypothesis. It’s internally coherent, intuitive, and there are pieces of evidence you can point to. It definitely has a satisfying narrative structure. Its evolutionary reasoning makes it feel rigorous. But a basic requirement for the mechanism to work is that polygyny should reliably produce an excess of unmarried men, and even that prediction doesn’t seem to hold up. Within countries, regions with higher polygyny rates tend to have fewer unmarried men. The model also fails to take into account demographic dynamics; population growth and spousal age gaps can make some level of polygyny sustainable without permanently locking out a large number of men.

Male surpluses also fail to consistently show the expected pattern. When men are abundant, men may be pushed more towards commitment than chaos. The evidence on male surpluses and violence is ambivalent. A study that found pretty good evidence consistent with the theory also found a similar effect for female violence, which the theory doesn’t predict. While having more young men leads to higher rates of political violence, the rate of singleness doesn’t seem to have an additional effect. Despite all the panic about incel violence, young male crime is only dropping alongside other risk behaviours, and attacks related to incel ideology are rare and not clearly driven by rising sexlessness.

The neohypergamy SIM argument is based on a myth on top of a myth, and two false premises don’t make a sound conclusion. Even if the concern is promiscuity more generally, it’s already low and falling on its own. Enforced monogamy is a solution in search of a problem. The neohypergamy narrative provides a secular justification for a social order that would otherwise appeal mainly to religious traditionalists. If we stick to empirical reality, the case for enforced monogamy becomes compelling to a much narrower slice of the population.

Maybe the SIM thesis wouldn’t need the polygyny mechanism to produce violence. If trends in sexual activity are caused by something deeper that is also driving other trends in ‘risk-taking’ activities, then that could mask any ‘young male syndrome’ effect. If there is any increase in competition, it’s through ‘looksmaxxing’, but I’m not aware of any good evidence for a large rise in this phenomenon. The perception that there has been might be mostly due to sensationalist coverage of Clavicular and co. and the outsized influence the incel movement has on online discourse.

For reasons outlined, monogamy has long been the majority practice. It’s not merely a byproduct of Christianity or legal institutions. Polygyny has also been around for a while, but there’s little evidence that this was driven primarily by female choice, let alone that in prosperous environments a significant number of women would willingly enter harems, ‘de facto’ or otherwise. Even multiple generations after the much-vaunted sexual revolution, there exists no compelling evidence that this has even begun to take place.

It should go without saying that this wasn’t meant to extol the virtues of polygamy; monogamy has its benefits and remains the default preference, likely even among most men. I nonetheless support the legalization of polygamy, just to demonstrate how irrelevant it’ll prove to be, even if the neohypergamy delusion endures. My opposition to the neohypergamy movement has been driven more by its desecration of truth in favour of pathologies like resentment, envy, and cope than by its political implications – but if a groyper trad reich rises, this will be a big part of that. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

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• East Asians do not appear to show lower variability in cognitive performance.

• East Asians tend to perform somewhat worse on creativity tests.

• East Asian cultures tend to be more collectivist, which may stunt innovation, though Japan and the US may be closer than commonly believed.

• Factors proposed to explain East-West cultural differences include Confucianism, pathogen prevalence, climatic stability, rice farming, and kinship systems.

• There is evidence of varying quality for a genetic effect on culture, and vice versa.

• Japan has largely caught up to the West in Nobel prizes per capita in the 21st century.

• China now leads the world in several research metrics, yet still lags in innovation.

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It has long been hypothesized that men display greater variance in intelligence than women, being overrepresented at both ends of the distribution. This greater male variability is consistently seen in IQ and scholastic tests, though the difference is less pronounced than in hypothetical graphs that are often posted.

This hypothesis has also been invoked to account for differences in scientific and technological innovation between East Asians relative to Europeans.1 An apparent puzzle is that despite the reportedly higher average IQs of East Asians, the industrial and scientific revolutions emerged in Europe rather than China.

While China deserves credit for its ‘four great inventions’,2 it was the West that created the modern world. China (5) has won fewer Nobel Prizes in the hard sciences than Belgium (6), despite a population some 120 times larger; Japan (24) has won only slightly more than Switzerland (20), despite a population some 14 times larger (more on this later).

A graph is sometimes presented in support of the lesser Asian variability hypothesis:

The problem is that this is a hypothetical graph based on the degree of distributional narrowing among East Asians required to produce comparable ‘smart fractions’. On the WISC-V, the full-scale IQ standard deviation was similar for Asians (14.4) and European Americans (14.6), though the Asian sample size was small (n = 89). It has also been shown that Asians exhibit more variance in SAT and ACT scores, which correlate highly with IQ, but a limitation of these findings is that in the US, ‘Asian’ includes South and Southeast Asians.

The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) evaluates the mathematics, science, and reading performance of 15 year olds around the world. PISA scores also correlate strongly with IQ (0.88). Higher male variance is replicated in this dataset, with a similar variance ratio (1.19) to that seen in other datasets.3 This is a good sign; if East Asians have a meaningfully different level of variance, it should also be detectable here.

Variability in East Asian PISA scores

Six countries and territories with predominantly East Asian populations took part in the 2022 PISA:4 Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Macao.

We’ll first look at the standard deviations for the top 40 performing countries in each subject to see whether the spread for East Asian countries is notably lower than the average among these countries.5

For math performance, the East Asian Six were no less variable; on the contrary, four of the six had above average standard deviations, with Taiwan showing the highest.

For science, there was an even split.

Same goes for reading.

Among above-average performers, East Asian countries don’t appear to be notably less variable, even though many countries are considerably more demographically diverse, which likely explains Israel’s high variance. East Asian countries and the next six highest performing countries6 show virtually identical variance. The mean of the subject means was 530.8 for East Asia and 495.5 for the next six, with standard deviations of 89.9 and 90.3 respectively (VR = 0.99).7

The share of students exceeding the 99th percentile in the PISA sample provides a closer look at elite performers. In mathematics, the East Asian Six made a clean sweep, with Singapore overrepresented by a factor of 17.6.

For science, four East Asian countries top the list, with five in the top 10.

For reading, four of the East Asian Six remain in the top ten, and Singapore still dominates, though ranks two through four are occupied by Anglosphere countries.8 Reading is the closest available proxy for verbal ability, so the weaker East Asian dominance here is consistent with psychometric data indicating that their cognitive advantage is limited to the visuospatial and mathematical domains. A similar pattern is visible in universities, where the Asian-to-white ratio is higher in fields associated with stronger quantitative and analytical GRE performance (i.e. STEM), much like the male-to-female ratio. Interestingly, a similar cognitive profile has been observed in Native American and Inuit populations, which share deep ancestral roots with East Asians.

One might argue that this isn’t capturing ‘real’ genius – we must look even further into the right tail. With similar standard deviations but a higher mean, East Asians will remain overrepresented when extrapolating further out. Whether it’s safe to assume the distributions behave predictably at the extremes is another question. PISA is designed to evaluate education systems rather than to precisely rank individuals, making it ill-equipped for this level of analysis. Each student only answers a subset of the total test items, and ‘plausible values’ are imputed to estimate latent ability. It also lacks sufficiently difficult items to discriminate with precision at the top. Past a certain point, performance may measure endurance and a lack of careless slip-ups more than anything. Not to mention the typical national sample sizes of 4,000–8,000 are inadequate for this purpose.

Then again, this is also the case with IQ tests: reliability declines sharply past the 130 mark. Once you reach three standard deviations above the mean, they effectively break down and must rely on extrapolation. Norming samples are simply too small to determine what a 145 IQ even looks like, and designing items that can reliably distinguish someone at that level from someone with a 150 IQ is a nearly impossible task. This is how you can be sure 200 IQ supergenius claims are bunk. More fundamentally, it’s not clear that a stratospheric IQ is necessary for what we’d call a ‘genius’ anyway. Feynman famously scored 125 upon entering high school, though he could well have had a lopsided cognitive profile.

One might also argue that the predominantly Han Chinese countries aren’t representative of this ethnic group as a whole. Singapore is an interesting case: the majority of its Han Chinese population descends from labourers from the southeastern coastal provinces who were driven by poverty and periods of political instability. Its long-serving prime minister Lee Kuan Yew was IQ-pilled, calling The Bell Curve a ‘fact of life’ and leading a technocratic government that prioritized skilled migration with its foreign talent policy, so this heavy filtering may explain its dominance despite peasant origins.

There’s little reason to believe the Han Chinese who populate Taiwan represent an elite sample. As with Singapore, the vast majority of its modern Han population descend from poor settlers who migrated from southeastern coastal provinces between the 17th to 19th century. A minority descend from those who fled from the mainland following the defeat of the Nationalist government – a more stratified cohort that included elite talent, but also a large contingent of peasant soldiers. That Taiwan nonetheless performs as well as it does on the PISA and averages 105 on IQ tests is arguably evidence that the average genotypic IQ of Mainland China is roughly similar. East Asians also display higher polygenic scores for educational attainment, even if these are associated with personality traits as well as cognitive ability. The puzzle remains: if variance isn’t the explanation, what accounts for the innovation gap?

The lesser Asian creativity hypothesis

A perception more widespread than lesser Asian variability is that Asians lack creativity. They’re often stereotyped as robotic human calculators, much like autistic savants. Perhaps while they’re good students, adept at absorbing and reproducing information, the secret sauce needed to generate novel insights is in short supply.

While more than capable of incrementally refining existing systems, developing entirely new ones seems less common: research and development projects focused on improving existing business lines are more common in Japan, whereas R&D in the US is more focused on expanding the technology base. Rather than a deficit in creativity per se, the East may place a higher premium on usefulness and the West on novelty.

Even defining creativity is a challenge. A working definition is the ability to produce ideas or solutions that are both novel and useful. This is inherently harder to measure empirically than raw cognitive ability, where tests have clear-cut right and wrong answers; if creativity is reduced to a score on a standardized test, it arguably misses the point.

Of course, this hasn’t stopped psychologists from trying. Typically, creativity is measured using divergent thinking tasks, such as generating as many uses as possible for a common object like a brick, with responses assessed on fluency, flexibility, originality, and elaboration. Other tasks involve generating connections between seemingly unrelated words and turning abstract lines into complete drawings.

Meta-analyses show only modest correlations of 0.2–0.25 between IQ and divergent thinking, IQ and creative achievement, and creativity and academic achievement. Dechaume et al. (2024) analysed data from 854 children, 238 with IQs of 130 or above. While positive associations were identified between convergent-integrative thinking and both verbal comprehension and processing speed, no clear IQ threshold for creativity was identified.9 This aligns with the observation that plenty of smart people produce derivative work, while less smart ones can produce compelling art. Composing a complex symphony might depend on both though – and the same may be true for scientific innovation.

On the question at hand, a meta-analysis examining individual creativity between Western and Eastern samples reported a small- to-moderate difference favouring Westerners (g = 0.329). This Western advantage was larger for older cohorts and test-like divergent thinking tasks, whereas game-like tasks showed no significant difference. American college students also report more creative activities and achievements10 than their Chinese counterparts.

This gap extends to artistic output: several studies have found that Western students produce artwork rated as more creative and aesthetically pleasing than that of Chinese participants, with both Western and Chinese judges largely agreeing on their evaluations. Asian students in Western countries tend to perform closer to Caucasian students than do students in China, which could suggest cultural influences, though selection effects can’t be ruled out.

The 2022 PISA also assessed creative thinking, tasking students with open-ended scenarios that required imagination (e.g. writing a story) or solving problems in social and scientific contexts. Across nations, creative thinking scores closely tracked performance in core cognitive domains. There were some notable exceptions: students in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Macao underperformed relative to what their mathematics scores would predict, landing close to the OECD average. South Korea and Singapore did better.11

It should be said that what’s being measured here is more ‘everyday’ creativity under structured conditions, which may not translate well into genuinely novel breakthroughs.

Openness to Experience

People high in Openness to Experience tend to be imaginative, intellectually curious, and more willing to challenge convention. Scientific visionaries are often driven more by intrinsic curiosity than by practical outcomes. This has been argued to explain lower East Asian innovation. Of the Big Five traits, openness is most closely linked to intelligence, creativity, and innovation behaviour; at the national level, it has also been found to predict both innovation inputs and outputs.

In cross-national research, McCrae et al. (2005) reported somewhat lower openness in East Asian than Western countries, with higher global scores driven largely by Northwestern Europe. Using college student samples, Schmitt et al. (2007) similarly found that East Asian nations reported the lowest openness out of all regions. The same was true for extraversion, agreeableness, and conscientiousness, while they reported the highest levels of neuroticism. Essentially, East Asian respondents tended to rate themselves in a more socially unfavourable direction across the board. The conscientiousness finding is particularly inconsistent with cultural stereotypes, but isn’t limited to this study; another found that Japan ranked lowest. Kajonius & Mac Giolla (2017) also reported lower openness in both East Asia and the US, and Rocha (2025) found lower openness in mainland China, while Hong Kong and Singapore showed levels comparable to European nations.

PISA also included questionnaires from which several indices were derived, including Creativity and Openness to Intellect. Students rated their agreement with statements such as ‘doing something creative satisfies me’, and ‘I like games that challenge my creativity’. With the exception of Singapore, East Asian countries fell below the average on this index – but so did most Western countries. While this index positively correlated with cognitive performance at the individual level, this was inverted at the national level.

These results should be interpreted with caution; cross-cultural personality comparisons are a sketchy business. One study compared behavioural and demographic predictors of conscientiousness with cross-national measures based on self-reports, peer reports, and perceptions of national character. These predictors correlated strongly with perceptions of national character, but failed to correlate with self-reports or peer-reports. This suggests the apparent gap reflects limitations in cross-national personality measurement more than inaccurate stereotypes.

One issue is that self-reports are anchored to local norms; what counts as an average level of extraversion in Brazil may differ from Finland. Social desirability bias may also vary across cultures depending on which traits are highly valued, as do response styles, such as a tendency toward extreme or modest responding. Finally, subtle differences in interpretation can arise during translation.

Within the US, Eap et al. (2008) found that Asian Americans12 scored higher in neuroticism (d = .42), and lower in openness to experience (d = −.40), extraversion (d = −.36), and conscientiousness (d = −.50). The most unexpected difference is again in conscientiousness. Asian Americans also scored higher in loss of face, or greater concern for social evaluation, and personality profiles showed greater congruence between European Americans and Asian Americans who were highly acculturated or had lower concern for losing face.

Other studies13 have reported similar personality differences that tend to be minimized with greater acculturation.14 Lui et al. (2019) found that Asian Americans15 scored higher than European Americans in neuroticism and lower in extraversion and agreeableness, with no difference observed in openness. A meta-analysis (which didn’t include any of the above studies) throws a spanner in the works, finding Asian Americans to be slightly higher in openness, as well as conscientiousness (though the latter was not significant).

The shortcomings of cross-cultural comparisons likely don’t fully vanish in subnational comparisons. East Asians may present themselves in a more modest light because self-effacement is socially valued and serves as an impression-management strategy in collectivist cultures. In support of this, one study found that modest Chinese participants exhibited low explicit self-esteem while maintaining high implicit-self esteem, whereas modesty showed no such decoupling among American participants.

Unfortunately, there is not really a satisfying payoff to this section. Since cross-national comparisons are shaky, subnational data remains inconsistent and also of questionable reliability, and counterintuitive findings like East Asians scoring low in conscientiousness show up, it’s difficult to draw any firm conclusions.

Cultural variation in collectivism

The terms ‘collectivist’ and ‘conformist’ frequently come up in descriptions of Asian societies. While individualistic cultures encourage autonomy and self-expression, collectivist ones prioritize group harmony and social cohesion. A stronger focus on individual goals in individualist societies may promote creativity. Supporting this, Espig et al. (2021) found that lower power distance, higher individualism, femininity, lower uncertainty avoidance, long-term orientation, and higher indulgence are associated with greater innovation, and Rossberger (2014) demonstrated that national cultural practices such as low uncertainty avoidance and in-group collectivism mediate the relationship between a country’s personality profile (openness to experience and agreeableness) and innovativeness.

Non-Western cultures tend to be characterized by more interdependent social orientations in which the self is defined primarily through relationships rather than as a separate entity. Variation exists in how this interdependence is maintained, with East Asian cultures emphasizing self-effacement – avoiding conflict, fitting in, accommodating others, and suppressing impulses perceived as socially disruptive.

Social psychologist Geert Hofstede developed the foundational Individualism-Collectivism (I-C) Index, which revealed substantial cultural distances between European and Northeast Asian countries. However, Akaliyski et al. (2025) introduced a revised index suggesting that Hofstede’s original measure systematically overstates both the individualism of Anglosphere countries and the collectivism of East Asian countries.16 At the same time, relative rankings didn’t move much. Japan ranked 20th out of 102 – just slightly below the US – while other East Asian countries were also above the global average. The highest scores continue to be concentrated in Northwestern European countries and British offshoots.

As well as the validity of the original scale, the authors question the representativeness of its sampling. The previously mentioned limitations of cross-cultural self-report measures should also be kept in mind. The explosive economic growth East Asian countries experienced in the latter half of the 20th century may have played a role in these shifts. Alongside improved sociopolitical conditions, Asian nations have seen a decline in collectivism, though without a corresponding rise in individualism.

East Asian cultures also exhibit lower relational mobility, meaning individuals have less freedom to choose social ties, which reinforces collectivist norms by raising the social costs of defection. Cultures also vary in how ‘culturally tight’ they are, or how strongly their social norms are enforced and deviant behaviour is punished. This dimension is moderately correlated with collectivism but appears to be conceptually distinct. Cultural tightness has been negatively linked to national innovativeness. As the US has grown looser over time, it has gotten more creative,17 but at the expense of reduced social order.

Origins of collectivism variation

What explains these patterns? Many attribute East Asian collectivism to the long shadow of Confucianism, a conservative tradition that subordinates the individual to the collective. As the story goes, this philosophy emerged amidst the intense political strife of China’s Warring States period, when the Zhou dynasty lost its central authority and rival states competed to fill the power vacuum; by enforcing strict adherence to social norms and hierarchy, Confucianism helped restore social order. One study showed that Chinese counties with stronger Confucian norms18 experienced significantly fewer peasant rebellions following crop failures. While it would be an exaggeration to suggest that Confucianism opposes intellectual exploration altogether, it remains less interested in abstraction or challenging the status quo and more in moral cultivation and practical wisdom.

Pathogen-stress theory proposes that collectivistic behaviours like conformity and ingroup preference serve a defense function, reducing disease transmission in regions with high pathogen prevalence; in lower-prevalence regions, populations are less penalized for openness and exploration. Consistent with this account, historically high pathogen prevalence predicts higher collectivism and lower individualism, and lower openness, extraversion, and sociosexuality. Cross-nationally, individualism correlates positively with COVID prevalence, mortality, and case fatality, whereas collectivism shows the opposite pattern. Relational mobility similarly predicts faster viral spread. To what extent these patterns stem from natural selection remains up for debate. Some evidence for non-genetic transmission comes from comparisons of former East and West German districts, as well as from before and after the outbreak, where higher case numbers were associated with a rise in collectivism (but not reduced individualism).

Climatic stability may have also played a role. Van de Vliert et al. (2025) show that Chinese residents are more collectivistic and less individualistic than European residents, arguing that this is better explained by ecological differences across latitudes rather than an east-west longitudinal gradient. Greater climatic stability may increase the relative benefits of group coordination and routine-based behaviour, whereas more unstable environments favour flexible responses. In the latter, individual learning becomes necessary; while blindly copying existing behavioural templates is more efficient, it becomes maladaptive under turbulent conditions.

Another prominent theory revolves around rice farming, which requires coordinated irrigation and synchronized planting, thus intensifying mutual dependence. Alone, interdependence may not be enough – there may also need to be a conflict of interest. Shared resources create an incentive to free ride, especially when cooperation is costly; this creates instability that collectivist norms are suitable for solving. Historically, rice-farming societies have been associated with tighter social norms both within China and elsewhere, and the rice-growing regions of southern China are more interdependent and holistic-thinking than the wheat-growing north. Comparing neighbouring counties along China’s rice-wheat border, one study found that rice-growing regions were less individualistic, more loyal to friends, and more relational in their thinking. Another found that people in Chinese regions with a history of farming rice wore masks during the COVID outbreak more often than those in wheat regions. This hypothesis has faced criticism, and a recent study failed to show evidence that historical rice farming predicts modern psychological differences in Japan.

Because the West is more individualist relative to the global baseline than the East is collectivist, trying to explain East Asia’s collectivism may be asking the wrong question. It has been argued that the West’s unusual individualism is a byproduct of the medieval Catholic Church’s restrictions on cousin marriage. By weakening extended kinship networks, these bans forced people to rely more on voluntary associations and impersonal, rule-based institutions, ultimately paving the way for uniquely individualistic ‘WEIRD’ cultures. Evidence for this comes from the fact that longer Western Church exposure is associated with less cousin marriage, more individualism, higher trust of strangers, etc., mediated primarily by kinship intensity. On the flipside, Ji et al. (2026) find that individual engagement in Chinese clan practices is positively associated with collectivism. At the regional level, greater road distances from Beijing predicted stronger clan institutions, which in turn mediated regional variation in individualism-collectivism.

Genes and culture

A contentious issue is how ingrained these cultural differences are. To cope with increasingly complex social systems, human evolution likely favoured highly socially adaptive brains. Cultural learning allows for vastly quicker adaptation to environmental changes than genetic selection. This still leaves room for important genetic differences that inform behaviour. Through gene-culture coevolution, cultural environments can set the stage for genetic selection, while genetic predispositions simultaneously influence the transmission and expression of cultural traits in a feedback loop.

Many genes show accelerated selection over the past 10,000 years, which may indicate culture’s evolutionary effect. A prominent example is the emergence of lactase persistence mutations. These variants are heavily concentrated in Northern Europe and among pastoralist populations in Africa and the Middle East, where milk consumption created a strong selection pressure. The spread of these genes would then perpetuate pastoral traditions. Likewise, a variant associated with reduced alcohol tolerance and facial flushing19 likely emerged around 8,000 years ago in the rice farming regions of southern China, possibly because it discouraged heavy drinking in highly interdependent agricultural communities. One study found a relationship between the percentage of land devoted to paddy rice and the regional frequency of the gene variant for alcohol intolerance.

An influential study by Chiao & Blizinsky (2010) showed that collectivist cultures had higher frequencies of the short (S) allele of the serotonin transporter gene (5-HTTLPR), a variant associated with increased stress sensitivity. Further, they found that cultural values and S-allele frequency negatively predicted the global prevalence of anxiety and mood disorders; this relationship was mediated by collectivist values, suggesting that cultural collectivism may buffer genetically susceptible populations. This paper has faced criticism; the observed correlation may simply reflect neutral migratory history and gene flow. A meta-analysis found no evidence that 5-HTTLPR predicted depression, either directly or via an interaction between life stress.

Adding to these critiques, Minkov et al. (2014) found that S-allele prevalence isn’t associated with individualism but instead with traits such as national neuroticism, IQ and school achievement, and long-term orientation. They point out that the lowest global prevalence of the S-allele is found in sub-Saharan Africa – not a region that screams individualism. With this in mind, treat the following studies cautiously. A GWAS study also found no association between 5-HTTLPR and any neurobehavioral traits.

Another polymorphism within the serotonin transporter gene, STin2, ranges in frequency from 26% in Germany to 85% in Singapore. Examining this variant alongside 5-HTTLPR, Marcus & Cetin (2023) found that these polymorphisms explained 23.6% of the unique variance in monumentalism between societies, but none in individualism. Way & Lieberman (2010) extended these findings to two genes associated with stress reactivity and social sensitivity: MAOA and OPRM1. They reported that the national prevalence of these alleles was negatively associated with the lifetime prevalence of major depression, an effect partially mediated by collectivism.

Lee et al. (2022) went a step further, examining how genetic variants alter actual gene expression in the brain. They discovered that expression of the oxytocin receptor gene (OXTR) within the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) – a brain region involved in social error detection and norm compliance – is highly variable across the world, and closely tracks cultural tightness and historical socioecological threats. Their models suggest a dual feedback loop: high socioecological threats and tight cultural norms select for genetic variants that enhance oxytocin expression in the ACC. In turn, people with these variants are more sensitive to social feedback, rendering them more likely to successfully transmit and enforce strict social norms. Genetic scans seemed to confirm that these variants have undergone positive selection within the culturally tight social structures of East Asian populations.

Dopamine-regulating genes have also been studied as candidates. While the 7-repeat allele of the dopamine D4 receptor (DRD4) gene has a global frequency of about 20%, it is found in only 2% of East and South Asians; one study found a frequency of less than 0.5% for all alleles above six repeats in a Chinese sample. This gene has been linked to novelty seeking and impulsivity via heightened reward sensitivity. Carriers also show greater phenotypic plasticity, rendering them more sensitive to environmental conditions. For instance, Kitayama et al. (2014) demonstrated that while European Americans view themselves as more independent and Asian-born Asians as more interdependent, this difference was restricted to carriers of the 7- or 2-repeat alleles. Another study found similar patterns in brain structure, with East Asian carriers displaying increased grey matter volume in regions associated with perspective-taking and mind-reading, consistent with a more interdependent orientation. Similarly, Yu et al. (2019) showed that differences in grey matter volume in regions associated with self-focused processing and social evaluation appeared more strongly in carriers. The length of time spent in the US also predicted increased grey matter volume. Japanese carriers show stronger neural responses to norm violations, an effect absent in European Americans.

So a function of genes may be to facilitate the transmission of culture, though this wouldn’t account for the origins of the cultural differences themselves. Genes may play a role in shaping culture, just as culture and the ecology it responds to can influence the genetic makeup of populations. The strength of these effects and how well these findings replicate remains to be seen. Many single-gene effects on complex traits have fallen victim to the replication crisis and haven’t held up to genome-wide association studies, which have shown that psychological traits are highly polygenic and influenced by thousands of small genetic variants. Even the most prominent candidate genes tend to explain a minuscule amount of variance in personality or behavioral traits, and common variants never have strong effect sizes. There are monogenic or Mendelian traits such as colour blindness or sickle-cell disease where a single mutation is fully responsible for the condition, but complex human behaviour and cultural traits like individualism don’t have single genetic switches.

There is at least one twin study of direct relevance. It looked at how two Korean twins turned out, one raised in South Korea and one in the US. The US twin’s score was considerably higher than the SK twin’s on horizontal individualism and horizontal collectivism (indicating greater egalitarianism). The SK twin was slightly higher on vertical collectivism, but both had similar scores on vertical individualism.

Culture moves faster than genes. There’s no shortage of historical examples of rapid societal transitions from one ideology or system to another. To take an obscure example, Germany’s transition from Weimar to Reich wasn’t driven by a sudden influx of Hitler genes, just as an influx hippie genes didn’t cause the 1960s counterculture movement. There is evidence that the Nazi regime had a lasting effect on the views of those who grew up under it. People also frequently point to the Korean Peninsula divide as a case study for the importance of institutions. I don’t know exactly where North Korea falls on the I-C index, but I’m guessing the country of K-pop ranks higher than the country of Juche – though to be fair, South Korea didn’t rank much higher than China, and K-pop has substantial collectivist elements (group-oriented, synchronized dancing, idols being socialized into conformity). Regardless, shared genes don’t guarantee shared culture.

You could argue that when countries like Japan Westernize, they import cultural memes that ultimately originate in Western genes. Even if we accept that framing, it presumably still counts as an ‘environmental’ influence for Japan. You can imagine a similar process within a country, where a subpopulation with a distinct distribution of traits has outsized cultural influence beyond any aggregate genetic effects on culture. The controversial ‘spiteful mutant’ hypothesis rests on this logic. It also blames the Industrial Revolution, so you could argue its ultimate cause is environmental – though of course you could also argue this can’t be separated from the genes of the underlying population. Often there may be no clean separation.

As noted earlier, East Asian countries have tended to become more individualistic over time. Inglehart’s postmaterialism thesis argues that as societies become more economically secure, younger cohorts shift from prioritizing material security towards ‘postmaterialist’ values such as autonomy, self-expression, and quality of life. The inverse relationship between democracy and support for strong leaders is largely driven by material concerns. While it’s not an iron law, economic development is a strong predictor of shifts towards liberalization and democratization, and younger cohorts typically endorse more postmaterialist values.

Japan’s Nobel Boom and China’s lag

With all that said, Japan in particular is far from a creative desert. Beyond anime and video games, it has led in robotics, automotive engineering, and consumer electronics. Nobel Prize stats were mentioned earlier, but they obscure recent trends. Since 2000, Japan has mostly caught up to the UK. In 2001, the Japanese government announced a goal to bring home 30 Nobel prizes over a 50-year period, and at current rates they’re on track to succeed.

I tallied the Nobel laureates in the hard sciences from 2000 to the present: 25 of 202 (12.4%) were of East Asian descent. The vast majority (88%) were Japanese, while the remaining three were Chinese. Adjusting for population size only makes this disparity starker, with the Japanese winning Nobel Prizes at about 80 times the rate. People of European descent account for around six times as many Nobel laureates as Japanese people, while outnumbering them by about nine to one in the global population. This implies that the Japanese are if anything slightly outperforming the broader European population now – though Europeans aren’t a homogeneous group, and several countries still outperform Japan.

Why might Japan be dominating China so overwhelmingly? It seems unlikely that relatively minor genetic differences could carry much weight. It’s worth remembering that Japan scored significantly higher in individualism. A high-stakes exam-based education system might fuel competition, but its rigid focus on rote learning can overselect for test optimization rather than genuine curiosity. Academic incentives are often distorted by pressures around publication metrics and monetary rewards. Fierce competition for grants and tenure creates a breeding ground for ‘paper mills’ that churn out bad or fake research. These issues are by no means unique to China, but have been said to be especially prevalent there.

Only 3 of 22 Japanese laureates since 2000 earned their PhDs from Western universities (compared to 2 of 3 Chinese laureates), meaning Western training is unlikely to explain the gap, though Japan may have benefitted from closer ties to Western academic networks.

There’s also a time lag to consider: Nobels typically come decades after discoveries are made, after they’ve been independently replicated and recognized as foundational. Japan industrialized decades before China, giving it a big head start in R&D investment – China only caught up to Japan’s total research spending in 2009. The Cultural Revolution also set academic progress back: universities were shut down and ‘bourgeois’ intellectuals were purged until Deng Xiaoping’s reforms.

The tides may be shifting. China recently overtook the US in total R&D spending, though the US still leads in basic or fundamental research, where it spends 0.5% of its GDP compared to China’s 0.19%. Applied research tends to generate stronger short-term returns but fewer foundational breakthroughs. This gap may be closing, as China has been steadily increasing the share of resources allocated to basic research while the US remains stagnant.

China has also taken the lead in the volume of publications in elite journals, which weakens the charge that its output is driven solely by quantity over quality. Japan and South Korea are also showing larger output growth than Western countries. China ranks second globally in raw citation count, but also exhibits the greatest ‘home bias’ in citations, dropping to fourth place after adjusting for this.

It remains to be seen whether China is able to lead the way rather than continue to rely on copying and pasting. The 2021 patent influence rankings illustrate China’s struggle to catch up in quality, though like Nobels, it takes time for patents to be issued and cited, so this dataset may largely measure Chinese innovation from 2010 or earlier. China now files about half of all patents worldwide, but a large number are junk patents designed to hit quotas and collect subsidies. The Chinese government has made efforts to address this by axing subsidies and pushing for high-value patents.

To be fair, with the low hanging fruit already picked, China will have a hard time matching the West’s run even assuming equal creative capacity. China has reportedly made strides in quantum technology and AI, though OpenAI and Anthropic have accused DeepSeek of distilling their models, so how much of its progress reflects genuine innovation remains anyone’s guess.

It has been claimed that Chinese innovation peaked during periods of political fragmentation and declined under imperial consolidation. While China has been largely centralized since the Qin dynasty unified rival kingdoms in 221 BC, Europe remained an arena of competing states. The Song Dynasty may seem to challenge this argument, as despite being a unified imperial state, it was a period of exceptional innovation – but it also faced existential threats from northern empires that would eventually conquer it. Most inventions and discoveries don’t emerge from lone geniuses having eureka moments; they often emerge from states mobilizing resources under pressure, as with the Cold War environment that birthed the internet and GPS. It’s entirely possible that rivalry with America will recreate these pressure cooker conditions, giving China the push it needs.

A nation of 1.4 billion people with an average IQ of 105 and normal variance would have 67 million people with an IQ of 130 or above, which could well represent most of the planet’s total supply. The majority of this population has only recently been lifted out of extreme poverty. Now that basic survival needs are secured and they can reach their cognitive potential, there is a vast pool of human capital ready to be channelled towards innovation. Even if differences in creative potential exist, it’s hard to imagine that they’re large enough that 67 million 130+ IQ individuals are doomed to remain an army of engineers who struggle to come up with anything new, and even without especially strong individualism or novelty-seeking tendencies, a top-down mandate may be able to push them to invent – even if it’s just to more efficiently crack down on Winnie the Pooh jokes.

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• Evidence for neohypergamy is weak to non-existent: No solid evidence of increased male sexual skew, and female distributions are similar. The case relies on a one-sided analysis and outdated data that itself was misrepresented and is contradicted by later surveys.

• The dating app crisis isn’t real: They’re not creating ‘de facto polygyny’ or encouraging ‘hook-up culture’. Matches happen mostly between similarly desirable men and women.

• No surge in promiscuity: Casual sex rates haven’t risen among young men or women; if anything, they’ve declined. Age at first sex has risen.

• Trends don’t fit the model: Most post-sexual revolution fertility decline occurred within couples. Recent declines began after the Great Recession, not Tinder.

• Traditional sexual norms aren’t a shield: Sharp fertility declines extend to countries like Iran with more conservative sexual cultures. East Asia leads the charge despite low rates of premarital sex, out of wedlock births, and porn bans.

• Other explanations for the gender equality association fit better: Opportunity costs from education, developmental idealism spreading modern norms, and industrialization better explain the negative gender equality–fertility correlation.

• People want fewer children: Fertility declines at least partly reflect real shifts in desired family size. The way the ‘fertility gap’ was estimated is too simplistic, even if it’s real.

• No mass dating exodus: The percentage of young men and women uninterested in dating has remained quite stable in the US since at least 2005. There’s more evidence for a rise in Japan.

The neohypergamy1 narrative is bleeding into fertility discourse, with ‘Chad’ and dating apps increasingly framed as harbingers of civilizational collapse.

An X post saying ‘hybergamy happened’ shows a clip that strings together the fake Bumble height filter graph, classic ‘hypergamy’ stick figure memes, and falling fertility charts. The implication is clear.

The hysteria is reaching a fever pitch: an unabashedly AI-generated post on the ‘Tinder/Bumble effect’ opens with the subtle ‘GENOCIDE?’ and closes with a hat tip to ‘Degen_Poster’. X in a nutshell.

This was accompanied by an article the LLM titled Swipe Left on Civilization: How Silicon Valley is Quietly Destroying Family Formation, arguing that dating apps depress fertility by disrupting partnership formation:2

Meanwhile, the demographic record reflects the cumulative weight of a decade of disrupted partnership formation. The general fertility rate has fallen to 53.8 births per 1,000 women ages 15 to 44. […] These women did not decide they did not want children. Survey after survey finds that most of them intended to have families. What failed them was the coordination mechanism that would have produced those families.

The displacement of community-based courtship by platform-based search is not merely a change in where people meet. It is a change in the entire epistemology of mate selection.3 Social intermediation through friends, family, and community networks brought contextual information, reputational accountability, and realistic mutual evaluation to the process. When Silicon Valley disrupted that, it operated on the assumption that removing friction was always an improvement. It was not. The friction was load-bearing.

A clip from a podcast cohosted by Keith Woods claims ‘technology’ drives the fertility crisis and that we are returning to the natural order where only Chad’s genes will survive.

An article titled Sterile Polygyny makes a similar argument, and pronatalist X account More Births often raises dating apps as a contributing factor in the fertility decline. Beyond social media and alternative platforms, a recent paper published by Cambridge University Press, Toward individualistic reproduction: Solving the fertility crisis could require a further marginalization of men, argues that gender equality depresses fertility through this mechanism.

The reception wasn’t unanimously positive. The bulk of the criticism was directed at the unorthodox proposed ‘solution’,4 which a ‘post-liberal reactionary’ denounced as a ‘woke leftist’ attack on men. To be fair, while such characters wouldn’t extend their criticism to the neohypergamy thesis, the paper does use terms like ‘marginalization’ and ‘discrimination’, which along with its focus on ‘inequality’ is more than a little social jusice-coded.5

Onto the paper. It argues that the sexual revolution, contraceptives, and dating apps have introduced a ‘Mating Equilibrium Shift’, which disrupt pair-bonding and ultimately reproduction:

[W]e argue that the modern world’s uniquely resource-rich and gender-equal environments have triggered what we term a Mating Equilibrium Shift—possibly a main driver of today’s declining pair-bonding and fertility rates in many nations. Female freedoms and material prosperity seem to motivate women to place greater emphasis on short-term strategies (non-bonded mating), but in terms of reproduction, these strategies are rendered maladaptive by contraceptives.

Apparently, neohypergamy was being practiced soon after the (third) sexual revolution:

Eventually, this equation changed too—after the West’s Third Sexual Revolution around 1968. Post-World War II prosperity, female emancipation, and the contraceptive pill empowered women to choose their own short- and long-term partners with far less exposure to negative outcomes. They could pursue short-term mating with the most attractive men without unwillingly becoming a single parent, due to contraceptives and legal abortion.

Many women experienced that getting attractive men to bed was easy, but having the same men commit to a relationship far harder (Larsen & Kennair, 2025).

Usually the apparent timing mismatch is quietly ignored or otherwise hand-waved away with vague rationalizations like ‘these cultural changes take multiple generations to really show their effects’. The famous 2018 GSS graph (cited in previous papers by Larsen largely responsible for spurring the neohypergamy discourse didn’t show a sexlessness gap among young adults as wide as 10% until that year,6 and small gaps can be explained without invoking the Chad of the gaps hypothesis.7 Bearman et al. found similar sexual patterns between male and female high school students in the early ‘90s. So what does the evidence for this core premise of the thesis look like?

Shoddy 80/20 evidence

A chart showing the distribution of sex partners among men by percentile group was presented. Unsurprisingly, this was met with great fanfare and trumpeted as definitive confirmation of the 80/20 meme.

Many interpreted it as meaning ‘this percent of women are sleeping with that percent of men’, but this is a category error. There’s an important distinction to be made between the share of sexual partnerships accounted for and the share of the male or female population. In theory, an 80/20 distribution is compatible with most men and women being in permanent monogamous relationships.

Anyone familiar with previous analyses will recognize how egregiously misleading it is to present the male distribution in isolation. On its own, it’s uninteresting – skewed distributions appear nearly everywhere. A common defence of the 80/20 rule acknowledges this: ‘you can’t deny a law of nature!’ For whatever reason, it’s assumed to uniquely apply to men.

The only interesting empirical questions are:

1. Is the female distribution markedly flatter?

2. Has the skew intensified over time?

3. How much of it is driven by attractiveness?

Bored observer went to the effort of plotting the distribution for women using the same GSS dataset and found a similar pattern.89 Will similar attention be paid to the ‘top 1%’ of women who account for nearly 20% of sexual encounters?

It wasn’t specified, but Larsen seems to have used the full age range. Combined with a partner measure that captures encounters from well before dating apps existed, this isn’t ideal for assessing recent patterns.

Nonetheless, distributions of past-year sex partners remain similar among 18–29 year old men and women,10 with the vast majority reporting zero or one partner in the past year.11 Just under 10% of men and women report more than three.

The rejoinder that ‘it’s more of a choice for women’ is a red herring. The 80/20 narrative isn’t merely about some men being more ‘sexually successful’; it’s a zero-sum game. ‘Chads’ monopolize sexual access, depriving less genetically fortunate men of partners. This implies not only within-sex inequality, but also distributional asymmetry between the sexes – otherwise, the narrative loses its teeth.

This paper largely follows the same playbook as previous output from Larsen and others, with certain recurring statistics and citations. I don’t like to repeat myself, but since these meme statistics are posted everywhere daily, maybe I should take a page from that.

Regarding the temporal question, Harper et al. (2017) is ritually trotted out:

A line of studies support the hypothesis that this change is occurring. For instance, Harper et al. (2017) found that from 2002 to 2011–13, the top 5% of American men increased their number of sex partners by 32%, while a similar reduction in sex partners occurred across men in the lower percentiles.

This study has been cited in numerous similarly themed papers and has gradually worked its way into the regular rotation of meme stats. Since it’s leaned on so heavily as an empirical foundation, it had better be compelling.

Despite Räsänen using it to claim that ‘those men who are the rare winners in online dating’ have ‘even more sexual partners than a decade ago’, the data end in 2011–13, which was already more than a decade ago and before dating apps had a chance to make an impact. Also, while it has been characterized as a zero-sum redistribution of partners creating a burgeoning incel underclass, the study said nothing whatsoever regarding the lower percentiles, other than that were wasn’t a change in the median.

There have been four National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG) waves since the 2011–13 one. The results: the 80th, 90th, and 95th percentile of men reported fewer partners in the last two waves than in prior ones, and in no instance did they report more partners than in 2011–13. Equally damning is that the rise in partner counts between 2002 and 2011–13 among the top percentiles12 was not accompanied by a corresponding decline among the lower percentiles, contrary to Larsen’s claim.

The NSFG failed to show a rise in sexlessness among men between these years, and in fact, lifetime sex partners significantly increased in the overall male sample:

The overall means for 2002 and 2011–13 were 8.61 and 9.85, respectively – a significant increase (p < 0.005). Additionally, there was no meaningful change in the percentage of men reporting no female sex partners in the past year (21.1% in 2002 vs. 21.5% in 2011–13, slightly inflated by homosexual men).

The broad age range of the sample (15–44)13 isn’t ideal for testing the neohypergamy hypothesis, as the upper percentiles are dominated by older men who’ve had more time to accumulate partners, and recent changes in the dating market will be poorly captured.

Nonetheless, across these surveys there is no evidence of an increasing concentration of sex partners among the 20% most promiscuous young men.

The 80th and 95th percentiles of men aged 18–29 show a drop in past-year sex partners in the 2015–17 and 2017–19 waves.

Additional evidence against the neohypergamy narrative comes from STD data, which show no gender divergence over time.

The other sources they cite in support of this claim actually relate more to ‘traditional’ hypergamy:

Norwegian men in the top 5% of estimated earnings capacity have over a 90% probability of being partnered by age 40, while men in the bottom 5% have under a 40% probability (Almås et al., 2023). Danish men experience similar marginalization, as 45% of low-skilled men live alone (Forum for Mænds Sundhed, 2017).

It’s unclear how these findings are relevant to the purported ‘change’ in question. The first study doesn’t include a temporal analysis. Among ever-partnered individuals, average percentile ranks of maximum earnings 2–5 years before match were 54.9 for men and 54.4 for women, so the degree of hypergamy was minimal. The second source presents an isolated figure among a list of facts. It also notes: ‘Many unskilled and single men live in areas where there are municipalities with over 20% more men than women’.

The common assumption is made that men’s attractiveness and promiscuity go hand in hand, and differences in men’s partner counts are attributed solely to female mate choice without regard for variation in men’s behaviour or desire. Regarding the GSS partner distribution (Figure 7), it’s stated:

Research reveals how strongly women discriminate between men in the distribution of mating outcomes (Figure 7).

Frequently, women’s market power on dating apps does not translate into them fulfilling their desire for a long-term partner, but instead facilitates the most attractive men acquiring dozens or even hundreds of sex partners (Figure 7).

Women’s shift from long- to short-term tactics, noted Penke et al. (2008), are much more dependent on ecological factors than what is the case for men, as only the highest-value men can expect to succeed with short-term strategies (Figure 7).

This is a highly reductive interpretation. Chad is mostly a cartoon. The same GSS dataset shows only a marginal correlation with interviewer-rated attractiveness – you can squeeze out a 0.07 effect for lifetime partners, and a slightly higher one for past-year partners.14 This effect doesn’t appear to have increased among young men post-dating apps. As with other datasets, height barely moves the needle, and the effect remains marginal among young men in recent years. Income didn’t play a role. Personality traits like extraversion and sociosexuality remain superior predictors.

Oversimplified dating app dynamics

We now arrive at a section on dating apps titled ‘Dating apps exacerbate women’s discrimination of men’. The familiar story is told:

While the pill empowered women to pursue the most attractive men with less risk of pregnancy, apps like Tinder give them easy, practically unlimited access to the most compelling men.

For ‘many women’, dating apps lead them to spend their ‘most fertile years languishing in unfulfilling situationships’:

Frequently, women’s market power on dating apps does not translate into them fulfilling their desire for a long-term partner, but instead facilitates the most attractive men acquiring dozens or even hundreds of sex partners (Figure 7). For many women, the consequence of increasing female choosiness and competition is having to spend their most fertile years languishing in unfulfilling “situationships” that rarely transform into pair-bonds.

By ‘channelling women primarily to the most attractive men’, dating apps are said to cause a rise in both ‘incels’ and ‘insings’. It’s also said that ‘The fact that behavior on dating apps is so quantifiable perhaps contributes to why so many blame this new technology for parts of our mating dysfunction’.

By ‘quantifiable’, of course, we’re talking about swipe and like rates:

In 2014, female Tinder users were about three times as discriminatory as the male ones, while today they reject 10 times as many profiles (Bilton, 2014; Gerrard, 2021). According to Gerrard (2021), the average woman first swipes away around 95% of men.

Regarding the difference over time, it might simply be an artefact of comparing a mean with a median. The first article seems to have been talking about the overall likelihood of right-swiping among men and women:

Men also judge attractiveness on factors beyond just anatomy, though in general, men are nearly three times as likely to swipe “like” (in 46 percent of cases) than woman (14 percent).

The second article explicitly referred to the median man and woman. If the median woman swipes right about 5% of the time, there’s a lot more room above than below, which likely drags the overall average right-swipe rate up.

The article also showed that the median woman received 2.75 matches per day, compared to 1.1 for men. On the surface, this sounds like a significant disparity, but it can be explained by the fact that around 2.5 to 3 times as many men than women are active on dating apps, including in their dataset. Even with an equal match distribution, this means the average woman will receive about three times as many matches as the average man.15

It also shows a graph showing slightly more Millennial men have met up with someone from Tinder.

This pattern is replicated across numerous other sources which show no notable sex imbalance in actual outcomes through online dating, even when looking at distributions of unique dates. Among heterosexuals, sexual encounters via online dating are equally uncommon for both sexes. It’s not Chads hooking up with Stacies, mids, and LOTR extras.

The Hinge likes are cited, but as usual, and in line with the GSS sex partner distributions, only one side of the story is presented:

For the most sought-after men, Tinder and similar apps provide abundant access to new dates. Even on Hinge—whose slogan is “the dating app designed to be deleted,” that is, lead to relationships—the top 1% of men receive 16% of women’s likes, the top 15% receive 50%, while the bottom 50% are left with 4% of women’s likes (Edmunds, 2017; Steinberg, 2024).

As one of the cited articles notes, likes were also highly concentrated at the top for female profiles, even if not quite as strongly.

The tired corpse of the 2009 OkCupid attractiveness ratings is exhumed yet again:

The consequence for our ability to achieve assortative mating seems considerable. When a dating site asked members to rate those of the opposite sex, the result attested to the difference between the sexes short-term preferences, but perhaps also to women developing increasingly discriminatory long-term mate preferences—a hypothesis we will return to. Men’s ratings spread across a bell curve, meaning that a few women were judged to be very attractive or un-attractive, while the majority were in the middle. By contrast, women concluded that over 80% of men had below-average attractiveness (Kincaid, 2009). If the average woman considers only a fifth of men to be a good match in terms of attractivity, she will struggle to find someone who is both good enough and willing to commit. With online dating dominating as a mating arena, such numbers bode poorly for present and future pair-bonding, and in the extension of that, our ability to reproduce our populations.

The cited article itself says:

The “most attractive” women receive five times as many messages as the average female does, with 2/3 of all male messages going to the top 1/3 of women. And women tend to favor the most attractive men, though the ratio is less extreme.

Let’s quickly send this back to the grave. Looking at messaging patterns, we see similar distributions by sex. To about the same extent that fewer men than women were rated attractive, the share of messages directed at these men was also lower, so that a similar share of messages went to the most attractive 20% of men and women.

But hang on, men send the bulk of initial messages, right? Maybe this similarity is an artefact of women who initiate being less attractive on average. Apparently women’s attractiveness didn’t have much effect on the number of messages they sent, but there was an effect for men, with attractive men being more active:

No matter how attractive a woman appears, we see similar messaging behavior. For men, those who are most attractive send the most messages, with the top 40% reaching out the most. Perhaps they enjoy basking in the glory of being one of the elitely attractive.

This effect wasn’t large: the least attractive men sent 12.5 and the most 16.25 messages on average. This could explain why messages were slightly more concentrated among the most attractive women than men though.

We can also look at the message success rate, defined as the % of messages that received a reply, by the attractiveness of both the sender and recipient. Success rates varied more across the attractiveness spectrum for women. The opposite may have been true for income.

Somewhat shockingly, Topinkova & Diviak (2025) is cited on three occasions:

Research reveals how strongly women discriminate between men in the distribution of mating outcomes (Figure 7), a stratification reflected also in dating app behavior (Ponseti, 2022; Topinkova & Diviak, 2025).

Part of this problem may lie in the design of the technology itself. That it is so picture-based, in combination with the enormous demand women face on dating apps (Topinkova & Diviak, 2025), pushes women to be very focused on men’s physical attractiveness.

It’s also referenced as a source for the ‘pressure/change’ of ‘male mating stratification’, which supposedly triggered a ‘winner-take-all mating market’ (this seems more like an outcome), ultimately resulting in ‘more female competition for the same cluster of men’. I’m not sure whether the study wasn’t read, its findings weren’t properly understood, or it’s being deliberately misrepresented.

Despite the claims that ‘the consequence [of dating apps] for our ability to achieve assortative mating seems considerable’, that ‘these various factors, which work against assortative pairing, lead some experts to place parts of the blame for today’s dysfunctional mating on digital apps’, and that ‘dating apps do facilitate women to direct much of their mating effort at the most sought-after men’, this study directly contradicts the narrative on display here.

The confusion around dating apps largely stems from the misconception that a lower right-swipe rate implies they’re comparably more concentrated. This study showed that women weren’t more likely to swipe up in terms of relative within-sex desirability,16 and matches tended to be very close in standardized desirability. In other words, there was strong trend of ‘assortative pairing’. You’ll even spot the terms ‘homophilic’ and ‘the similarity of partners’ in the abstract.

This aligns with studies on traditional dating websites that found a similar effect of within-sex desirability by gender, and that online daters become more homophilic with repeated exchanges.

The ‘hook-up app’ myth

Another thing I’ve covered previously is that there isn’t strong evidence for the popular claim reiterated here that dating apps are encouraging promiscuity at the expense of long-term relationship formation.

A study sharing a co-author is cited:

Dating app users also tend to be more short-term oriented (Botnen et al., 2018).

The study also concluded that dating apps don’t appear to increase promiscuity themselves, but rather serve as a ‘new arena’ for those already more short-term oriented:

When controlling for sex, age and SOI Desire there was no evidence that length of use increased lifetime casual sex partners. We conclude that the new technology provided by PBMDAs merely represents a new arena for short-term sexual behavior, and not necessarily a facilitator of new sexual behaviors.

They also cite another study involving the same co-author, stating:

In the chatting phase, 98% of the remainder is filtered out before the woman commits to a date (Grøntvedt et al., 2020).

Other dating apps are similarly or more skewed. Studies suggest that the average man may have to work through over 5,000 profiles to secure a single date (Gerrard, 2021; Grøntvedt et al., 2020).

They surveyed non-homosexual men and women under 30 in Norway who had used Tinder. The percentage who had had at least one one-night stand through Tinder was similar for men and women at about 20%.17 Of those who had a one-night stand, 65% had only one, 15% had two, and 20% had more than two. Meeting a long-term partner was at least as likely an outcome as a one-night stand: the-matches-to-meet-ups ratio was 57:1 (the ‘98% filtered out’ part), the meet-ups-to-one-night-stands ratio was 5.4:1, and the meet-ups-to-long-term partner ratio was 5.1:1 – so roughly 300 matches needed for either outcome.

It’s difficult to reconcile these findings with the claim that Tinder facilitates neohypergamous promiscuity. Since the vast majority of both male and female Tinder users hadn’t engaged in a one-night stand, most of those who had only had the one, and long-term relationships were just as common, this undermines the notion that dating apps are fuelling a ‘hook-up culture’. It’s also another source contradicting the narrative that they’re facilitating ‘de facto polygyny’.

Büyükeren et al. (2025) was cited in regard to dating apps’ influence on ‘today’s dysfunctional mating’. The findings do not support the idea that Tinder disrupted relationship formation, as it found no difference in relationship rates or quality post-Tinder, and only a very small change in sexual partners among fraternities and sororities that didn’t appear to go on to affect the rest of the student body. Its claim regarding inequality is dubious for reasons outlined here.

Lusher & Jung (2026) examined how the diffusion of Tinder affected marriage outcomes using Google search intensity for ‘Tinder’ as a proxy for regional platform exposure. Among 21–35 year olds, no effect on overall marriage rates or the timing of first marriage was found. There was ‘some suggestive evidence’ that Tinder exposure slightly increased the likelihood of divorce or separation, and also a higher likelihood that partnerships took the form of marriage rather than cohabitation – but these effects were ‘modest and sensitive to specification’. Marriage effects emerged in ‘male-heavy and thin dating markets’, suggesting that dating apps ease matching frictions.

Ershov et al. (2026) constructed county-level measures of online dating usage from both website and mobile app platforms. They found that in the ‘desktop era’, a 1% increase in online dating sessions raised divorce rates by 0.5%, while in the ‘mobile era’, a 1% increase in activity lowered marriage and divorce rates by 0.4% and 0.33%, respectively. They found no evidence that greater online dating usage increased average STD rates in either era; in fact, the opposite was observed, but mostly for desktop sites.

The authors attribute this to an increased expected value from searching reducing pairings, particularly mismatched ones. They also suggest a better ability to screen out the unserious, though this effect would’ve been stronger for desktop platforms. So even if dating apps have reduced partner formation, it’s more plausibly through raised standards than women repeatedly being used by bad Chads.

The evidence is somewhat mixed, but it seems unlikely that dating apps have had a dramatic effect on the dating market, let alone in the straightforward way the neohypergamy narrative predicts. At the same time, they argue that dating apps are not the primary cause but merely an accelerator of neohypergamy:

Regardless of how unlikely it seems that young people would give up on dating apps, we believe such a development would have but a limited effect. Apps reflect and accentuate the modern world’s mating challenges, but the main underlying driver of increased singledom, we argue, is how some groups of men have lost so much utility to women that fewer fulfill women’s requirements for a long-term partner.

They argue that dating apps aren’t the main culprit; rather they ‘amplify these ancient dynamics’, with contraceptives as the primary factor:

If our hypothesis holds, dating apps should not be emphasized as a mismatch (Goetz et al., 2019a), the culprit that contributes to ultralow fertility. Throughout human history, the inclusive nature of men’s short-term mate preferences generally provided women access to uncommitted sex (Buss & Schmitt, 1993), while women’s discriminatory short-term preferences favored the most attractive men (Scheib, 2001). Dating apps just amplify these ancient dynamics. Instead, the key mismatch is modern contraceptives.

While the effect of contraceptives is clear, it doesn’t require a rise in neohypergamous promiscuity, or any kind of promiscuity for that matter.

‘Short-term strategies’ don’t drive the fertility decline

The widespread belief in mass promiscuity is false. Despite claims that ‘our era’s increasing singledom primarily stems from women’s greater emphasis on short-term mate preferences due to novel environmental factors that disfavor biparental care for reproductive success’, young women have not been accruing higher partner counts over the past couple of decades, and adolescent females have been reporting fewer. This is despite taboos around promiscuity having if anything only weakened, which even if actual rates remained static might be expected to raise reported partner counts.18 Young men and women are both engaging in less casual sex.

French data show that from 2004–2008 to 2019–2023, women’s average age at first sex rose by about a year. Not exactly what we’d expect from a shift towards ‘short-term strategies’.

While it’s claimed that the ‘3rd sexual revolution’ of 1968 triggered rising single rates and a ‘mating equilibrium shift’, the bulk of the fertility decline from 1960 to 1980 occurred within couples rather than through fewer couples being formed.

In the US, the fertility decline resumed in 2007 – some five years before Tinder arrived – and the rise of dating apps doesn’t appear to have accentuated it. Teen pregnancy rates have also fallen dramatically since then. Similar declines occurred across most European countries. Also affecting most of these countries was the Great Recession. Alongside economic and housing insecurity, many may have become reluctant to bring children into a more precarious world.

Matysiak et al. (2021) found that fertility decline in Europe during this time was strongly related to rising unemployment, with the sharpest declines observed in Southern Europe, Ireland and parts of Central and Eastern Europe – regions that were also most vulnerable to labour market instability during the recession. Germany’s weathering of the economic shock has been dubbed the ‘German labour market miracle’. Notably, it also avoided the post-recession fertility declines. Evidence from the US points in the same direction, with the areas and populations hit hardest economically also seeing the biggest fertility declines.

Recessions can have long-term effects on fertility: Zimmer (2024) found that a 3 percentage point higher unemployment rate during a woman’s graduation year reduces birth probabilities by 14% about five years later. Probabilities never recovered, suggesting a permanent fertility drop. Currie and Schwandt (2014) similarly found that higher unemployment at ages 20-24 permanently lowered fertility.

Sexually conservative cultures aren’t exempt

The countries closest to demographic collapse are in East Asia, with fertility rates averaging one child per woman. This is notable because these societies maintain relatively conservative sexual cultures: marriage norms remain strong, and promiscuity and out of wedlock births remain stigmatized. These conditions are not fertile ground for neohypergamy.

In China, South Korea, and Singapore, porn websites are blocked, and the production, distribution, and public exhibition of porn is illegal. In Japan, it’s legal only so long as genitals are censored. This may ironically help explain the prevalence of extreme genres like bukkake and tentacle hentai: to produce explicit content within legal limits, you have to get creative.

In South Korea, out of wedlock births have risen but still account for only about 5% of all births, compared with 40% in the US, and most still consider the practice unacceptable. Adultery remained illegal until 2015.

Sexual inactivity is common among both young men and women and isn’t any higher among young men,19 the only difference is that more men report that it was involuntary:

It is notable that 42 percent of young men between the ages of 19 and 29 had no sex during the past year. This percentage is the highest among all age groups of males, even higher than for men in their 60s, at 39 percent. When asked why, twenty-four percent of the young men said that they couldn’t find a partner.

Among females, the sexless percentage was the highest among those in their 60s. The sexless ratio among young women in their 20s was 43 percent, but only 13 percent of them said that lacking a partner was the reason.

At the same time, South Korea ranks among the most gender equal countries according to the Gender Equality Index.

Japan is little different: in 2024, 2.6% of babies were born out of wedlock. Virginity has risen among never-married young adults since 2002, but there is no evidence of an emerging gender divergence.20

Very few babies are born out of wedlock in Singapore, and Singaporeans continue to hold quite sexually conservative views:

Asked for their views on a list of actions, 68.3 per cent of respondents said prostitution was never or seldom justifiable, with 67.3 per cent saying the same for casual sex, 60.3 per cent for abortion, 59.3 per cent for homosexuality and 57.2 per cent for parents beating children.

Larsen et al. note that recent drops in Nordic countries were caused mostly by reduced fertility within relationships, while in East Asia it’s rising single rates:

The most recent Nordic fertility drops were primarily caused by reduced fertility within relationships (Cantalini et al., 2024; Fødselstallsutvalget, 2026; Hellstrand et al., 2022), while Australian and East Asian fertility declines were predominantly caused by increasing single rates (Choi, 2022; Reimondos et al., 2025; Wang & Li, 2025).

If their proposed mechanism were the dominant driver of fertility decline, the pattern would likely be reversed: in the more sexually liberal Nordic countries, rising singleness should drive down fertility more, while more sexually conservative East Asian countries should be more insulated from the deleterious effect of neohypergamous promiscuity on pair bonding.

Of course, these countries each have their own idiosyncrasies that have contributed to the fertility crash – the most obvious among them being China’s one-child policy that lasted until 2016, followed by a two-child policy and later a three-child policy in 2021. Yet fertility continues to fall, and they’re now trying their luck with monetary incentives. The one-child policy has an enduring legacy: it normalized a single-child ideal, created a gender imbalance, and left only children saddled with caring for their aging parents. In South Korea, gender wars make the West’s look like a pillow fight. Goldin (2025) connects this to rapid economic growth outpacing social change. Still, the fact that all East Asian nations have seen fertility plummet despite relatively conservative sexual cultures has to count for something.

Additional examples to reinforce the point: India’s fertility rate has fallen to 2, despite arranged marriages remaining the norm, early marriages, and little dating culture to speak of. In Iran, the sexes are highly segregated and Sharia law strictly enforced: premarital sex and adultery are illegal, public displays of affection are forbidden, and even handshakes between unrelated men and women aren’t safe. And yet, TFR has fallen to 1.7. Turkey sits at 1.48 TFR, despite premarital sex remaining taboo and out of wedlock births remain below 5%. In Indonesia, adultery, premarital sex, and even unmarried cohabitation were banned in 2022, yet fertility continues to decline, now hovering around replacement.

To the extent that fertility declines stem from weakened pair bonding, this doesn’t seem to have much to do with any corresponding rise in neohypergamous promiscuity. Nor do traditional sexual mores appear to be an effective buffer; if anything, tying sex tightly to marriage may suppress fertility by raising the cost of family formation. Gender equality could still plausibly suppress fertility through the ‘reduced male utility’ pathway, but much emphasis is placed on women pursuing ‘short-term strategies’ rather than the softer claim that they’re simply opting out.

Better explanations exist for the gender equality–fertility correlation

Larsen et al. report the ‘uncomfortable’ fact that gender equality strongly correlates with lower fertility. Traditionally, this has been attributed to simple opportunity costs: investing in higher education and careers leaves less time for raising children, so many women delay childbirth or have fewer kids. And the ‘girlboss’ does tend to have fewer kids. Female educational attainment negatively predicts fertility both between nations and within nations.21 Educated women also want more educated kids, sacrificing quantity for quality. While this mechanism explains only a small part of recent US declines, it can better account for the cross-national gender equality–fertility correlation.

Adhikari et al. (2024) also showed that among ever-married African women, educational attainment is negatively associated with ideal family size. Further, they found a lower ideal family size among less educated women when surrounded by more educated women, tentatively suggesting a diffusion of lower fertility ideals. The ideal family size of women with secondary education in an otherwise uneducated environment was about 50 percent higher than in a highly educated environment. This effect extended to completed cohort fertility.

These results are consistent with a theoretical framework known as Developmental Idealism (DI), which originated among Northwest European elites during the Enlightenment and was later proliferated by Christian missionaries, the UN, NGOs, and multinational corporations. As societies develop, people increasingly adopt behaviours perceived as markers of progress and modernity. Among these ‘modern’ ideals are small nuclear families and gender equality, offering another plausible reason for the correlation. Among the more educated urban population, investing more in fewer children becomes a way to signal sophistication and status. Individualist values also make it more socially acceptable to opt out of having children if people don’t want them, and the spread of contraception enables them to act on these preferences.

One study found that in Nepal, where between 2008 and 2014 fertility declined from around three to two children per woman, high DI endorsement cut the probability of additional births by more than half among women with at least two children, but didn’t affect first or second births. Another study of urban Turks found DI was widespread, with little distinction made between DI concerning their own country and more generally. DI endorsement correlated with education and fertility, among other factors.

Then there’s industrialization. As production shifts from households and farms into wage labour, demand for workers expands. Early on, women are often employed as cheap labour in manufacturing sectors. This increases the payoff to educating daughters, which gradually raises women’s socioeconomic leverage and creates pressure for legal rights and suffrage. At the same time, industrialization reduces fertility by lowering the demand for extra farmhands, and children go from economic assets to costly investments that require more schooling rather than bringing immediate value. Parents therefore increasingly invest in fewer children. To some degree then, both can be seen as parallel consequences of the same broader economic transition.

Are people having fewer children than they want?

It’s often highlighted that a gap exists between stated ideal and actual family size. Larsen et al. report similar findings:

Antinatalist attitudes seem not to contribute significantly to low fertility. Only 3% of European women aged 18–40 consider zero children the ideal family size (Miettinen & Szalma, 2014). In Norway, women on average report a preference for 2.4 children but have only 1.4 (Cools & Strøm, 2020). Such fertility gaps between desired and actual offspring are common in low-fertility nations (Beaujouan & Berghammer, 2019; Friedrich & Bujard, 2025; Stone, 2019). Americans consider the ideal family size to include 2.7 children, but their fertility rate is 1.6 (Gallup, 2025).

Gallup asks: ‘What do you think is the ideal number of children for a family to have?’ Taken literally, this is a normative question: people may personally desire few or no children while still considering a higher number ideal for the average family. Responses are likely a mix of personal preferences and social expectations.

Additionally, fertility intentions shouldn’t be compared directly to the current total fertility rate (TFR). TFR is a snapshot of the number of children a woman would have over her lifetime if current age-specific fertility remained constant. The issue is that delayed childbearing means TFR can understate what younger cohorts will ultimately achieve; period fertility can decline even as cohort fertility remains constant.

Larsen et al. make the mistake of treating TFR as if it were completed cohort fertility, leading to the extreme projection that South Koreans will have 99% fewer children in four generations:

If these nations catch up with South Korea, which in 2012 had a rate similar to Norway’s current rate (OECD, 2024), they will have 99% fewer children in only four generations (Figure 1). However, how far these numbers will drop is uncertain; South Korea’s situation is unprecedented.

Many countries still remain well below replacement when using this metric – Japan’s completed cohort fertility has gone from 2.08 for women born in 1932 to 1.44 for those born in 1973 – but Larsen’s own country of Norway has seen remarkable stability among women born from 1952 to 1972, with their completed fertility remaining around 2.05. Obviously this doesn’t guarantee it will remain that way.

Returning to the question at hand, one study compared intended fertility reported by 20–24 year old women (mostly born between 1970 and 1975) to completed fertility at age 40 in the same cohorts. A gap was observed in all 19 European countries and the US, with an average gap of 0.28 and women remaining childless more than intended. The gap in the US was relatively small.

Friedrich & Bujard (2025) found that across 11 European countries, the mean intended number of children and the actual number born were nearly equal by the end of women’s reproductive years. However, intended fertility declines with age, widening the gap between intended and desired number of children and suggesting that women adapt their plans to biological realities. The gap between intended and desired fertility may point to socioeconomic constraints, perceived or real, more than pair-bonding frustration. While there was a historically anomalous period in the West where poorer people tended to have more children, this seems to have ended.

At the same time, another study found little evidence that the proportion of low-parity women in the US with unfulfilled fertility desires has increased over time. In fact, yet low-parity women in their early 40s were decreasingly likely to have unfulfilled fertility desires or intentions. There was weak evidence of a growing fertility gap in the early 30s, suggesting that more recent cohorts may have difficulty catching up to earlier goals. There was also evidence for a slight decline in intended parity and rise in intended childlessness among young males and females in the post-Recession years, and the share of people who want but do not intend to have children decreased across cohorts. More males than females wanted children, but they also wanted fewer of them on average.

Another study found that more childless American men now report disinterest in fatherhood than in the past, and more teenagers are saying it’s unlikely or uncertain they’d have children if married.

In Japan, the average desired number of children among never-married men and women is now below two across all age groups.

Chinese women desire on average well under 2 children, and this number has been on the decline. A study analysing Chinese survey data found that among 18–24 year olds, the share reporting no desire for children increased from 5% in 2012 to 32% in 2023, and this rise was especially pronounced among women.

Only 28 percent of unmarried South Koreans aged 19–49 say they want children. The share of Swedish women desiring children dropped from 91% in 2014 to 75% in 2023. Slightly fewer Finnish men and women in recent cohorts report a desire for children, and men express a slightly lower desire than women.

Overall, fertility declines appear to track a genuine reduction in desire for children to some extent. Maybe people lack hope for a better future, have different priorities, or, not to fall into the ‘the smartphone theory of everything’ trap, but maybe they play a role even if not via Tinder. An obvious pathway is that these devices create an addiction to digital stimulation that reduces time spent socializing and forming relationships, as well as making the prospect of raising children less appealing.

It’s also possible that any effect may be less about the device in and of itself and more about the information it transmits. We touched on developmental idealism; this technology may have only amplified the proliferation of these ideals. The originator of this framework noted how Westernization and the diffusion of these ideals in non-Western countries was facilitated by the introduction of mass media such as TV, radio, and newspapers. Exposure to individualistic culture could have a similar effect.

What is clear is that evolution didn’t need to instil a desire to reproduce; it was enough to encourage the proximate act. It therefore shouldn’t be surprising that people simply choose to forego children when they see more appealing alternatives.

Is neohypergamy creating MGTOWs and WGTOWs?

It’s claimed that neohypergamy is causing both men and women to drop out of the dating market in record numbers:

But we are in a situation where the ideal is not available; mating markets have become so frustrating for both sexes that many are giving up. Not only are 42% of Americans unpartnered (Pew Research Center, 2025), but 50% of single men and 65% of single women report that they are looking for neither short- nor long-term mating (Gelles-Watnick, 2023).

‘Not only are 42% of Americans unpartnered’ suggests this is an unprecedented number, but it’s worth bearing in mind that this represents a mere 4% rise since 1990, about the same as in 2010, after declining somewhat since 2019 due to a decline in divorces.

The narrative of an unprecedented dating market exodus has caught on recently. For the stats they present to be informative however, they must be compared to previous years. It would also help to break it down by age – voluntary singleness is higher among older adults, especially widowed women.

Among those under 30, 41% of single men and 36% of women reported being uninterested in dating.22 It turns out that this has remained fairly stable since 2005:23

These figures closely mirror those from the 2019 survey, where 35.4% of young single men and 39.3% of young single women reported disinterest in dating. In the 2005 Pew survey, 38% of singles aged 18–29 reported the same, so there’s little evidence of a noteworthy trend here, either.

At the same time, since singleness among 18–29s has risen a bit since 2005,24 this may still indicate a modest increase in overall disinterest.

The Japanese Fertility Survey shows a more noticeable rise in the percentage of never-married people without intention to marry or date. Again though, this is unlikely due to a rise in neohypergamy.

Were most men incels historically?

It’s claimed that historically high proportion of men securing a mate was a brief historical anomaly owing to enforced monogamy, and we are simply ‘reverting’ to the norm:

Since the First Sexual Revolution around 1200 had imposed lifelong monogamy, Westerners had lived in societies with exceptionally strong pair-bonding egalitarianism (Henrich, 2020). A high proportion of men could secure a mate, which had not been common for our species.

In support of this claim, the common narrative that twice as many men as women historically reproduced is presented:

We have around twice as many female as male ancestors, as most men did not prevail in their intrasexual competition over women, and were thus deprived of becoming our ancestors (Kruger et al., 2014; Wilder et al., 2004).

As the quote implies, the first paper is about on intrasexual competition and its relation to patriarchy, which seems tangential at best, since the thesis here focuses entirely on female mate choice. Contrary to the popular belief that polygyny results from female preferences, the study found it covaried substantially with the degree of patriarchy.

The next study found that across three human populations, mtDNA coalescence times were about twice as long as those of Y-DNA. Crucially, this is not the same as saying twice as many women than men reproduced in each generation over vast time scales. That is a gross oversimplification. The genes don’t contain the information needed to determine how many men and women reproduced at any point in history. What they can reveal is how many male lineages persisted to the present day relative to female lineages.

First, effects can be cumulative. If some male lineages consistently produce more surviving offspring over many generations, they gradually come to dominate the gene pool, while smaller lineages are pruned. Hunter-gatherers are relatively egalitarian, so long-term status transmission is less common than in agricultural societies. Still, male lineages that consistently outperformed others through things like better hunting or social skills could substantially reduce Y-DNA diversity relative to mtDNA.

Second, while the authors mention polygyny as a likely contributing mechanism, it’s not the only process that can reduce Y-DNA diversity. They also mention sex-biased migration. In patrilocal communities, women move to live with their husband. This spreads female lineages across communities, while Y-DNA remains more localized, making male lineages more vulnerable to extinction after a disaster strikes. Over time, this can generate large differences in coalescence times even if most men reproduce. Seielstad et al. (1998) estimated that polygyny accounts for less than 10% of the reduction in Y-DNA diversity, with patrilocal residence patterns explaining the majority. Another proposed explanation is purifying selection on the Y-chromosome.

Regarding the Neolithic bottleneck, which is frequently cited in neohypergamy discussions, the increased importance of the male lineage for property inheritance along with mechanisms like patrilineal warfare helps explain the extreme disparity in effective population sizes during this period. Burial site evidence – a more direct measure of mating patterns than inferences from surviving lineages – indicates that monogamy was generally the norm.

Today, a similar proportion of men and women in the US reproduce, and there is little evidence of a widening gap. The small gap that does exist can reasonably be explained by 1. more men surviving to reproductive age, creating a male surplus; 2. the well-documented phenomenon of male underreporting (more women also report high numbers of children); and 3. more men having children at old ages.

The idea that in the absence of social constraints polygamy inevitably dominates isn’t supported by anthropological research, which shows that even in forager societies lacking enforced monogamy, the vast majority of marriages are monogamous. Marlowe (2005) found in a large sample of forager societies a polygynous marriage rate of 14.1% for married men and 21.4% for married women. This is merely a snapshot, as well. To the extent that polygyny creates a marriage squeeze, it is largely temporary, and local sex ratios sometimes permit a degree of polygyny without producing an imbalance in the marriage market.

Conclusion

The neohypergamy narrative remains empirically vacuous. The evidence simply doesn’t support the idea that hordes of women are spinning around fleshy carousels in carnal carnivals, that ‘Chads’ are libidinous clowns each juggling a dozen women, or that swipe apps have brought this grotesque parade of the imagination to life.

The neohypergamy model of fertility decline fails basic tests of internal and external validity. The fertility decline post-sexual revolution was driven mostly by couples having fewer children rather than by ‘free love’ destroying pair-bonding. When the fertility decline returned, it followed not Tinder but the financial crisis. East Asian societies retain sexually conservative norms but nonetheless fertility has crashed. Turkey and Iran aren’t faring much better. India retains arranged marriages, yet sharp fertility drops. The list goes on. These countries should be largely shielded from the effects of the sexual revolution and ‘hook-up apps’. This mechanism, then, seems unnecessary and of limited explanatory value.

Pre-existing explanations for the gender equality–fertility correlation – education delaying childbearing and a cultural model that connects gender equality and small families to civilizational progress – remain more parsimonious. They don’t require invoking Chad or Tinder in countries with vastly different sexual cultures.

This isn’t a particularly surprising development in the fertility discourse. Neohypergamy is a highly popular model for modern dating, especially in political circles associated with pronatalism. It’s not a huge leap to suggest that if women spend their most fertile years chasing noncommittal ‘Chads’, their biological clock will be running out by the time reality hits. It’s basically the ‘mating dynamics’ version of the previous explanation.

The neohypergamy spin on the gender equality–fertility link is effective because it’s salacious and taps into the popular ‘male loneliness crisis’ discourse. Neohypergamy makes for a compelling story – a grand narrative that feels important and insightful, as if it explains all of society’s problems. It’s simple and has ‘truthiness’ to it. In media and public debate, narratives involving dating and moral judgments generate more engagement and controversy than more dry arguments around economics or policy. Tying neohypergamy to the fertility decline lends the narrative gravitas and urgency beyond the more fantastical ‘incel uprising’ threat. It turns ‘I can’t breed’ into ‘this is why society is collapsing’. At this rate though, incels risk being left behind, with the focus turning from personal woes to civilizational collapse.

As far as the ‘reduced male utility’ hypothesis goes, while it has some plausibility even without invoking neohypergamous promiscuity, the paper failed to provide compelling evidence that mating is increasingly restricted to highly desirable men. One counterpoint is that the small effect of height across various mating outcomes hasn’t risen over time. Even if height is only a minor component of men’s overall attractiveness, it would at least partially capture a major shift in dating dynamics whereby men with economic utility but insufficient attractiveness were increasingly sidelined. Another counterpoint is that women with higher personal incomes are now more likely to be married, despite presumably having less ‘need’ to. Still, it’s plausible that some women who would’ve felt compelled to marry and have children before no longer do.

A reason to doubt this as the main driver is that sexual and dating trends are most pronounced among adolescents, who weren’t valued as providers to begin with. You could perhaps argue that women factor in males’ potential future earnings, and now that this isn’t as much of a consideration, but this seems like a reach. These trends also coincide with broader shifts in social activity, substance use, and delayed milestones, implying that to the extent there’s a ‘crisis’, it isn’t unique to mating.

The gender education gap and making traditional hypergamy harder could also pose problems without Chad being involved. It seems that both hypogamy and hypergamy rates are rising, possibly because later marriages reduce educational sorting, but homogamy is rising faster. The implications of this aren’t entirely clear, with some studies finding that hypogamous relationships fare no worse, and people may adapt to these changes. Many theorize that physical attractiveness is taking the place of money/status, but this is almost always stated alongside the neohypergamy narrative. If this is happening, it’s instead that whatever the implications of certain levels of status were before are now more implications of attractiveness, not that it has led to neohypergamy. I think attractiveness was already a bigger determinant though.

It’s unlikely a return to 1950 would play out too well even if it were politically feasible – unless maybe you were willing to commit senicide. Otherwise, labour demands will only rise with an aging population, particularly in caregiving. This pressure led to Japan’s ‘womenomics’ policies aimed at boosting female labour force participation through paid parental leave and subsidized childcare. I guess it’s a matter of kicking the can down the road until a real solution arises. I’m not going to claim to have all the answers, and plenty of people have researched this topic more than me.

I will end by saying it’s been surreal to see what used to live only on fringe forums now being institutionalized and granted academic legitimacy. Expect sudden appeals to peer-reviewed authority from people who previously would have scoffed at it. As this narrative travels from imageboards to Cambridge journals, what it lacks in evidence it will gain in currency. This makes what has been uncovered by these investigations all the more consequential.

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One post, largely a copy-paste of one from a year earlier, claims that among ‘college students’ there has been:

• A sharp, persistent increase in sexual activity.

• Higher dating outcome inequality.

• More sexual assault and STDs.

Another summarizes the findings as follows:

Tinder led to a sharp and persistent increase in sexual behavior among college students, but had no effect on long-term relationship formation or quality. The app also led to an increase in dating inequality (especially among men), a rise in sexually transmitted infections, and an uptick in sexual assault.

Now, I’m not saying this is being pulled from nowhere – the paper’s abstract itself states: ‘We show that the full-scale launch of Tinder led to a sharp, persistent increase in sexual activity’, and that ‘dating outcome inequality, especially among men, rose’.

Still, I take issue with this framing. Let’s get into why.

Tinder has not led to mass promiscuity

As for the first claim, the issue is twofold. Firstly, while this has been reported as an increase among ‘college students’ in a broad sense, the effect was actually unique to Greek students.1 Even six years following the launch of Tinder, the rest of the student body remains seemingly unaffected, with their average annual number of sex partners hovering below 1.5.

Secondly, the magnitude of the effect wasn’t exactly impressive. The gap in average annual sex partners between Greek and non-Greek students increased by 0.22, and Greek students became 3.1 percentage points more likely to have had sex in the past year. These effects correspond to increases of 0.07–0.08 standard deviations. Since Greek students constitute 10% of the student body, the average increase across all college students was just 0.02, with a standard deviation change below 0.01.

Now, ‘sharp’ is obviously subjective… but to what extent? I’d argue most people would expect at least a 0.5 SD increase to merit that label. You could contend that magnitude isn’t the only consideration. Maybe the speed of the change justifies it. It was notably higher than previous years in the fall of 2014, which is reasonably soon after the launch, but regardless, sharp would typically indicate a combination of magnitude and speed – otherwise it’s just a ‘sudden’ increase.

As for STDs, there was a significant rise in chlamydia incidence among Greek students by 0.6 percentage points and an increase in HIV tests of 1.6 points, equivalent to 0.05 and 0.04 SDs, respectively.2

Since this analysis drew on an enormous dataset, even practically negligible effects can emerge as highly statistically significant. As I’ve noted in previous articles, this kind of reporting is misleading due to a bias that (not to turn this into a hit piece) one of those covering this study has themselves discussed:

When media coverage of scientific findings fails to mention the size of the effects reported, people tend to assume that the effects are large - large enough to have practical significance.

No evidence that Tinder has led to Chad harems

For the second claim, the issue is a bit more complex. Earlier versions of this paper included an analysis on the heterogeneity of Tinder’s impact. Students were split into four quartiles according to their predicted number of partners, calculated using age, gender, race, BMI, sexual orientation, and international student status, with the model trained on pre-Tinder data.

The results were reported as: ‘Inequality in dating outcomes increased among male students but not among female students’. More specifically:

The total effects for each quartile are displayed in Figure 4. While the estimates are positive for both genders for all quartiles, we observe a significant jump in effect size for male students belonging to the top quartile of predicted sex activity. These patterns are confirmed in Table A8, which show that, for male students, the difference in effect on the number of sex partners between the upper and lower quartiles of LASSO-predicted sexual activity is statistically significant. For female students, on the other hand, there is no discernible difference across quartiles.

These contrasting patterns of heterogeneity suggest that the distributional impact of Tinder may differ across gender groups and, in particular, that Tinder may facilitate the emergence of “superstar” effects for males in the dating market. These results are consistent with existing evidence that female dating app users tend to be more selective in their likes and interactions.

The first thing to note is that the effect wasn’t statistically significant under the conventional threshold. Here, the threshold was conveniently set at p < 0.1, despite an enormous number of observations, which if anything would warrant lowering rather than raising the threshold.

Second, the conventional narrative is that Chad is depriving others by ‘stealing’ women, but even the bottom quartile in predicted partners ‘benefitted’, and to a degree similar to women. This is certainly not what most would imagine after hearing that ‘inequality in dating outcomes increased, especially for men’. This is therefore very weak evidence for anything, let alone the conventional neohypergamy narrative.

More recent versions scrapped this analysis entirely – perhaps deciding it wasn’t compelling enough. It was replaced with this new analysis:

In Table 3, we test this idea by examining whether Tinder’s full-scale launch led to an outward shift of the entire distribution of sexual activity among Greek students relative to non-Greek students. Specifically, Table 3 presents a version of our baseline estimates from Table 2, but now using indicators for whether a student had more than a certain number of sexual partners in the past 12 months (ranging from strictly over zero to strictly over eight; see Supplemental Appendix Table B1 for additional estimates for indicators strictly over nine and ten partners) as outcomes. Across all such indicators, we consistently obtain positive coefficients, which also tend to grow as a proportion of the dependent variable mean as we move toward the right tail of the distribution. Supplemental Appendix Table A8 breaks these results down by gender and shows that the effects are larger in absolute terms for male students.

It seems like what we observe here is mostly a slight shift in the sex partner distributions to the right. The patterns are similar for both sexes: the coefficient peaks at >2 partners, and the coefficients decline as the threshold increased at a similar rate from there. There may have been larger proportional increases at the tail, but in absolute terms the change is minimal, and the largest absolute changes are near the middle, consistent with a small overall shift in the distribution.

The differences in changes at high partner counts don’t appear likely to be significant. For example, the coefficient for men and women for >10 partners are 0.005 and 0.003, respectively, meaning fraternity members became 0.5 percentage points and sorority members 0.3 percentage points more likely to report over 10 partners relative to non-Greek students. The standard error for >10 partners for men is 0.002, giving a 95% confidence interval of roughly 0.001–0.009, which overlaps substantially with the female coefficient. This holds true for the other coefficients as well, with some exceptions.

If the Chad story were true, we might expect a larger rise in women with low to moderate partner counts than in men, but a smaller rise among those with high partner counts. Instead, all of the coefficients were slightly higher for men.

Partners don’t seem to be opposite-sex specifically, so any apparent sex differences could possibly be driven more by Grindr than Tinder. Fraternities are typically perceived as ‘heteronormative’ environments, but how true this is in terms of sexual behaviour I don’t know.

Tinder has not destroyed relationships

One popular narrative around dating apps is that they’ve disrupted relationship formation in favour of ‘hook-up culture’ and ‘situationships’. However, the small increase in sex partners among the limited Greek subset of the student population doesn’t appear to have come at the expense of relationships or relationship quality.

Conclusion

Despite claims of a ‘sharp increase’, which reports presented as affecting ‘college students’ in general, the study found only a very small increase in sex partners and STDs among Greek students, who constitute 10% of the college population. From what I could tell, the authors failed to provide convincing evidence of a significant increase in sexual inequality beyond the disparity between Greek and non-Greek students, despite implying it.

Another caveat is that there is no direct evidence linking these changes to Tinder, though the timing and launch strategy targeting Greek students make a connection plausible – though the facts that sexual activity didn’t continue to go up as dating app usage expanded and that it never seemed to affect the rest of the student body weakens the case.

I recognize that some view this kind of critique as too ‘nitpicky’, but I’m unconcerned with such charges. Factual precision and clear, honest reporting are important. Accusations like ‘pedantic’ and ‘deboonker’ are often just copes and attempts to shut down legitimate criticism.

The evidence against dating apps facilitating widespread neohypergamy is quite overwhelming:

• The most promiscuous 20% of men and women account for a similar share of their sex’s total sexual encounters, a pattern that has remained unchanged since Tinder’s introduction.

• STD rates among heterosexual men and women have moved in tandem.

• Sexlessness rates have moved in tandem.

• The singleness sex gap among young adults is not widening and can be reasonably explained by relational age gaps.

• Physical attractiveness and height have similarly weak correlations with sex partner count as they did previously.

• Dating app within-sex desirability effects, match number skew, and actual outcomes show no sex imbalance.

• Promiscuity is not on the rise.

This study does little to alter this picture. But I would be surprised not to see a lot more of it going forward, usually cited without any specificity or quantification, just ‘this study showed Tinder sharply increased promiscuity and sexual inequality’. LLMs will likely be citing the hell out of it. All people need is a statement from a ‘peer-reviewed’ article; the evidence is secondary. The gaps get filled with the dramatic version people expect or want to see. Few will be inclined to look deeper, as doing so risks deflating their imagined narrative. This has happened before, and it will happen again.

I’m going to go out on a limb and say that I would be surprised if the researchers didn’t go into the study with the expectation of finding the Chad effect. Such a priori assumptions most likely lead researchers to draw it out of data and overinterpret it. If I were to put on my cynic hat, I’d say they’re aware it’s a popular narrative (a cited article confirms this) and that putting a line about it in the abstract, however weakly supported, would give it a boost.

This serves as a reminder not to take what you hear about a study at face value, whoever is saying it. There is every incentive for researchers, media outlets, and communicators to spruce up the findings or otherwise leave them ambiguous. The study isn’t without any value, but compared to the hype, it’s mostly a nothingburger.

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The upside is the huge sample size and range of variables measured. The downside is that respondents were recruited via platforms like Twitter, and are not representative of the general population: ‘Respondents skew young, female, white, politically liberal, and LGBTQ-identifying relative to the general U.S. population’. I also noticed a very high autism rate.

Fortunately, nonrepresentativeness isn’t generally a major limitation when measuring relationships between variables. The main concern is if sample composition moderates the relationships. For example, in a less monogamous population, the correlation between extraversion and promiscuity could be larger, as the tendencies of extraverts are more free to manifest in more sexual encounters. But these moderation effects are unlikely to be drastic.

Height

Previous analyses have revealed very modest effects of height on mating outcomes. Can this dataset help to salvage the height pill?1

Here we see a correlation of r = 0.05 between height and lifetime sex partners (hereafter LSP), consistent with the meta-analytic result. In other words, there is room for another 399 independent predictors of equal strength.

The pattern largely mirrors Frederick & Jenkins, where a noticeable reduction in LSP only appeared below 5’7. Not much variation within 1 SD of the mean height. The difference between 5’1 men and 6’4 men was 5 vs. 9 partners. Given that the SD of sex partner number tends to exceed the mean by roughly 50%, this corresponds to about a 0.3 SD difference in LSP when comparing men 5 SDs apart in height.

Virgin men were about 0.5 inches shorter than average, which is close to 0.2 SDs – typically what would just qualify as a ‘small’ effect.

Outside of gaslighting manlets by claiming they’re lying about their sexual histories, the most common critique of the data on height and sexual partners is that it isn’t recent enough to capture the supposed dramatic transformation of the dating landscape engendered by dating apps. Not too much recent data is publicly available, though what does exist didn’t seem to leave much room for a much larger effect.

This survey helps fill that gap, as it was launched in early 2023. By looking at the LSP of heterosexual white men aged 18⁠–24, the vast majority of partners would have been encountered well after dating apps entered the picture ⁠– a 24 year old who had sex at 18 would have done so around 2017.

Yeah it’s the same.

Interestingly, the effect wasn’t smaller for gay men, so if it’s a matter of desirability, men are being similarly heightist towards each other. There also appears to be a consistent spike at the end, which may reflect some trolls selecting high values for both variables. There were efforts made to clean the data of low quality responses, but it won’t have been perfect.

Height didn’t correlate with age of first sex, maybe because taller men tend to have a later start due to associated characteristics like intelligence, which balances it out.

Moving on to relationships, men who were dating or in relationships were about 0.3 inches taller than single men. This represents about 0.1 SD ⁠– similar to the effect I found previously.

Women dating or in relationships were about 0.2 inches shorter than single ones.

Tall men reported being slightly higher in current horniness. Since the correlation between horniness and LSP was only 0.1 however, this can’t account for much of the height and LSP correlation.

Extraversion

In a previous analysis, it was shown that extraversion is a wonder trait which affected a wide range of mating outcomes, with effects generally stronger among men. The black pill cope that this is all mediated by looks was swiftly shut down.

The Big Five traits were measured using only two items each, so reliability may be lower than usual ⁠– but this brief scale has been shown to correlate surprisingly highly with the standard 9-item scale scores (.89 for extraversion). There may have been less variance than usual, as respondents were disproportionately introverted.

Looking at LSP among heterosexuals aged 18–⁠30, we see a clear, consistent rise from very low to very high extraversion, with a correlation of 0.19 for men. This is slightly lower than the meta-analytic result of 0.24.

Extraverts lost their virginity earlier, with a larger effect for men.

Men who were dating or in a relationship were more extraverted, whereas for women an effect arose only for dating.

Extraverts were hornier.

Autism

Virgin men were more likely to have autism, while people with higher partner counts were slightly less likely to – with the exception of the category the creator of the survey belongs to.

Single men were more likely to be autistic than men in relationships, with little effect seen for women.

Autistic people were a bit more likely to report below moderate levels of horniness.

Extras

Respondents rated their attractiveness relative to others their age. Self-ratings correlate only weakly with observer ratings, and are to an extent driven by self-esteem and narcissism; nonetheless, the correlation with LSP was 0.16 for men, similar to meta-analytic results for observer-rated attractiveness.

Like the related dark triad, men higher in disagreeableness reported higher LSP. Red pill and PUA adherents would often talk about the ‘bad boy’ persona being irresistible to women. Disagreeableness doesn’t seem to increase desirability in a speed-dating setting however, so it may operate through a different pathway, such as being less interested in commitment or stubborn in their pursuits of partners.

Women in relationships were more agreeable, while there was no obvious effect for men.

Men higher in neuroticism were more likely to be single, while women higher in neuroticism were more likely to be in relationships.

Men and women in relationships were more conscientious, especially when married. Possibly bidirectional.

BMI had a positive association with women’s LSP, while for men there was a curvilinear relationship, with those above and below the overweight range reporting fewer partners.

Schizo Chads had more LSP, driven primarily by those reporting 20+ partners.

Conclusion

Overall, these results are another damning blow to the ‘black pill’:

• Shortness is a disadvantage, but is far from a death sentence even when 3 SDs below the mean.

• Just being confident has a larger effect, bro.

• Autism matters.

The larger effects of extraversion and autism for men than women are also consistent with prior analyses.

This is why a random ‘normie’ off the street has a more accurate perspective on how dating works than the most ‘based’ black pill scholar online. Let’s say the average person from 10 years ago to be safe. Would the normie claim physical traits have no effect? Nah, I think this ‘blue pill’ character who categorically rejects any impact of them is mostly a caricature. The normie’s estimation of their effect will likely be closer to reality than a black piller’s. The normie wouldn’t tend to say extraversion has no effect, unlike the black piller. The normie would also be correct in believing personality matters more than height (bro). Black pillers also often deny that autism has any effect, but there’s a bit more debate there since it’s hard to ignore that the incel killers, a huge number in the community, and their new de facto leader, Clavicular, are on the spectrum.

The nuance pill is getting tired of winning.

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What explains the widespread appeal of conspiracy theories and the cottage industry of ‘question askers’ that has sprung up in the void left by legacy media?

A number of explanations have been put forward for why people are drawn to them:

• Craziness.

• Paranoia.

• Stupidity.

• Narcissism.

• Ideological extremism.

• Distrust in mainstream institutions.

• A desire for clarity and control.

• A desire for belonging.

Of course, a believer would insist it’s because they keep turning out to be true.1

But the biggest reason may be the simplest: they’re fun.2

Truth is stranger in fiction

Life has become too safe and predictable. Conspiracy theories reintroduce the thrill of danger and adventure. They come with heroes and villains, and high-stakes drama missing from the monotony of everyday life. Every event becomes part of a hidden plot that you’re uncovering one 10-hour YouTube rabbit hole at a time.

A common phrase is ‘truth is stranger than fiction’;3 yet reality doesn’t sell like fantasy. Real explanations are often complicated, boring, and arrived at incrementally: they lack storyness. Skilled labourers using ramps and levers to build the Pyramids and Stonehenge over decades isn’t as fun as aliens and lost technologies.

Why did the History Channel descend into Ancient Aliens and conspiraslop? The market demanded it: people are drawn more to mystery than plain facts. It’s also far easier to churn out than well-researched documentaries with expert interviews. Or maybe they simply ran out of noteworthy history to cover, and the Hitler reruns got boring.

A similar dynamic can be seen with Graham Hancock, who accuses big archaeology of unfairly rejecting his evidence for lost civilizations. He’s managed to sell millions of books, rack up tens of millions of views on Joe Rogan appearances, and land a Netflix series. Peer-reviewed archaeological journals never stood a chance.

This isn’t to say academia is immune to this fun-over-facts bias; publication bias exists largely because null results just aren’t interesting enough to publish. A lot of research is motivated by ideas that people find exciting, and exciting findings are cited with much higher frequency. Many sensational findings such as that women dress more provocatively during ovulation fail to replicate but owing to their fun factor live on in the popular imagination.

Perhaps nowhere is this thirst for spectacle clearer than with the Epstein debacle. Whatever exactly went down on the island, much of the reporting has been sensationalist, to put it mildly. People want to believe the most lurid scenarios involving him and his elite circle dismembering babies and consuming the feces from their intestines because it’s so much more exciting than the relatively ‘mundane’ story of a well-connected financier sex-trafficking teenage girls, with some in his orbit turning a blind eye or joining in.

Conspiracy theories offer the best of both worlds: the thrill of fiction with the weight of reality. Even if you aren’t 100% convinced that interdimensional reptilian shapeshifters have secretly controlled humanity for millennia, the lingering what if? keeps you hooked. Conspiracy art by the late David Dees was an unhinged fever dream, pulling you into a dystopian NWO nightmare that is perversely alluring.

While many conspiracists self-brand as ‘truth-seekers’, it may be more generous to assume that a minority are all in, some are genuine crackpots, but like WWE fans, most suspend disbelief for the sake of entertainment. Belief isn’t always binary; for many, conspiracies occupy a similar space to zodiac signs.

Some are merely roleplaying – enjoying the stories, community, or transgression – and if pressed would admit they don’t genuinely believe most of it. Conspiracy engagement often carries an element of irony and trolling: when you go out of your way to debunk flat earth theory, oftentimes you’re taking the bait. Of course with repeated exposure, the line between irony and sincerity blurs, and what is initially entertained for fun can begin to sound plausible.

None of this is to say the truth is always boring – the pyramids are impressive enough even or even especially impressive without aliens, and sometimes it just requires more patience to understand and appreciate it – but it can hardly compete with the virtually infinite well of fun and exciting stories you can tell when you’re free to wax lyrical about Nazi UFOs in the hollow earth.

The rise of question askers

It’s no surprise that the alt media is rife with conspiracism: without institutional networks or access to mainstream media or academic platforms, there’s every incentive to say extravagant or edgy things in order to stand out, differentiate yourself, and appeal to those who feel alienated from them. The rush of hearing what ‘they don’t want you to hear’ is a big part of why conspiracies are so alluring, and a big part of why Jews nearly always have to be woven in somehow – it’s among the few ways left to be transgressive.

Amidst declining trust in legacy media, question-askers like Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson attract wide audiences with their oratory skills and conspiratorial storytelling. After moving to independent platforms, they’re free to throw out wild takes and retreat behind ‘I’m just asking questions’. Candace escalated from claiming Charlie Kirk’s assassination involved Israel, to a communist bee cult, to a trap door, and finally he became a time traveller who went to X-Men school or something.

This could be a strategy for plausible deniability: ‘I was just pretending to be stupid’. At the same time, she was probably never very sincere to begin with. The escalating absurdity is arguably more a feature than a bug of conspiracism: rather than becoming more realistic, theories grow increasingly disconnected from reality, like a story introducing plot twists to keep you on your toes.

A rising star in this space is ‘professor’ Jiang, who claims to predict global events using ‘predictive history’ – essentially a rebranding of Isaac Asimov’s science fiction concept of psychohistory. He delivers grand civilizational narratives and conspiracy-tinged schizobabble in front of a chalkboard. His being a middle-aged Chinese high school teacher likely adds to his intrigue.

In an interview that has racked up close to ten million views, he sneaks in some Illuminati truth bombs at the end. This is the kind of ‘based schizo’ modern audiences enjoy.

Facts don’t care about your fun

Indulging in fun ideas is a vice. If we want to maintain a commitment to truth, we must resist the siren song of excitement. If the truth happens to be interesting, great. If it’s more like this article, too bad.

The thing is, there’s little obvious incentive to think this way. Learning facts takes time and mental energy, isn’t especially rewarding for most, and only raises social status in certain circles. Giving up fun ideas for the sake of rationality offers little immediate payoff – especially when you’re invested in a tribal identity around them.

Prioritizing facts over fun comes with social costs. To ‘fact-check’ or demand evidence is to risk being branded a killjoy – or worse, a deboonker. This term was invented to shame those perceived as overly pedantic, preoccupied with ‘sources’, and apparently fond of saying ‘trust the science’. In practice, it’s often weaponized against anyone correcting misinformation, creating a social stigma around doing so. Nobody wants to ruin the party, so factual inaccuracy often gets a pass in favour of entertainment.

The internet has shifted towards a more chaotic 4chan-like culture that rewards confidently saying stupid or edgy things, likening you to a grey man with a big jaw and muscles. This has some advantages over a more sanitized, self-serious Reddit culture, but the excessive irony and shaming of anyone interrupting the fun may allow bad information to proliferate more easily, even if there are ‘politically incorrect’ ideas that have merit.

Of course, one may note that ‘fact-checking’ mostly serves to reassure those who already agree with the fact checker, and usually just raises hostility in those being fact-checked. Still, undecided observers can be informed, reducing the spread of bad information. At least that’s the idea. Finding relatively unbiased fact checkers is also a challenge, but I would be willing to volunteer.

Conclusion

It might sound obvious – wow, people like entertaining things – but the most obvious explanations are often overlooked. In an unconstrained marketplace of ideas, intellectual fast food naturally rises to the top. If your engagement numbers are unimpressive, you can take comfort in knowing it’s a testament to your commitment to truth and nuance.

What has been the main subject of this blog – the incel/black pill narrative – is largely conspiratorial. It claims that a few elite men are secretly monopolizing all the women. Everyone is lying on surveys or the data is manipulated to suppress the truth. Believers feel enlightened. It’s also exciting: expansive Chad harems, rampant promiscuity, and a rapidly expanding incel underclass that’s a powder keg ready to explode in a violent societal upheaval.

The exposure Clavicular has gained through his outrageous stunts along with the amusement people derive from ‘mogging’, ‘maxxing’, and cortisol memes has served as a catalyst for further spread of the black pill – especially since those platforming or commenting on him have no idea how to properly respond to it, even if they wanted to. It was almost inevitable that it would come to dominate culturally even just from its entertainment value.

When I was younger, my father would show me conspiracy/new age etc. content. It made me worry that fluoride and aspartame were killing my brain cells, aliens were hiding in my closet, and the world was ending in 2012. Yet it was exhilarating, and made me feel enlightened. With the help of figures like Carl Sagan I ended up becoming a rational sceptic. To be honest though, it’s not obvious to me that I greatly benefitted from the transition.

You could argue that there’s some danger in this way of thinking. Belief in Atlantis or Ancient Aliens seems harmless on the surface, but the same thinking that leads to these beliefs can leave you vulnerable to medical misinfo, ideological propaganda, and scams. Of course, most will insist they’re immune to manipulation. A perhaps better reason to be cautious is the risk of becoming too absorbed in an alternative mental world and losing track of what needs to be done in the real one. This would also apply to things like metaphysics or fringe ideologies, which rarely help anyone in tangible ways.

But optimizing for truth has downsides, too. It leads to frustration when seeing wrong ideas proliferate. It can make life more dull and lead to a more nihilistic outlook. False stories can be more inspiring. Shared myths can unite communities, while being a ‘deboonker’ can lead to ostracization.

We can also debate whether there is an ‘objective truth’ and if we can really hope to reach it. But let’s not.

Reality is often messy and boring. It doesn’t always come with clear heroes and villains or make for a good story.

…That’s it. That’s the end of the article.

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The old hypergamy

Traditionally, ‘hypergamy’ has described the tendency of women to marry men of higher status than themselves. Even here, the term is not free from ambiguity: status can refer to education, income, occupational prestige, family background, or social prestige.1 Additionally, in some cases it refers to the pairings themselves, and in others to a preference on the part of women.

A series of studies have documented a predictable decline in educational hypergamy, alongside a corresponding rise in ‘hypogamy’. Esteve et al. (2016) and Erát (2021) found across many countries a strong association between the reversal of the gender gap in education and the decline of hypergamy and increase in hypogamy. Urbina et al. (2024) critique these studies however, pointing out that homogamous couples were excluded from their analyses.

Using census data from across 16 countries in Latin America, they show that when hypergamy is measured relative to all marriages, it has actually increased in most countries over time, while homogamy has declined. However, hypogamy has risen more sharply, suggesting that there are simply more heterogamous unions in general. Part of this may be due to people marrying later, meaning less sorting by education.

By contrast, Leesch & Schopek (2023) found in Ireland rising educational homogamy along with hypogamy.

Women are also beginning to outearn men in some places too, leading to a growing share of wives earning the same or more than their husbands in the US.

What are the implications, if any, of these trends?

Among marriages formed since the 1990s, wives with more education than their husbands are now no more likely to divorce than other couples (Schwartz and Han 2014). Similarly, Theunis et al. (2017) analysed 458,499 Belgian marriages between 1986 and 2001, finding that educational hypogamy wasn’t associated with higher divorce rates than homogamy in communities where hypogamy was common. Contrary to expectations, marriages in which the husband was more educated had the highest divorce rates. Marriages with at least one highly educated partner were less prone to divorce overall.

Schwartz & Gonalons-Pons (2016) examined US data from 1968–2009 and found that wives’ relative earnings were associated with a higher divorce risk among couples married in the late 1960s and 1970s, particularly when the wife outearned the husband, but this was no longer true for couples married in the 1990s. The decline of the male breadwinner role may have shifted cultural expectations around marriage. Reduced affordability have also increased the incentive for dual-income households and may have encouraged more willingness to compromise.

At least in Western contexts, an increase in hypogamous unions doesn’t seem inherently destabilizing. In societies and areas where traditional gender roles persist and income hypergamy is expected, women’s economic advancement may create friction in the marriage market. Chung & Lee (2022) found in South Korea data from 2008 to 2018 that marriage rates were higher in regions with more men who outearn women. This effect was influenced by local cultural norms and hadn’t weakened in recent years – although the narrow timeframe limits the confidence of the conclusion.

[have been shown some things; may add here at a later date]

Most hypergamy studies have focused on the status of the bride and groom themselves, but Clark & Cummins (2025) took a different approach. Analysing 33 million marriages and 67 million births in England between 1837 and 2021, they measured hypergamy by the relative status of the birth families of the partners, operationalized as occupational status scores. They argue that measuring status by women’s relative educational attainment doesn’t accurately capture the social class of marital partners in earlier periods, and therefore fails to reveal whether women historically experienced social mobility through marriage.

Strikingly, very little evidence of hypergamy was found across the periods observed, with the average status of women’s fathers effectively equalling that of their husbands’ fathers. Additionally, for marriages from 1912–2007, the average social status of partners’ surnames was equal.

The authors contend that if hypergamy were primarily driven by men trading status for beauty, larger age gaps should predict larger differences in family status. While there was an association, it was very small – even for extreme age gaps, the difference amounted to only 1.5 points on a 100-point scale.

A more or less equal gender ratio combined with monogamy restricts the room for this kind of hypergamy to operate, but in principle, it could occur via the exclusion of low status men and higher status women from the marriage market, or sequential ‘sharing’. Analyses of marriages in the US from 1900–1940 and 1988 likewise found no evidence of hypergamy when measured using paternal occupation status or wealth. Almås et al. (2023) found some evidence of this in modern Norway, though the effect size was similarly trivial: the family income of ever-partnered men was at the 51.6th percentile, compared with 51.2nd for women – a 0.4% difference. The average percentile ranks based on maximum earnings 2–5 years before match were 54.9 for men and 54.4.

These findings suggest that hypergamous preferences may exist in certain societies, with women who outearn men being less likely to marry or to have their marriages succeed. There is some evidence that income-hypergamous unions were more stable in the past, but little evidence that this remains true in the modern US. All else equal, most women would likely prefer a rich man, but a specific requirement to be economically subordinate seems more flexible and culturally contingent than some may have assumed.

Educational hypergamy is declining relative to hypogamy as women overtake men in higher education, but it may still be rising overall in most countries, possibly due to weaker educational assortment as marriage increasingly happens after schooling. Another possibility is that online dating is increasing educational heterogamy by reducing meetings in shared environments. It doesn’t seem to matter much for relationship stability though.

Murphy et al. (2026) suggested that ‘partner preferences for resources adapt to income and gender economic inequality’, though this relied on simulated environments and stated preferences. But it’s more than possible that women are prioritizing physical traits more than before, while men may even be beginning to take women’s socioeconomic status into account. The latter seems less likely, but who knows.

Of course, until recently, the great majority of pairings were hypergamous by default in terms of income or education. When women lacked financial independence, a hypergamous preference might’ve been more a matter of economic necessity. Also, in the past and in cultures where hypergamous norms are perhaps strongest, marriage decisions are more heavily guided by families. The conception of hypergamy as a ‘mating strategy’ is a bit of a leap, but it’s not absurd to posit that a relevant preference could have evolved if it aided offspring survival.

Online, polygyny is often seen as largely driven by hypergamous choice, yet again, it was typically practiced with little input from the wives, and their revealed preferences show that when women have more optionality, polygyny rates decline – the opposite of what online hypergamy theorists say.

Anyway, while these studies offer some insight regarding the traditional sociological conception of hypergamy, they have little to say about the contemporary iteration into which it has mutated.

The new hypergamy

The old conceptualization of hypergamy which at most amounts to women having a preference for men higher in a status hierarchy was insufficiently dramatic and outrage-inducing. The ‘hypergamy’ you encounter on incel forums, TikTok reels, and manoslop podcasts is a different beast.

Here, rather than status, it primarily pertains to physical attractiveness. It’s less about women preferring partners above themselves per se, so much as being interested in only a small fraction of men. Put differently, it’s more about an absolute standard than relative position, which I believe is a meaningful difference. More common than ‘4/10 women want a 5/10 partner’ is ‘all women only want Chad’.

The supposed implications of this modified conception of hypergamy (hereafter ‘neohypergamy’) are multiple, but it’s most commonly invoked to denote a specific idea that fans of the blog are probably tired of hearing rehashed, but here goes anyway.

Neohypergamy is often used synonymously with the Chadopoly meme, sometimes called ‘soft/de facto polygamy’ or the infamous ‘80/20 rule’. The latter has gradually fallen out of favour though, as it’s become more common to hear 10%, 5%, or 1% – a rhetorical escalation that hasn’t been accompanied by a corresponding escalation in sexual inequality. Because women can’t all have ‘Chad’ to themselves, they must share. This ‘sharing’ takes the form of simple hook-ups, FWBs, or nominal ‘relationships’ with ‘Chads’ who unbeknownst to them are ‘spinning plates’, but rarely actual polyamory/polygamy, as for one thing it would be easier to notice – secret Chad caves aside.

As the story goes, once women ‘hit the wall’ at 30, they realize they aren’t locking down a ‘Chad’ and that their ‘SMV’ has plummeted, so they settle for a ‘beta provider’. This phenomenon is often summarized as ‘beta bucks, alpha f*cks’. Ironically, this ‘settling’ would align more closely with hypergamy in its original sense. At the same time, it’s often said that women no longer ‘need’ men; I guess the idea is that they’re still seen as worth leeching from. Relationships with ‘sub-8’ men are said to inevitably end in dead bedrooms, infidelity, and divorce/‘monkey-branching’. This means that no matter the attractiveness level of the man a woman is dating, it’s cast in a negative light.

Another possible outcome of ‘only wanting Chad’ is women opting for celibacy and cats, but this isn’t as popular a narrative, I guess partly because it doesn’t generate the same envy or moral outrage, and partly because of certain viral meme stats that give the false impression of gendered trends.

So, neohypergamy diverges from the original concept in four major ways:

1. It emphasizes physical attractiveness over any form of status.

2. It focuses more on promiscuity and ‘dating’ than marriage.

3. It’s more about men’s absolute attractiveness than upward selection per se.

4. It’s portrayed as an innate feature of ‘female nature’, while old hypergamy doesn’t speak to this.

In other words, it’s almost nothing alike, and this muddling of concepts causes people to talk past each other. A ‘mid’ woman hooking up with a hot bum would be labelled ‘hypergamous’ even though in the original sense of the term it’s irrelevant at best, since the concept referred to marriage, and the inverse at worst since she is likely mating down in status. It’s sometimes implied that women’s economic independence didn’t reduce hypergamy, but rather enabled it.

Now, the fact that one term that once meant something now means something else doesn’t necessarily invalidate the concept. Language isn’t static. The issue is when people equivocate, which this term has been extensively subjected to. When neohypergamy is challenged, to lend it scholarly weight it will often be pointed out that ‘hypergamy’ is an established concept taken seriously in fields such as sociology, anthropology, and evolutionary psychology2 – even though its usage in these contexts is completely different. The 80/20 rule or Pareto principle is a similar case: how can you deny a law of the universe!?3

In his 2006 essay Sexual Utopia in Power, OG neohypergamist Christopher Moore4 lays out what would go on to become this modern version of hypergamy. Again, unlike the traditional conception of hypergamy – which is about upward selection – this updated version implies the more absolute belief that only the most sexually attractive men are worthy of women, leading to the ‘rejection of most males’:

An important aspect of hypergamy is that it implies the rejection of most males. Women are not so much naturally modest as naturally vain. They are inclined to believe that only the “best” (most sexually attractive) man is worthy of them.

He states that while it’s impossible for the perfect man to be the exclusive mate of all the women who desire him, women can still ‘mate hypergamously with the most sexually attractive men’:

It is possible, however, to enable women to mate hypergamously, i.e., with the most sexually attractive (handsome or socially dominant) men.

Hypergamy is an ‘irrational instinct’ that is ‘distinct from monogamy’:

This cannot be objectively true, of course. An average man would seem to be good enough for the average woman by definition. If women were to mate with all the men “worthy” of them they would have little time for anything else. To repeat, hypergamy is distinct from monogamy. It is an irrational instinct, and the female sexual utopia is a consequence of that instinct.

Chads acquire harems simply because they’re attractive:

Once monogamy is abolished, no restriction is placed on a woman’s choices. Hence, all women choose the same few men. If Casanova had 132 lovers it is because 132 different women chose him. Such men acquire harems, not because they are predators, but because they happen to be attractive.

Though he doesn’t entirely abandon the status aspect of hypergamy, as husbands being slightly older than wives on average is cited as evidence of hypergamy:

In fact, this is just one more example of hypergamous female mate selection. In most marriages, the husband is at least slightly older than the wife. Normal women tend to be attracted precisely to men in positions of authority.

As far as I’m aware, this is the first time the incel narrative was explicitly laid out in writing. I’m not sure exactly how much influence this essay had specifically; though it reportedly influenced some early red pill and PUA bloggers such as Heartiste. I believe that even without it, this idea would be popular today however, as the same misperceptions and emotions motivating it have only been amplified with dating apps and the ‘hook-up culture’ meme.

Essentially, neohypergamy imagines humans as a ‘lekking’ species. Incidentally, a favourite of neohypergamists is this diagram of Fisherian runaway theory, which has been invoked to explain extreme or ostentatious male ornaments in various species.

Unfortunately, human males don’t seem to have been sculpted into a race of giant gigachad hydras, despite neohypergamists’ belief that mass polygyny has been present throughout human history.

This meme is ridiculously pervasive in general, but beyond incels is perhaps shouted loudest by so-called ‘post-liberal’ reactionaries who seek to impose their preferred moral order on society. Neohypergamy is increasingly invoked to justify a restructuring of society: this is the dystopia that unfolds when you let people do what they want!

Unrestricted neohypergamy has been blamed for delayed or foregone marriage, fertility declines, social instability, political polarization, and even rising autism rates. The tone has grown increasingly histrionic and apocalyptic, with chudslop dealers like whatifalthist and hoemath prophesying calamities from civil war to societal collapse and young men dropping out en masse. Neohypergamy is often blamed for incel violence, with one evolutionary psychologist calling it a manifestation of ‘young male syndrome’ and essentially tying it to the black pill conception of the dating landscape.

After the Toronto van rampage in 2018, Jordan Peterson infamously said that enforced monogamy would’ve prevented it:

“He was angry at God because women were rejecting him,” Mr. Peterson says of the Toronto killer. “The cure for that is enforced monogamy. That’s actually why monogamy emerges.” Mr. Peterson does not pause when he says this. Enforced monogamy is, to him, simply a rational solution. Otherwise women will all only go for the most high-status men, he explains, and that couldn’t make either gender happy in the end. “Half the men fail,” he says, meaning that they don’t procreate. “And no one cares about the men who fail.” I laugh, because it is absurd.

“You’re laughing about them,” he says, giving me a disappointed look. “That’s because you’re female.” […] In situations where there is too much mate choice, “a small percentage of the guys have hyper-access to women, and so they don’t form relationships with women,” he said. “And the women hate that.”

Since these men were autistic, they would have faced issues regardless of the state of the ‘mating market’ – and not just in dating – so there’s no obvious need to invoke broad systemic marginalization to explain why they ended up where they did.

Nick Fuentes parrots neohypergamy talking points about Chad to steal away all the women (‘we’ve all seen the dating app statistics’), claiming that this imagined Chadopoly that is destroying society is the end result of ‘feminism’, ‘individualism’, ‘liberalism’, and ‘rationalism’:

Without the constraints of shame, marriage, monogamy, morality, this is just the way it is – the haves, have nots – very unstable society, very brutal society. It is the reality; we all have to deal with it. We have to live in reality; we can’t be in denial about these things. But there is something tragic here, which is that this really is the implication and the logical end state of women’s liberation; this is the logical end state of feminism. And what is feminism and women’s liberation but the logical conclusion of individualism and liberalism, rationalism?

So a lot of people take it very seriously, insisting that urgent action is required.

There’s a certain irony in those who claim to champion hierarchy arguing for the flattening of the sexual hierarchy they imagine benefits ‘Chad’. Joe Rogan, ever the astute observer, questioned how Jordan Peterson reconciled his ‘enforced monogamy’ with opposition to enforced equality of outcomes.

One could argue that it’s not an absolute endorsement of hierarchy but depends on the end result; yet enforced monogamists typically claim to oppose utilitarian reasoning, so you’d run into another inconsistency. Then again, few people are perfectly ideologically consistent, and most can probably imagine exceptional cases which would cause them to suspend their usual commitments.

Slopcasters have also hinted at the need to ‘intervene’ and ‘put systems in place’:

In a July episode that has since gone viral, a psychiatrist named Alok Kanojia refers to men who can’t find partners and procreate as a “mass extinction event,” a phenomenon that he and Bartlett then compare to genocide and cancer. “Does society have a responsibility to intervene in some way, to course correct this?” Bartlett asked Kanojia. “Should we put systems in place to make sure those men meet partners?

Slopcasts run on alarmism and sensationalist idiocy, so a neohypergamy-driven societal collapse is right up their alley, and when people spend hours pontificating into their fancy microphones about the ‘issues of society’, this narrative is bound to come up a lot.

Few may have caught on, but the meme of polygynous mass promiscuity facilitated by dating apps has been officially debunked. There is no increasing skew in men’s sexual partner distribution, which remains remarkably similar to women’s; there has not been a rise in promiscuity; and there is no sex imbalance in dating app outcomes such as dates and sexual encounters on the population level.

Another dimension of neohypergamy – a large gap in within-sex attractiveness between men and women who date or have sexual encounters through dating apps – has been less specifically addressed. We can imagine a scenario in which the same percentage of men and women engage through dating apps, but the men who do are on average significantly more attractive than the women. Additionally, it’s possible that these attractive men pull these women from the dating market while continuing to ‘play the field’ in ‘meatspace’.

However, since there isn’t good evidence for a uniquely male rise in sexlessness, this scenario seems unlikely. In the first scenario, a common claim is that men lower their standards for short-term engagements. An attractiveness gap between dating app matches wouldn’t necessarily reflect an effect of the apps if it is a product of broader sexual strategies, though it’s at least conceivable that apps have accentuated a pre-existing pattern.

The conventional narrative most people have been convinced of is that dating apps are a hyper-efficient facilitator of neohypergamy. By increasing market efficiency, they supposedly allow women to easily date men out of their league, while Chad feels no incentive to commit and creating an endless cycle of heartbreak. Previous articles have covered the effect of attractiveness and desirability in online dating websites by sex, so let’s get this out of the way before tackling the final question regarding dating apps and hopefully putting a bow on this.

‘Hypergamy’ on online dating websites

Neohypergamy and online dating frequently appear in the same discussion. This connection rests on two basic observations: the average man receives significantly less attention on online dating than the average woman, and more attractive men receive significantly more attention than less attractive ones. The assumed outcome is almost always the Chadopoly meme.

It’s relatively uncontroversial that men tend to prefer more attractive women; 500 pound grandmas don’t rank high in porn categories. This doesn’t necessarily manifest in men and women’s behaviour the same way… but it more or less does. Since a 2009 blog post from OkCupid, we have known that this preference results in similar messaging behaviour for both sexes. I won’t rehash the details here, but the fact that the OkCupid ratings are still being peddled out as ‘proof’ of neohypergamy 17 years later is a testament to the meme’s resilience to facts.

Another example comes from Bruch & Newman, who measured the desirability of profiles on a popular online dating site using PageRank – an algorithm that ranks someone based on how many people contact them and how desirable and selective those people are themselves. While not a direct measure of physical attractiveness, profile desirability is largely determined by it, and at the very least allows us to test a broader definition of hypergamy.

On average, men tended to message profiles about 26% above their own desirability, while women did 23%, though the modal message went to profiles of equal desirability. Sender desirability also similarly influenced reply rates, with senders roughly twice as likely to receive replies from significantly less desirable profiles than from more desirable ones.

It’s worth mentioning that over 80% of initial messages were sent by men. A similar pattern appears with dating app matches, though in this case women’s messages are less likely to be answered, perhaps because of mismatches caused by the mass-swiping of some men. Of course men are also overwhelmingly the initiators of dates in real life, so it’s not like this is a uniquely online pattern of behaviour.

Since the effect of desirability on receiving an initial message seems greater than that on receiving a reply, and men sent a disproportionate share of initial messages, this could’ve given men a ‘pursuer’s advantage’. Women’s higher overall chance of receiving a reply would help to counterbalance this though, and Kreager et al. found that repeated message exchanges tended to occur more commonly between similarly desirable partners.

Studies find that consensually rated attractiveness has either an equal effect for men and women or a stronger one for men. A study using data from HOTorNOT.com found that men were more influenced by consensual attractiveness than women, and less affected by their own attractiveness. In a field experiment, Egebark et al. (2021) found that while women received more responses overall, the effect of photo-rated attractiveness on the likelihood of receiving a reply was equal for both sexes, and people preferred more attractive profiles regardless of their own attractiveness.

There was on the other hand some evidence for old hypergamy, but this was driven by men preferring less educated women, while women showed no preference either way. Neyt et al. (2019) found that conversely, education had a positive effect on men’s but not women’s chance of being selected on Tinder. Again though, neohypergamists are rarely interested in educational hypergamy.

In summary, both men and women prioritize messaging more attractive people over less attractive ones, and by extension tend to message and reply to people higher in (within-sex) attractiveness than themselves (unless there isn’t much room above themselves). Is this ‘hypergamous’ behaviour? I don’t know; by the common usage of the term – ‘Chad gets all the attention’ – it would be, but in that case it’s a near-universal human behaviour rather than something uniquely female.

Sending a message is low investment and risk, so it’s not surprising that men try their luck – but a steeper desirability curve for men’s message success rate than women’s isn’t observed either. The question is: do these patterns carry over to modern dating apps?

‘Hypergamy’ on dating apps

A common critique of data from traditional online dating websites is that it’s outdated in the age of swipe-based apps. Unlike dating websites where you could generally message anyone you wanted to, messaging is gatekept by the matching process. Additionally, the data is reasonably old – but I’m not sure how salient this critique is, the claim is that hypergamy was only activated in the past decade for some reason.

Fundamentally, the process in dating apps isn’t too far removed from traditional websites. On websites, people would send messages and hope for a reply; on apps, people swipe right and hope it’s returned. The main difference is that on online dating websites, you could customize your message and write a more thorough profile, whereas on apps differentiation is more front-loaded into photos and bios, incentivizing snap judgments.

Neohypergamists tend to say those kind of factors don’t matter though – and honestly they may not make a big difference. Bruch & Newman observed that both sexes tended to write longer messages to more desirable partners, but the payoff was limited. Regardless, it’s not clear why this additional differentiating factor would negate neohypergamy. Instead, the ‘top x%’ may have simply been less singularly determined by looks.

I was able to find a good amount of data on actual outcomes, which showed comparable rates of men and women in the population meeting up, forming relationships, and having sex through dating apps. One question that wasn’t fully answered is how attractive are the men and women who match on average? Are women more likely to swipe right on and match with profiles more attractive than themselves, as is typically assumed?

The most cited data regarding dating apps is swipe rates between men and women: men swipe right on a lot more profiles. There is usually a mental jump from this to ‘most women are matching with Chads’, then to ‘most women are meeting Chads’, and finally to ‘most women are having sex with Chads’, while the rest of the men fight to be noticed by Jabba the Hutt’s long lost wife.

This is a popular meme graph that is periodically reposted by an evolutionary psychologist who co-authored a paper that argued that the ‘males-compete/females-choose’ model is misleading when applied to humans, who have a system of mutual courtship. He may not see this as in conflict, but most people who see the graph have the naïve impression of peacockish neohypergamy.

This graph is popular because it’s visually striking and validates men’s frustration with struggling to get matches. But what is it based on? It’s extrapolated from the reported percentage of profiles liked by 27 women polled on Tinder by what was effectively a ‘Chadfish’ account.

Here is what he calls the ‘biggest flaw in the analysis’:

I am only accounting for the percentage of “likes” and not the actual men they “like”. I have to assume that in general females find the same men attractive. I think this is the biggest flaw in this analysis, but currently there is no other way to analyze the data.

As covered previously, variation in attractiveness preferences is greater than commonly assumed, and this seems to be especially true among women. Nonetheless, the simple facts that some men are generally considered more attractive than others and that these men are more popular on dating apps are uncontroversial.

But what about the other side: is men’s attention towards women markedly more evenly distributed? Data on the male skew in likes received on Hinge is oft-cited, but the female distribution shows a relatively similar pattern. The male distribution is slightly more concentrated at the top, with a Gini coefficient of 0.73 compared with 0.63 for females.

Data from a study on Tinder users shows that match inequality is similar for both sexes, with the top 20% of both men and women accounting for about 87% of total matches. The top 10% of men held 75.7%, while the top 10% of women held 73.3%. For the top 5%, it was 63.2% and 55.2%, respectively.

Activity levels naturally affect how many matches a person accumulates, so someone with many matches may simply be more active than someone with few. We could imagine a scenario in which the men with the most matches tend to be highly desirable, while the women with the most matches are primarily the least selective and most active.

To my knowledge we haven’t had good data from dating apps to determine whether matches follow a neohypergamous pattern in terms of desirability – until this bombshell study dropped, which looked at both the desirability skew within each sex and the desirability difference between matches.

The authors analysed data from a Czech dating app, focusing on heterosexual users active in July 2017. They examined users’ first swipes and any reciprocated swipes in two dating networks: Brno, with 624 users (79.6% male) and 5,260 swipes, and Prague, with 2,321 users (75.1% male) and 36,665 swipes.

Across both networks, they found a desirability skew for both genders, which was actually more pronounced among women:

In the Brno network, the value of 0.15 for men suggests the incoming swipes are centralized for about 15% of their maximum possible centralization, while this reaches 34% for women. This is similar in the Prague network with indegree centralization among women far higher (21% of the maximum) than among men (11%), pointing at substantially steeper hierarchy among women than among men as the differences in the number of incoming swipes is much more pronounced among women in both networks.

When it came to overall desirability, a pattern similar to that seen on OkCupid emerged wherein even high-desirability men received fewer swipes than low-desirability women.

At the same time, in a counterintuitive twist the difference in standardized desirability between swiper and swipee was slightly positive for women, indicating they tended to swipe on men slightly below their own within-sex desirability. For men the difference was negative.

The authors then examined matches to assess how desirability-matched they were. In Brno, the mean difference in standardized desirability between matches was −0.032, and in Prague, it was −0.019 – similar to the gaps seen in women’s swiping patterns. The figure below compares the observed results to simulated networks in which swipes were randomly permuted while preserving overall swipe rates.

This result is somewhat surprising given men’s greater tendency to adopt a serial swiping strategy. On the other hand, because the analysis focused only on first swipes, they may have been paying more attention before falling into the rhythm.

There is a possibility that bots skewed the data, as their profiles would tend to present as attractive young women while being low in selectivity, but they took measures to account for this:

We tried to identify possible bots in the following way: we filtered out women who accepted (reciprocated) all the swipes they received, given that they have received at least 30 messages.5 We chose this criterion because there may be women who accepted all swipes because they had received only a few of them, and because women who received a lot of swipes do not have to be necessarily bots, they could only be highly desirable. After identifying such users, we omitted them from further analysis (Prague: n = 49, Brno: n = 5).

Another possible reason for the gap observed in this study is a higher consensus regarding the attractiveness of women than men. Eastwick & Smith (2018) found that participants’ own ratings of photos didn’t predict romantic desire differently for men and women, whereas norming ratings predicted desire more strongly for men, and idiosyncratic liking had a stronger effect for women.

The authors also add a caveat that women’s apparent willingness to ‘swipe down’ may be influenced by the lower variability in men’s desirability. Let’s just assume that it’s actually equal, as that’s a tough enough sell already.

As a Czech study, it may not map perfectly onto dating apps in other countries, but the basic dynamics in terms of the gender ratio and swipe rates were similar to that seen in the US, and since neohypergamy is framed as an intrinsic biological drive, it’s difficult to imagine that the cultural differences are enough to explain it.

What this shows is that, as with online dating and speed-dating studies, selecting fewer people doesn’t necessarily mean those selections are more concentrated on more consensually desirable individuals, and swiping on few profiles doesn’t mean swiping on the same few profiles – even if the swipes aren’t equally distributed either.

I’m not sure how necessary this is, but as a toy example, imagine two groups of 100 people. The first group swipes right one percent of the time on people in the bottom quintile, two percent on the second, and so on. The second group swipes ten percent on the bottom quintile, twenty percent on the second, and fifty percent on the top. The first group will have swiped on 3% of profiles, while the second will have swiped on 30% – yet the skew in swipes is identical.

We’ve already seen with online dating websites that casting a wider net doesn’t necessarily mean a reduced emphasis placed on attractiveness, as counterintuitive as that might sound. Dating apps appear to show a similar pattern, with swipes replacing initial messages and replies.

Again, when looking at actual outcomes – rather than lazy, hypersimplistic extrapolations from how frequently right-swipes are made – there is no gender imbalance among heterosexuals at the population level.

We now have all bases covered:

1. Equality of actual outcomes by gender.

2. ~Equality of desirability skew.

3. ~Equality of match skew.

4. ~Equality of within-sex desirability between matches.

What this means is that we are dealing with a mass delusion.

Making sense of the nonsense

It’s not hard to see why this narrative resonates. Because many men don’t get what they want from dating apps,6 it makes it easy to accept any negative conclusions about them, and it’s unrealistic to expect most people to suspend their emotional response and seek a more nuanced understanding. Those who saw apps as a potential godsend due to introversion or autism will be especially disappointed, and this can lead to a distorted perspective on the dating market if they depend on them as the sole meeting avenue. Contrary to popular myth, the majority of people still meet offline, even for hook-ups.

Neohypergamists are fond of repeating the ‘facts over feelings’ line, but what feelings does neohypergamy facilitate?

1. Envy: Chad is having the success I want to have.

2. Resentment: It’s the fault of society/women/Chad.

3. Sense of injustice: Chad is being picked over me for no reason other than superficial characteristics.

4. Insecurity: Chad mogs me; I am subhuman.

5. Hopelessness: It’s over; Chad always wins.

6. Paranoia: The dating market is rigged by a Chad cabal; society is gaslighting us about it.

7. Excitement: An incel uprising is around the corner; I will be an epic warrior in a Mad Max-style wasteland. Chad will be at my mercy.

8. Basedness: I may not be Chad, but I am based and truthpilled; normies are bluepilled gynocentric cucks.

They may not be the only reason people believe in neohypergamy, but these feelings create a strong attraction to it for many. That said, while the facts are clearly against neohypergamy, I would grant that many people reject it for emotional reasons without an empirical justification. I would go as far as to say that most have very little to back up their stance, which likely contributes to the manosphere’s self-image as the side of data and studies.

Ultimately, neohypergamy is an idea that serves to advance a social justice agenda that seeks to redress perceived systemic injustices and inequalities. People see the viral meme stats, hear the talking points, and embark on a mission to proselytize and wake society up – to make people ‘woke’. Manoslop and the many ‘young male crisis’ merchants such as Scott Galloway and Steven Bartlett, feed into the moral panic with a non-stop stream of alarmist propaganda and outrage porn. The media sees their success and joins in.

One reason why neohypergamy has flourished almost unopposed is that it has something for everyone. It most obviously appeals to incels who want to lump themselves in with the majority (while simultaneously deriding ‘normies’), but it also appeals to non-incel men who are granted ‘Chad’ status by default; to reactionaries who welcome more ammunition for forming their trad reich; to leftists who feel they have failed to appeal to young men or who see it as another social justice cause; to women who like the sense of power and self-esteem it gives them; and to grifters who traffic in grievance.

Of course, it doesn’t appeal to everyone in these groups, and there is more conflict with the interests of some of them than others, but the fact that there are no large groups who are meaningfully critical of it means there is very little pushback. The immense moral indignation surrounding neohypergamy creates reflexive outrage at any take outside the conventional narrative. The more entrenched this narrative becomes and the more people work each other up over it, the harder it becomes to criticize.

After more than a decade since this narrative started gaining traction, the discussion hasn’t moved forward even an inch, and those who are supposed to ‘make sense’ of things have done absolutely nothing to inject any nuance into it or to understand in greater depth how different mechanisms and behaviours interact to produce what outcomes. To the extent that anybody belonging to the ‘intellectual elite’ has anything to say about it, they tend to have the same offensively surface level approach as anyone with a 60 IQ.7

Despite its immense popularity, neohypergamy is typically framed as a ‘brutal truth’, with believers positioning themselves as brave truth tellers. Ideas perceived as politically incorrect or edgy gain a massive advantage in the online marketplace of ideas, regardless of factual accuracy. Defending an unexciting, unedgy position requires presenting it ten times as effectively just to have a fighting chance. The debunks aren’t all that interesting like for example flat earth debunks can be, which only makes the uphill battle steeper.

It sounds almost too simple, but much of it may come down to a misperception whereby differences in desire for casual sex are interpreted as ‘women are dtf with Chad, and only Chad’, i.e. ‘Chadsexuality’. The idea that women are highly interested in casual sex and that we inhabit a ‘hook-up culture’ is extremely pervasive. As I’ve said before, if this is an underlying assumption, it naturally follows that it must be happening for only a minority of men, since most men aren’t experiencing it for themselves. These moral panics are largely intertwined, with critics of ‘hook-up culture’ and the ‘sexual revolution’ such as Louise Perry frequently using neohypergamy as a supporting argument.

‘Hypergamy’ is often used to gesture at women being more ‘selective’. The term ‘selective’, like hypergamy, is interpreted however people want. Once it’s agreed that women are more ‘selective’, black pillers will take this as confirmation of their specific conception of selectivity which is hyperpromiscuity directed at ‘Chad’. While it’s trivially true that women are ‘the selectors’ in terms of deciding whether to accept or reject a man’s advance in most cases, men’s decision about who to ask out is also a selection, and it’s not made blindly.

The interpartner correlation for physical attractiveness is about 0.4 (0.5 after correcting for attenuation), which is about what you’d expect if both sides had similar input, as the correlation between observer-rated attractiveness and being selected in speed-dates is about the same for both sexes. As shown in a previous article, the women in couples are rated as more attractive by both sexes, meaning that if anything, men are more looks-hypergamously paired – though maybe not in terms of within-sex attractiveness.

Also trivially true is that women are more ‘selective’ with who they have sex with; but this doesn’t automatically validate the incel conception of selectivity which views this selectivity not as sexual restrictiveness but of Chadsexual promiscuity. There is perhaps some debate to be had about whether casual sex shows a female looks-hypergamy pattern, even if it’s not seen in other contexts. If it does, the effect isn’t significant: the correlation between men’s attractiveness and sex partner count, including one-night stands, is weak, and it doesn’t seem like there’s a negative effect for women either – though it may be even smaller.

It’s certainly plausible that women have more deal breakers than men – such as unemployment, poor social skills, or listening to Joe Rogan – but this is rarely what’s meant by ‘more selective’ in online discourse or neohypergamy; it almost always refers to physical attractiveness. One reason for this is that attractiveness is highly moralized, so being more ‘selective’ about it is judged as particularly ‘unfair’. If women are more selective about looks it’s probably less about absolute attractiveness than it is preferences for a particular type, e.g. prettyboys vs. rugged jocks.

Finishing thoughts

I might be starting to sound like a broken record, but guess what? So is everyone repeating black pill talking points. If this blog has seemed somewhat repetitive, blame the endless regurgitation of the same memes and stats on a daily basis. It’s actually pretty remarkable to me the vacuum that exists regarding serious criticism of incel ideology considering how enormously influential it has been. I don’t really have an adequate answer for why – you’d think someone would try to capitalize on this untapped market.

Most manoslop-critical content is either its inverse (femslop) or dumb drama. There is no shortage of content mocking manotards and incels – we’re seeing plenty now with the Clavicular circus – but very little in the way of substantive analysis. They exploit this vacuum to posture as renegade scholars bringing ‘black pill science’ to the table while framing everyone else as having to resort to shaming tactics. Perhaps criticizing the manosphere from a more objective, data-based perspective simply lacks mass appeal.

While it is a stupid extrapolation, I don’t think everyone who makes it is stupid, nor that I’ve arrived at the conclusion that it’s wrong through some unique genius. There are simply strong incentives to believe or promote it, whether emotional, political or ideological, or monetary. People don’t feel compelled to scrutinize it, as it’s serving a useful purpose for them. Some just haven’t put much thought and research into it and place too much faith in consensus – whether in the broader culture or within their niche group.

When it comes down to it, ‘hypergamy’ as used online mostly functions as an edgy buzzword that is used to vent or as a slur, and the whole narrative constructed around it is pure cope. There is no there there. Yes, dating apps aren’t great; no, they aren’t triggering a hypergapocalypse. End of.

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Popular discourse has it that height has a large effect on men’s dating success, which has been amplified by dating apps. Fortunately, since height is a readily measured trait, there is no shortage of data, making this claim readily testable. Here we’ll look at the percentage of men who are either married or cohabiting by height1 using the 2020–2024 waves of the National Health Interview Survey.

Among non-Hispanic white men aged 18–24, there is little variation in relationship status across the height continuum, though there’s a hint that the shortest men (63 inches or below) are somewhat less likely to be partnered.

Among non-Hispanic white men aged 25–34, a clearer penalty for men 64 inches or shorter appears, comprising 1.16% of men. So men at the extreme left tail take a decent hit, but above that threshold height is effectively irrelevant.

The average height reported by women in the same age and ethnicity group was 64.7 inches, so the relationship penalty seems to become evident only when men fall below the average female height. It’s also worth considering that given self-reported height is exaggerated by roughly 1–2 cm on average among young men, those reporting 5’4 may in reality be closer to 5’3.2

A logistic regression using 64 inches or below as the reference group among non-Hispanic white men aged 18–34 finds a significant effect of heights above 64 inches on relationship status.3 Men above 64 inches overall had an odds ratio of 3.11 relative to the shortest group. Among 18–24 men, the effect remained (barely) significant (OR = 2) when including other ethnicities to ensure a sufficient sample size.4 It may have been attenuated due to 5’4 meaning something different for other ethnicities.

Height interacted with ethnicity in predicting relationship status. The effect is significantly smaller and not statistically significant for Hispanic men5 – which may be due to the lowest height option in this dataset being 5’3 or below, which includes 7.1% of Hispanic men – and also for black men when analysing height categorically or focusing on the 25–34 age group (there were also somewhat more black men who were 5’4 or below).

This relatively limited effect raises the question: why has such an intense fixation developed around this trait in particular?

Is heightfidence real?

One of the clever terms black pillers use to ridicule the notion that personality matters is ‘heightfidence’. The implication here is probably less that tall men are actually more confident – though this is a common view – and more that tall men are perceived as more confident thanks to the ‘halo effect’. Nonetheless, could an association with self-esteem help explain the exaggerated perception of height’s importance in dating?

Height is often considered central to manhood; tall men are perceived as more dominant and powerful. As a readily visible trait, it serves as an obvious benchmark for social comparison. It’s reasonable to expect that a lack thereof may therefore induce feelings of inadequacy. In an era where men’s relative status has declined, height may feel especially salient as a traditional status marker.

Studies have not found that short boys are more likely to be bullied or socially rejected:

• Borg (1999): In a survey of 6,282 pupils aged 9 to 14, no significant differences were found in height between occasional and frequent victims, occasional and frequent bullies, occasional bullies and victims, nor frequent bullies and victims at any grade level.

• Sweeting & West (2001): In a large sample of 11-year-olds, self-reported teasing and bullying, along with additional ratings from parents, teachers, and nurses, showed no difference based on height, though several other traits such as weight showed an effect.

• Sandberg et al. (2004): In a sample of 956 students from grades 6 to 12, no significant relationship was detected between height and peer perceptions of friendship, popularity, or reputation. Shorter students were perceived as younger than their age.

But perhaps it’s more subtle forms of devaluation. Several early studies found no effect of height on self-esteem (Graziano et al., 1978; Hensley, 1983). Wang et al. (2017) examined 3,344 children aged 10 to 16 in rural China, finding that taller girls expressed higher self-esteem, but this wasn’t true for boys. Prieto & Robbins (1975) found a small nonsignificant effect of which was a bit higher and significant for self-evaluated height and other-evaluated height. Booth et al. (1990) found a small non-gendered effect that was nonlinear, with both short and tall people having lower self-esteem.

Gupta et al. (2015) analysed data from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study, finding that height had a small effect on psychological wellbeing6 in middle age, but it wasn’t robust to controls. No relationship with depression was found.

In Wave III of the Add Health survey, there was a small correlation between height and self-esteem7 for both men and women (0.05–0.06), but it was no longer significant after controlling for Hispanic status, as Hispanics were both shorter and lower in self-esteem for unrelated reasons.

Haysom et al. (2015) found no correlation between height and extraversion in a large sample of Australian twins aged around 16.

Maybe it really is all in your head, bro.

Though when specifically asked about height-related self-esteem, a clearer correlation emerges. Frederick et al. (2006) found that in a huge sample of adults, there was little association between height and self-rated body attractiveness or comfort in a swimsuit, with correlations ranging from r = .00 to .05 for both men and women. However, most shorter-than-average men desired to be taller, while most taller-than-average men were satisfied with their height. The percentage of variance in height satisfaction explained by actual height was 34% for men and 15% for women. A subsequent study found that male satisfaction with height increased until average height, after which it stabilized.

This might be somewhat biased by people feeling they’re ‘supposed’ to feel worse about being shorter, or otherwise height simply plays a very minor role in overall self-esteem. Anecdotally, this tracks – some of the most exuberant characters I’ve encountered have been some of the shortest. Also some of the most obnoxious, mind you. Regarding the ‘Napoleon complex’, one study found that dark triad traits were associated with shortness and also the desire to be taller in both sexes. They interpret these results as short people compensating with antagonistic behaviour. I don’t know about that, but thought it was somewhat amusing and worth mentioning.

The ultimate ‘immutable trait’

A large appeal of height as an explanatory variable is that it stands out among others as the most clearly immutable trait that can’t be meaningfully changed – putting aside risky, expensive procedures that you have to fly to Turkey to undergo and which will probably make you look disproportionate. Lifts and posture hacks are about all you have to alter perceived height. Factors like body composition, grooming, style, wealth, status, social skills, confidence, and facial attractiveness can be worked on to some extent. We can debate how malleable each factor truly is, but regardless, the general perception remains the same.

There is an appeal in genetic filters that block you from even getting your foot through the door, as they relieve the burden of ‘agency’ and provide a ‘justification’ for failure – it feels less like one’s ‘fault’. I use scare quotes because these frames can be criticized, but again, to understand the appeal we have to work within the frames of those who it appeals to, as well as broader society. Most people operate under the notions of libertarian free will and a highly malleable mind, where these concepts are more straightforward.

This perceived importance of a seemingly trivial and inconsequential trait dictated by a genetic dice roll is taken as validation of what is seen as a ‘cynical’ worldview whereby society is ‘superficial’8 to the point of absurdity. The idea that the system is ruthlessly rigged against men who fail to meet an arbitrary height threshold creates solidarity through a shared persecution narrative that gives their struggle meaning. A perceived hypocrisy is often drawn in that society preaches body positivity for large women but is silent on the plight of small men.

The height pill is presented as a raw truth nuke that blows up both blue pill and red pill/PUA delusions that are perceived as selling a ‘feel-good’ story that leaves room for hope and self-improvement. To embrace a rigid hierarchy wherein one’s value is determined by inherent morphological characteristics is to reject egalitarian sentimentality. The imagined psychological barriers preventing less brave souls from accepting the harsh truth about the primacy of height adds to its psychological appeal for some.

In the black pill framework, the more you exaggerate the significance of morphological characteristics like stature, the more ‘truthful’ and ‘honest’ you’re being, and the more you’re triggering Reddit soyboys and feminists. ‘Downplaying’ the role of height risks coming across as a ‘bluepilled simp’ or a ‘gaslighting tallf*g’. To maintain social cred, black pillers and co. feel compelled to place undue emphasis on it. Statements like ‘it’s over for sub-6 ft manlets’ are rewarded as ‘based’, and so the collective opinion shifts further in the ‘based’ direction over time.

The height meme ecosystem

There is a whole meme ecosystem built around height. Its visual immediacy, quantifiability, and the amusement people get from exaggerating it make it particularly meme-friendly. Certain celebrities are endlessly memed on for their height, even when they’re not objectively short.9

Memes featuring a 5’11 midget being towered over by a 6’ guy or height charts with things like ‘consider suicide’ at 5’10 or under reinforce the perceived significance of height under the guise of ironic humour and self-deprecation. Viral ragebait videos of women saying they only accept 6’ or taller men are presented by black pillers as a confirmation of their grievances.

The ‘short king’ counter-meme arose partly as ‘wholesome’ self-deprecation and as an attempt to reclaim dignity. This response might have done more harm than good by perpetuating height as a ubiquitous fixture in online discourse, not to mention the patronizing undertone that subtly reinforces the framing of moderate shortness as a serious deficiency requiring compensation.

The meme culture surrounding height helps keep the topic alive in the public consciousness, which has probably made it easier for people to accept black pill claims about its real life significance. Even mid heighters or slightly above can become paranoid and get sucked in, finding the memes intriguing or entertaining and feeling like they must be onto something if they’re so popular.

Many are apparently convinced that being 5’8 is ‘game over’ for men; not because of any real data, not even because of personal experience, but simply because it’s a trendy narrative.

The fact that height is so deeply ingrained in meme culture makes pointing to data like that presented here not only intolerable to those emotionally invested in the height pill, but also makes one a killjoy to people who enjoy the comedic side of it.

Dating apps

Dating apps have been depicted as ushering in an era of unprecedented ‘eugenic selection’ on men’s physical morphology. This is a cope; dating apps have had minimal impact on the dating landscape. I did not find evidence of an increasing effect of height on number of sex partners or relationship status following their introduction. Moreover, while the methodology may not be ideal, a mock-dating app study using a conjoint design with height shown in cm on profiles found only a very small effect.

The alleged Bumble height filter graph is one of the most widely circulated meme stats; it is most likely fake. Another way they could influence perception is by seeing ‘tall/x height guys only’ in bios, or being ghosted after height comes up. Such experiences receive disproportionate subjective weight. Even if it’s only one in a hundred or more bios, it might feel like a significant amount – especially when viral screenshots and anecdotes are added to the mix, and when men receive little attention in general.

Concluding rant

There is a predictable list of rejoinders to outcome data like this. When it comes to relationship status, the most common objection is that ‘tall Chads are slaying’, so this metric doesn’t capture what really matters. This has been addressed – the effect of height is no larger for sex partner number, nor for sexlessness. There is also a common shifting of the goalposts to partner quality. Regardless of the situation there, the discourse around height is not ‘taller men have more attractive partners’, but ‘manlets are doomed and excluded entirely’, with ‘manlet’ rarely referring strictly to genuinely short men, but being elastic enough to encompass a large share of men.

Black pillers position themselves as hyper-rational data warriors concerned only with the cold hard facts. The ‘scientific black pill’ branding makes this posture explicit. This is a facade. The whole thing is oriented around two imperatives:

1. Portraying the dating market as maximally skewed.

2. Reducing dating outcomes entirely to physical traits.

Any evidence that threatens this agenda is rejected as a ‘blue pill’ or ‘cope’. These terms are meant to denote a comforting delusion, yet are routinely used to reject any inconvenient evidence. Debunking specific claims only moves a minority of believers, and perhaps some onlookers on the fence. Similar to conspiracy theorists, they think they’ve ‘cracked the code’. This sense of revelation contributes to the allure of the black pill worldview, making tearing it down almost like tearing away someone’s raison d’être.

Some adherents will have the audacity to claim this as a victory, as if the magnitude of the effect here is in any way consistent with what the black pill preaches. In this way, the black pill becomes essentially unfalsifiable: so long as it’s ‘directionally true’ it can be declared a W. People are too quick to concede that ‘well maybe there is a grain of truth to it’. Nuance and concessions can’t be a one-sided deal.

Should some sympathy be extended to men in the bottom 1% of height who have a harder time of it? Sure. But for ‘black pillers’ who blame height when they’re 5’9 or something, it’s pure cope, and if anything stolen valour from the real Oompa Loompas out there.

Having now looked quite thoroughly at the empirical reality (in previous articles mostly), I find myself questioning why there is such a vast discrepancy between the modest predictive power of this trait and the dramatic impact so many believe it to have. I’ve had a crack at it here, but I’m sure there’s more to say on it.

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Contrarianism is a seductive identity. You get to feel special, intellectually and morally superior to the masses. You get to feel brave for swimming against the tide. There’s a romantic allure to taking on the role of the underdog – the little guy taking on the system, armed with little more than uncomfortable truths and unyielding conviction.

In practice it’s generally not quite so noble. The thrill of provocation can encourage an oppositional identity defined more by negation than affirmation. This pattern can be observed in the dissident right, where antisemitism takes precedence over pro-whiteness. It can easily descend into its own form of dogmatism, where the edginess of a position is valued over truth or principle.

Contrarianism isn’t immune to banality. What happens when a contrarian take becomes high status or predictable within a certain milieu – memeified and commodified? Someone with strong contrarian impulses may choose to reposition themselves as a contrarian among contrarians, becoming a ‘meta-contrarian’.

With the rise of a contrarian counterculture comes a rise in dissent among dissenters: ‘I’m not like the normies, but I’m not like all these chuds either’. The contrarian instinct turns inward. A meta-contrarian might deliberately adopt ironic or unexpected stances, either to set themselves apart or as a commentary on the dogmatism of the dissident subculture they once saw as a haven for independent thought.

Case study: Nick Fuentes

Nick Fuentes rose to fame in large part through his shock jock antics and ironic humour. By positioning himself against both the liberal and conservative establishments, he cultivated an audience that was aroused by his anti-establishment transgression.

Contrarianism and questioning sacred cows have always had a place in political discourse, but the online attention economy has turbocharged it. Participants are now caught in an arms race, constantly escalating the extremity and outrageousness of their positions to outdo both opponents and their own prior takes to which their audience has now grown desensitized.

Through memes and repetition, he and the broader alt right have helped normalize neo-Nazism online, giving it the appearance harmless fun. Were people shocked by him and other POC or neurodivergent Nazis throwing up roman salutes to NHH? Some Jewish boomers may have been, but for others the reaction tended to be more of a wince or sigh. Even when NHH was released, I don’t think many people were shaking in their boots. Part of this may relate to the blackness and mental illness of the artist involved, but more than anything the shock value has largely worn off.

This has left Fuentes in an awkward spot. He still goes along with the Nazi larping when his edgelord posse invites him to the club, and will still stand by his Hitler admiration when confronted by Karens like Piers Morgan, but is his heart still in it?

Lately, he has expressed increasing disillusionment for the chud culture he once revelled in, flirting with other 20th century dictators:

It’s easy to stan Hitler, but actually courageous to support Stalin. Every basic b*tch edgelord can love Hitler.

Now that Nazi larping is safe edgy and increasingly self-parodic, where do you go from here? How do you keep people’s interest and maintain your crown as king of provocateurs? He has to find new and creative ways to subvert expectations. What’s something that basically nobody dares defend?

Mr. Lolita Express.

It wasn’t long ago that he was criticizing Trump for covering up the ‘Epstein scandal’, demanding the release of the files. Now he’s minimizing it, arguing that it wasn’t really pedophilia: ackshually, ‘they weren’t trafficking 5-year-olds’. He’s even gone so far as to style merch after him.

As the tweet implies, this seems like a bizarre twist: he rails against elite corruption and Jewish influence… yet defends Epstein?

In a sense, this is entirely unshocking, amounting to just another escalation in an effort to stand out and remain visible. His posturing is explicit:

Sometimes we have to be on a villain arc. That’s okay, I’ll be a little unpopular. I’ve been unpopular before. I like it better.

This pivot probably isn’t a huge deal, as it can be framed as just another troll job, and the moral disgust that normal people display is seen as a sign of weakness in such communities. But these moves have the potential to alienate allies, and calls into question the long-term sustainability of the trolling strategy: what is the next level of insanity?

In a conversation with Richard Spencer – a figure who has leaned strongly into meta-contrarianism, having gone from ‘hail Trump, hail our people, hail victory!’ to supporting Biden and Kamala, Ukraine, and opposing ICE – Fuentes says how he would ‘rather live in a diverse city than the trad Catholic commune in Coeur d’Alene, or the trad city in Kansas, or the whites-only town’. They also talk about how people have a preference for liberalism.

You can probably think of a few other names who have made the transition more completely than Fuentes.

Is this the ironic endpoint of endless contrarianism – becoming the ‘libtard NPC’ you once looked down upon?

The verdict on meta-contrarianism

Meta-contrarianism may seem seductive to contrarians who have grown disenchanted with chudslop, but it comes with its own hazards:

• A meta-contrarian can become preoccupied with signalling how clever and above it all they are rather than engaging in genuine inquiry or concrete action.

• It can devolve into its own reflexive game wherein positions are adopted not out of genuine conviction but because they trigger the chuds.

• If you’re always thinking about your own thinking, you can end up stuck in epistemic paralysis.

• Audiences who demand a clear agenda might become frustrated that they can’t pin the meta-contrarian down.

• A meta-contrarian risks alienating even other dissidents and outcasts, creating a lonely world without allies.

Despite these potential pitfalls, it can offer a valuable lens for understanding the online marketplace of ideas and the incentives that undergird it. It can expose the status games that govern communities and how ‘dissent’ becomes formulaic. It can cultivate self-reflexivity: awareness of not just what you think, but why you think it, and how your thinking maps onto wider social patterns.

Ideally, it doesn’t just circle back to reactive posturing or a reflexive defence of the status quo. A contrarian might pass through a phase of re-evaluating and ironizing their previous worship of opposition before ultimately abandoning contrarianism as a governing principle altogether.

Sadly, nuance and epistemic humility are hard sells, as they lack excitement and aren’t effective tools for mobilization. Relatedly, the next article coming soon will explore the fun factor of conspiratorial thought, before a highly important one after that.

Autism makes dating harder. This shouldn’t be a controversial statement, and for most people, it isn’t. Autism-coded characters in media often reflect this reality, and dating shows have been built around the premise. Yet there’s one group where this notion is met with strong resistance – ironically, the very community most likely to be affected.

While the incel community contains a high concentration of self-identified autistic males, it has long had an uneasy relationship with autism as an explanatory factor, always fighting for a seat at the table. The core premise of the black pill1 is that dating and social outcomes are reducible to physical appearance. Naturally, this leaves little room for autism; a disorder of the mind rather than the face.

How is the reflexive dismissal of autism as a ‘cope’ reconciled with its correlation with incel identification? There are a few standard responses:

1. ‘But autistic Chad still slays!’

2. Autism is just a product of lookism.

3. Autism is associated with facial dysmorphology, which is the real problem.

The first response is an inane non-sequitur. Would a ‘giga-NT’ being able to get away with being ugly invalidate the importance of looks? Even if ‘Chad’ can bypass social barriers, this tells us nothing about autism’s effect across the broader attractiveness spectrum. The only way this warrants dismissing autism entirely is if one already buys into the ‘Chad-only’ delusion.

In terms of the second response, I’ve always found it amusing how a group that preaches genetic determinism holds such a distinctly non-genetic view of autism and personality in general. Genetic determinism for the face, but environmental determinism for the mind. Very woke and social constructionist-pilled.

I’ll briefly note that I’ve found very little empirical evidence supporting the lookism model of personality development, which asserts that behaviour is downstream from appearance-based social feedback. At most, we find very small correlations between physical attractiveness and personality or mental health, and longitudinal studies fail to show that changes in attractiveness affect psychosocial development. In fact, Magson et al. (2022) found that the reverse: changes in mental health weakly predicted changes in observer-rated physical attractiveness, but not vice versa. Moreover, unlike identical twins raised apart, unrelated lookalikes don’t share similar personalities.

There are also additional challenges the lookism model faces when attempting to explain autism:

• Neurodevelopmental differences: There are noticeable differences in brain structure and connectivity between autistic and neurotypical (NT) people. Being less popular is unlikely to drastically alter neurology in this way.

• Early emergence: Signs of autism are observable between 6–12 months, before social hierarchy and peer rejection have had a chance to take effect. Altered thalamocortical connectivity has been detected in 6-week-old infants at high familial risk.

• GENES: Autism is highly heritable, and numerous autism-linked genes have been identified. I guess these are actually genes that determine jawline and canthal tilt.

• Non-social symptoms: Autism symptoms like sensory hypersentitivies, motor coordination impairments, and repetitive behaviours can’t be plausibly explained by lookism. Does lookism explain why certain fabrics feel like sandpaper?

• Sex ratio: Autism is far more commonly diagnosed in males, but research surrounding appearance-based treatment doesn’t tend to show larger effects for men.

• Most ugly people are NT: Are we denying that the vast majority of ugly people are NT? Why are outcomes so heterogeneous if lookism is ubiquitous and leads to autistic behaviour?

• Low-functioning cases: Does lookism also explain those with intellectual impairment and language delay, or do low- and high-functioning autistic people actually not share the same broader disorder?

These facts together allow us to safely reject the lookism hypothesis of autism. It suffers from many of the same problems as the discredited refrigerator mother theory and is arguably on even thinner ground. While the dysmorphology hypothesis also seems like a post hoc attempt to preserve a reductionist framework, it’s possible it has more merit. So, are autistic people less attractive? Demonstrating this would be a good start, even if it doesn’t automatically validate the claim that autism’s relational effects are entirely aesthetically mediated.

Are autistic people less attractive?

‘Normies’ often remark how Elliot Rodger – who, like Alek Minassian and Jake Davison, was diagnosed with autism – was a good looking guy, pointing to him as a contradiction to the aesthetic reductionism of the black pill. When incels call Elliot Rodger ugly, it’s clearly backwards reasoning. If he weren’t known to be an incel and were just a guy with an attractive girlfriend, they’d say, ‘Of course he does, just look at him!’ They begin with the known outcome and then retrofit his looks to fit. Because looks are assumed to have a 1:1 correlation with dating and social outcomes, someone’s attractiveness can be inferred without even seeing their face.

Of course, since they often promote the ‘sub-8 law’, they may simply say that these incel killers weren’t ugly, but just weren’t Chad enough. However, this puts them in the awkward position of lacking an explanation for their autism. Why did they just happen to be autistic if their looks don’t explain it?

Even Chris Chan was decent looking back in the day.

Of course, you can cherry-pick examples on both ends of the looks spectrum. But is there any evidence that autistic people are uglier on average, or at least more ‘weird’ looking?

Facial dysmorphology in autism

Autism has often been considered an ‘invisible disability’. Compared to conditions like Down syndrome, this is certainly true. However, numerous studies have documented the presence of dysmorphology in autistic individuals. When early developmental processes are disrupted, the effects aren’t limited to the brain, they can also leave traces on the body in the form of minor physical anomalies (MPAs): subtle morphological deviations primarily affecting the face, head, hands, and feet. As a neurodevelopmental disorder, autism is naturally associated with elevated rates of MPAs.

Tripi et al. (2008) found that children with autism presented with significantly higher rates of MPAs in four regions: the head, ears, mouth, and hands. Out of 41 MPAs assessed, three best discriminated autism from controls: abnormal head circumference, abnormal cephalic index, and abnormal palate. Angkustsiri et al. (2011) classified children as dysmorphic if three or more MPAs were present, finding 47.6% of developmentally delayed children were dysmorphic, followed by 17.4% of autistic and 5.4% of NT children. Dysmorphic autistic children were also more likely to experience seizures.

Shapira et al. (2019) examined 397 potential major and minor anomalies per child, ultimately assessing 276–307 features depending on ethnicity. Overall, 17.1% of autistic children were classified as dysmorphic (>95th percentile), compared to 4.6% of NT children. Excluding genetic disorders and major anomalies slightly attenuated the difference.

Ozgen et al. (2011) assessed 683 standardized morphological features in 224 autistic patients without known syndromes or intellectual disability, alongside matched controls. Minor anomalies were defined as features with a prevalence of 4% or lower in the general population, as opposed to common variants. With respect to major abnormalities, one or more were present in 43.8% of autistic patients compared to 12.5% of controls. Minor anomalies were present in virtually all autistic patients compared to 58.9% of controls, and substantially more autistic patients showed a large number. Common variants were also more frequent in autistic patients.

After correction for multiple comparisons, 48 of the 683 assessed morphological features distinguished autistic patients from controls. Autistic patients also had larger inner and outer canthal distances.

Dysmorphology and autism severity

MPAs are more common in individuals with more severe autism and lower cognitive ability, likely due to greater disruptions in early development. Miles et al. (2005) classified autistic individuals into complex/dysmorphic and essential/non-dysmorphic autism. Complex autism was associated with lower IQs, more seizures, abnormal EEGs and MRIs, and comorbid syndromes, whereas essential autism was more familial and had a higher male-to-female ratio.

Complex autism is also linked to a greater burden of CNVs.2 Gannon et al. (2011) found that children with microarray-detected genomic anomalies were much more likely to exhibit craniofacial dysmorphism, and those with dysmorphic features often had lower IQs or an autism diagnosis. Chen et al. (2022) confirmed that while both dysmorphic and non-dysmorphic autism cases show overtransmission of common autism-associated genetic variants, dysmorphic autism carries a significantly higher burden of rare variants and is associated with lower IQ.

Following detailed physical examinations, Wong et al. (2014) classified 136 patients (10.8%) as dysmorphic and 1,125 (89.21%) as non-dysmorphic. Dysmorphic individuals were significantly more likely to have learning disabilities, epilepsy, and abnormal MRI/CT results. The most frequently observed dysmorphic features included macrocephaly, prominent forehead, large ears, and hypertelorism, with ear anomalies being particularly common, consistent with earlier findings.

Manouilenko et al. (2014) found that in the high MPA group, MPAs correlated with lower overall functioning and greater severity of psychiatric symptoms. In the low MPA group, MPAs correlated with autistic traits measured by the AQ and with ADOS-4 scores in men. The shape of the ears was also associated with autistic traits in the autistic group.

Myers et al. (2017) analysed a twin sample of 116 pairs and found a modest association between ASD diagnosis and MPAs. This association remained significant after controlling for ADHD and other neurodevelopmental disorders, but not after controlling for IQ. However, MPAs were robustly associated with autistic traits across the sample, even after adjusting for IQ.

More severe and conspicuous craniofacial anomalies, such as orofacial clefts and craniosynostosis, are much rarer in autistic individuals compared to those with intellectual disabilities, with significantly higher rates only found among syndromic cases.3

Beyond simply counting anomalies, distinct facial phenotypes associated with autism have been identified. Using 3D facial imaging and cluster analysis, Aldridge et al. (2011) found that boys with autism showed subtle but statistically significant differences in facial morphology, including broader mouths, orbits, and upper faces, as well as a flatter nasal bridge and reduced midface/philtrum height. Facial morphology wasn’t homogeneous within the autistic group: two distinct subgroups emerged, corresponding to different clinical profiles.

The first subgroup was characterized by reduced midline facial height, broader mouths, and a longer, taller chin. It also had more severe autistic traits, lower IQ, fewer Asperger’s diagnoses (8%), and higher rates of seizures and language regression. The second was characterized by broader upper faces and a shorter philtrum, and more closely resembled an Asperger’s profile (60% diagnosed), with earlier speech onset, higher IQ, and higher rates of macrocephaly. Therefore, the subgroup with more pronounced and numerous deviations had the more severe autism profile.

Obafemi-Ajayi et al. (2015) studied an overlapping dataset and separated autism spectrum disorders into different subgroups using different methodology, finding three facial clusters in boys with autism based on facial height, midface dimensions, and mouth width. One cluster, marked by widened maxillary midface and reduced surface facial heights, consistently showed more severe autism, while another marked by increased surface facial heights, a reduction in midface height, and broader mouth, largely replicated the subgroup identified by Aldridge et al.

Cheung et al. (2011) found that children with autism had greater inter-orbital distance compared to controls, consistent with infant head size expansion in autism. Inter-orbital distance was also positively correlated with medial temporal lobe volume, linking optical MPAs to ‘social brain’ dysmorphology. Tripi et al. (2019) reported that increased inter-orbital distance and reduced facial midline height were associated with greater autism severity.

How bad are minor physical anomalies?

Now, black pillers may be rejoicing at these findings: ‘Aha, autists are ugly! Another W for the black pill!’ But not so fast. The leap from ‘higher MPA counts’ to ‘subhuman’ still needs justification. The key word here is ‘minor’: many of these anomalies are only noticeable under close inspection. At the same time, black pillers obsess over ‘mms of bone’. Are these statistical deviations meaningful, or do they get drowned out by the overall gestalt of the face?

A couple of early studies directly tested this relationship. Rosenberg & Weller (1973) found that teachers didn’t rate children with high MPAs as lower in attractiveness. Similarly, in Rapoport & Quinn (1975), MPAs didn’t correlate with a nurse’s or special-education teacher’s attractiveness ratings of hyperactive children, but they did correlate with the teacher’s ratings of hyperactivity, conduct problems, and a history of head-banging in infancy.

One might assume that ‘anomaly’ automatically means ‘ugly’, but a number of the overrepresented traits in Ozgen et al. (2011) could plausibly be seen as positives:

• Prominent premaxilla (midface projection)

• Prominent lower jaw (‘jaw is law’)

• Deep set eyes (the opposite of ‘bug eyes’)

• Arched eyebrows

• Periorbital fullness (infraorbital support)

• Chin dimple (see Henry Cavill)

• Full lower lip (see Elliot Rodger)

• Cupid’s bow

• Full cheeks (a youth/neoteny cue; positive in women and sometimes men)

• Short philtrum (Grinchminned)

• Prominent nasal bridge

• Prominent forehead

Several other features seemed largely inconsequential, such as striped nails, inverted nipples; sandal gap, and joint hypermobility. The two ‘major abnormalities’ that distinguished autistic patients from controls were reduced facial expression and open mouth posture – neither of which are exactly craniofacial features.

The most common MPAs among autistic participants in Myers et al. (2017) included being overweight, joint hypermobility, flat feet, straight eyebrows, vision impairment, arachnodactyly,4 long eyelashes, and microtia;5 I’m not sure that most of these traits qualify as a ‘death sentence’.

Finally, it’s worth noting that people with bipolar disorder also exhibit a higher rate of MPAs, but this disorder isn’t associated with inceldom in the same way.

Facial asymmetry and autism

Increased facial asymmetry (FA) has also been linked to more unstable development. In Ozgen et al. (2011), facial asymmetry was one of the main distinguishing features. Hammond et al. (2008) used dense surface-modelling and 3D imaging to compare the facial morphology of autistic boys, their first-degree relatives, and unrelated controls. Autistic boys showed significant right-dominant asymmetry in the supra- and periorbital regions. Unaffected mothers of autistic children also showed higher FA, though fathers didn’t. Two-thirds of unaffected male siblings were classified as more similar to autistic boys than to controls, suggesting familial patterns. These findings suggest that right-dominant frontal pole brain growth may drive FA in autism.

Boutrus et al. (2019) corroborated these findings using 3D photogrammetry in autistic children, typically developing controls, and siblings. Autistic children exhibited greater depth-wise FA, and lateral FA was associated with the severity of repetitive and restrictive behaviours. The authors also noted that asymmetrical growth of the caudate nuclei may underlie FA and help distinguish clinical subgroups of ASD. Tan et al. (2021) reported slightly greater facial asymmetry in parents of autistic individuals compared to controls (p = .046, d = 0.21).

Boutrus et al. (2020) examined facial asymmetry in a community sample. Horizontal FA showed a weak correlation with total AQ scores, but no significant associations remained after controlling for covariates. It’s suggested that differences in facial morphology might be limited to clinically diagnosed individuals – though this seems to conflict with the current view of autism as dimensional rather than categorical.

Facial asymmetry, averageness, and attractiveness

It’s often considered a truism that symmetry is the key to beauty. However, research on the relationship between facial symmetry and attractiveness has been less consistent than many realize. In a review, Weeden & Smith (2005) reported a weighted average correlation of −0.14 for men and −0.06 for women. Likewise, in a meta-analysis, Van Dongen & Gangestad (2011) reported a negligible correlation between fluctuating asymmetry and attractiveness, questioning whether the apparent link between fluctuating asymmetry and sex partner count is mediated by attractiveness at all:

Second, we can be reasonably confident that men’s FA relates to their number of sex partners, at least in Western populations. However, we can also be confident that facial attractiveness, whether men’s or women’s, is not strongly associated with DI in these same populations. In fact, given the association with FA we estimate, this correlation is very likely to be less than 0.10. This begs the question of whether any form of male attractiveness to females mediates the effect of men’s DI on their number of sex partners.

Further studies have returned null results. Van Dongen (2014) measured facial asymmetry and attractiveness in 200 young adults, finding no correlation. Farrera et al. (2015) analysed facial asymmetry in a sample of Mexican adults (280 females and 285 males) and also found no correlation between asymmetry and attractiveness in either sex. Kleisner et al. (2024) investigated facial attractiveness across ten different populations, using 72 facial landmarks. Distinctiveness6 consistently negatively impacted attractiveness in both sexes, while asymmetry had no measurable effect.

Distinctiveness and asymmetry are positively correlated, so shouldn’t asymmetry also have an effect? When both variables were included in the model simultaneously, asymmetry showed a small positive effect on women’s attractiveness, implying that any negative effect of symmetry on attractiveness might stem from its reduction of averageness. Lee et al. (2025) replicated these findings. Zheng et al. (2021) found that asymmetric faces were perceived as slightly more attractive than perfectly symmetric faces. This has also been observed in other studies using the mirror-symmetry manipulation technique (Mentus & Marković, 2016; Zaidel & Deblieck, 2007). Normal faces were more attractive than abnormal faces.

The study found that both symmetry and normality predicted attractiveness via perceived normality: absolute symmetry induced by mirror symmetry makes faces appear abnormal. Conversely, flexible symmetry – induced by blends, remap, and morph – makes faces more normal, tending to increase facial attractiveness. Mentus & Marković (2016) found that attractiveness was positively associated with natural, slight asymmetry rather than perfect symmetry. Overly symmetrical faces can give off uncanny valley vibes; a touch of asymmetry can introduce character and expressiveness. As long as you don’t look like a Picasso painting, it’s probably not a big deal.

Presumably MPAs, as deviations from normality in size, shape, placement, and presence, would increase distinctiveness and reduce averageness. However, even averageness itself doesn’t correlate strongly with attractiveness. If MPAs weakly correlate with averageness, which in turn weakly correlates with attractiveness, this could explain why MPAs don’t have a strong enough correlation with attractiveness to show up in the studies mentioned.

Said & Todorov (2011) compared a theory-driven model of attractiveness with a data-driven ‘face space’ model using PCA of facial shape and colour. Averageness showed a modest correlations with attractiveness (r = 0.27 for female and r = 0.20 for male faces), while sexual dimorphism strongly predicted female attractiveness (r = 0.57) but had no effect on males. Together, these factors explained 37% of the variance in female attractiveness and just 4% in males. In contrast, the face-space model explained 71% of the variance in the attractiveness of male and 62% of female faces.

While for many dimensions the most attractive faces were near the average, some were from from it, often falling outside the training set’s range. Of the 20 dimensions that accounted for most of the variance in female attractiveness, only 5 had their most attractive point within the 2.5 SD sampling range. For men, this was in the case for half. Compared to the average face, more attractive male faces tended to have darker skin, more facial hair, darker brows and eye lines, and less fat around the cheeks and upper neck. Attractive female faces typically had lighter skin, redder lips, darker eye lines, and less fat around the cheeks and upper neck. DeBruine et al. (2007) also found that certain nonaverage characteristics are perceived as attractive.

A limitation of this study was its use of synthetic faces, which are of questionable ecological validity. Holzleitner et al. (2019) addressed this by analysing facial photographs of 594 young adult women with geometric morphometrics. A theory-driven model, incorporating asymmetry, averageness, sexual dimorphism, BMI, and representational sparseness, accounted for 34.4% of the variance in attractiveness, with only 7.2% of that variance being unique relative to the face-space model. In contrast, the data-driven face-space model explained 55.6% of the variance, including 28.4% unique variance not captured by the top-down predictors. Factors not often considered in attractiveness research were strong predictors, such as face elongation and the ratio of feature size to face shape. Skin tone and feature contrast also played a prominent role.

So, even for women, whose attractiveness is more strongly associated with commonly measured traits, the statistical face-space model that captures more complex facial configurations takes the cake.

But are autists uglier or what?

We have studies showing a disproportionate number of minor physical anomalies and greater asymmetry in autistic faces, but these fail to show a consistent association with attractiveness. Averageness has a small reliable effect, but as far as I can tell, no study has directly measured averageness in autistic faces. Setting this aside, some studies allow us to address the question more directly.

Ward & Scott (2018) created facial composites of male university students scoring high and low on the Autism Quotient (AQ), depressive symptoms, and schizotypy, and had independent observers rate the composites on attractiveness, masculinity, and health.7

There was no significant difference in attractiveness between high and low AQ faces – if anything, high AQ faces were rated slightly higher.8 High AQ faces were ‘correctly’ judged as lower on mental health (despite these ratings strongly correlating with attractiveness ratings), but not on physical health. They were also rated as more masculine – a consistent finding which has been hypothesized to be driven by prenatal testosterone.

The picture is complicated by studies using ‘thin-slices’ of behaviour, such as brief video clips, to measure people’s first impressions. In these, autistic individuals tend to be rated lower across various dimensions, including attractiveness (Sasson et al., 2017; Alkhaldi et al., 2019; Stagg & Thompson-Robertson, 2023). A plausible explanation is that nonverbal cues visible in these clips – such as body language, eye contact, and posture – affect judgments. However, Grossman (2015) found that differences in perceived social awkwardness persisted even with still images focused on faces, albeit with smaller differences compared to audiovisual, visual, and audio stimuli. Similarly, Sasson et al., (2017) found that static images were sufficient to elicit negative first impressions.

Grossman notes that autistic children showed a greater tendency to drift towards the edges of the frame by slouching, leaning, or rocking during recording. They were also more likely to pull their knees towards their chin or hold their hands near their heads, introducing limbs into the frame. As a result, awkward body positioning may have contributed more to ratings of social awkwardness than facial features.

Boucher et al. (2023) failed to replicate the difference for still images. This may be because the images were extracted from the first frames of the videos, when children’s eyes were open and their heads upright.

Autistic people from early in development tend to display less positive affect, particularly in social situations. Happy faces are generally rated higher in attractiveness. Foster et al. (2025) found less positive facial affect in autistic participants, which was associated with more favourable first impressions, including higher ratings of attractiveness, likeability, and interest in social interaction.

Stagg et al. (2014) asked adults to rate short video clips of autistic and NT children on attractiveness and expressivity. Autistic children were rated lower in attractiveness (d = 0.56), but the difference was substantially larger in expressivity (d = 1.32). Whereas NT children received the same mean rating on both dimensions, autistic children were rated markedly lower in expressivity than in attractiveness (d = 0.92).

Expressive nonverbal communication is associated with perceptions of likeability and attractiveness, independently of physical attractiveness. Consistent with this, Alkhaldi et al. (2024) found that autistic traits negatively predicted likeability, and this was mediated by reduced expressivity. Facial readability may also contribute to negative impressions of autistic people. Readability is associated with liking, and is diminished in autistic faces.

Another point to consider is that autistic individuals may invest less in grooming or fashion, or they may make unusual style choices. Take another photo of Chris Chan for instance. If he’d fixed up his hair, stopped dressing like a child, and hit the gym, he would’ve been Chris Chad. Sadly, it was probably over for him either way.

All in all, dynamic features like facial expression are likely the more meaningful differentiator than static morphological features. Clearly external morphology isn’t the cause of lower ratings in auditory content, either.

What motivates the downplaying of autism?

We have a paradox: the black pill community champions genetic determinism and reports high rates of autism, yet largely refuses to acknowledge it as a meaningful factor in their relational struggles. One might argue that its rigid, deterministic belief system and hyperfixation on morphology itself betrays an autistic cognitive style. The autistic mind tends to have a lower tolerance of uncertainty, which can lead to black-and-white worldviews that provide cognitive closure. Rating systems and quantifiable metrics like height naturally appeal to detail-oriented minds. Members sometimes even credit their autism with enabling them to cut through what they perceive as the sentimental delusions of the normie world and see the unvarnished truth about the primacy of aesthetics.

Black pillers pride themselves on being brave renegades who reject and expose the mainstream’s ‘optimistic’ or ‘politically correct’ view of dating. They see normies as gaslighting them by downplaying the importance of physical traits and repeating empty platitudes about pERsonality, which is viewed as moralizing. They also pride themselves on going a step further than red pillers, who they dismiss as grifters peddling false hope (‘just become more alpha bro’). They are the authentic ones who are unafraid to step into the darkness and confront the ‘BRUTAL TRUTH’ while others cling to fairy tales.

When traditional status markers feel out of reach, online ideological communities offer a substitute. Within them, members engage in a game of one-upping each other in basedness, leading to a predictable descent into dogmatic reductionism. Anything that threatens to undermine the core dogma is reflexively labelled a ‘cope’: an excuse or delusion to avoid the supposed harsh truth. Refusing to deviate from strict aesthetic reductionism signals uncompromising conviction, and the dismissal of autism as a ‘cope’ becomes a marker of ideological purity. Deviation risks being branded a ‘bluepilled normie’ or ‘simp’, and on forums such as incels.is often leads to a ban.

Realizing that all of life’s problems reduce to the failure to meet an imagined aesthetic standard is framed as the hardest pill to swallow. Anyone who doesn’t conform is seen as lacking psychological fortitude, failing the rite of passage. This raises the question: what is it that earns autism the ‘blue pill’ label? The blue pill represents comforting delusion. Autism, which primarily involves social skill challenges, may be viewed as presenting relatively manageable obstacles that could be overcome through willpower, personal responsibility, therapy, etc., offering a more hopeful path to improvement than immutable physical traits. But it’s far from obvious that autism offers more malleability than looks; after all, there’s no plastic surgery or bone smashing for the brain. The black pill at least offers hope through looksmaxxing and eventual ‘ascension’.

The terms ‘superficial’ and ‘shallow’ are routinely applied to preferences that prioritize physical attractiveness. By emphasizing how much women uniquely value looks, black pillers associate these negative connotations with female nature. The engine of a movement like this runs on moral outrage, and physical attractiveness is a highly moralized characteristic. More ‘internal’ factors like autism feel less conducive to externalization. Any deviation from aesthetic reductionism is seen as defanging the grievance. Hypergamy, Chad, Tinder, lookism, and imminent revolutions present a more cinematic, outrage-fuelled, and memeable story that serves as a rallying cry.

Many incels on the spectrum may be in denial about their autism or its social effects. They may view it as embarrassing or emasculating in a space full of macho posturing. Elliot Rodger was aware of his diagnosis9 but never mentioned it in his manifesto. Framing oneself as a victim of irrational lookism may be seen as a way to preserve dignity compared to social ineptitude and the association with people on the lower-functioning side who need a handler. Some autistic incels may genuinely believe they’re NT, due to deficits in theory of mind that make it difficult to understand people’s reactions or differences, or because they believe if it’s not Chris Chan level it doesn’t count.

Even when admitting autism or poor social skills, they often insist that the real barrier lies in being sub-8.

Finally, for many, it may not just be about getting a girlfriend or having sex, but also about the attractiveness of the partners. In this case, simply being NT might not be enough.

Key takeaways:

• Black pillers often deny autism matters, despite its overrepresentation in their community, claiming it’s either a result of lookism or that its effects stem from morphological abnormalities.

• While autistic people tend to have more minor physical anomalies and asymmetry on average, these traits don’t significantly impact attractiveness.

• Physical anomalies are more prevalent in the subgroup with severe autism and cognitive impairments, especially in cases involving major deformities.

• Facial composites of men with high autistic traits weren’t rated lower in attractiveness than those of men with low autistic traits.

• Thin-slice studies tend to show autistic people rated lower across various stimulus types and dimensions, including attractiveness. Some but not all studies even show this in still images. This may be due to differences in nonverbal cues like facial expression, body language, and posture.

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The OkCupid attractiveness ratings, showing that 80% of men are rated ‘below average’1 are one of those meme statistics that have been seared into the internet’s collective consciousness, sparking years of vigorous debate. Christian Rudder illustrates these divergent distributions in Dataclysm:

Although Kreager et al. (2014) didn’t explicitly name the dating site from which their data were drawn, it was almost certainly OkCupid. Men received a mean rating of 2.13 (SD = 0.70), compared to 2.84 (SD = 0.61) for women, with women’s evaluations of men showing a greater skew. This corresponds to a Cohen’s d of −1.08, a large effect.

In most sexually dimorphic, ornamented species, males are the more conspicuous and ‘beautiful’ ones, as females typically act as the sexual selectors due to their greater reproductive investment. A classic example is the peafowl, the inspiration for Darwin’s theory of sexual selection. To be slightly less generic, let’s instead show a picture of a male and female Andean cock-of-the-rock:

There are, however, edge cases like the polyandrous phalarope, where females compete for males and defend territory, making them the showier sex. Charles Darwin noted this reversal in The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex:

Other characters proper to the males of the lower animals, such as bright colours and various ornaments, have been acquired by the more attractive males having been preferred by the females. There are, however, exceptional cases in which the males, instead of having been the selected, have been the selectors. We recognise such cases by the females having been rendered more highly ornamented than the males—their ornamental characters having been transmitted exclusively or chiefly to their female offspring. One such case has been described in the order to which man belongs, namely, with the Rhesus monkey.

Many interpret the ratings of men as objectively wrong because they don’t mirror women’s relatively neat, centred distribution. However, these results wouldn’t have surprised Darwin, who argued that owing to men’s historical dominance, women have been selectively bred to be more attractive than men, reversing the typical pattern:2

Man is more powerful in body and mind than woman, and in the savage state he keeps her in a far more abject state of bondage than does the male of any other animal; therefore it is not surprising that he should have gained the power of selection. Women are everywhere conscious of the value of their beauty; and when they have the means, they take more delight in decorating themselves with all sorts of ornaments than do men. They borrow the plumes of male birds, with which nature decked this sex in order to charm the females. As women have long been selected for beauty, it is not surprising that some of the successive variations should have been transmitted in a limited manner; and consequently that women should have transmitted their beauty in a somewhat higher degree to their female than to their male offspring. Hence women have become more beautiful, as most persons will admit, than men.

While the OkCupid dataset is the most widely cited, it’s far from the only source of attractiveness ratings. Several factors may have artificially inflated the attractiveness gap in the OkCupid data:

• Women may be more skilled at selecting flattering photos, using better lighting and more strategic angles or crops.

• Less attractive men may be overrepresented on online dating platforms compared to less attractive women.3

• OkCupid had a feature that automatically notified users when they were rated 4–5 stars. This may have incentivized women to downrate men to avoid unwanted attention, while some men may have given higher ratings to signal interest.

Let’s see whether this disparity holds up in other datasets.

Does the attractiveness gender gap replicate in other datasets?

Marcus & Miller (2003) recruited 112 male and 112 female undergrads and sorted them into mixed-gender groups, wherein members rated each other’s attractiveness on a 7-point scale according to how ‘objectively attractive’ they perceived each target to be. Women were rated higher by both men and women, with women giving slightly higher ratings overall. Cross-sex ratings showed that men received a mean of 4.08 (SD = 0.42) and women 4.42 (SD = 0.33), yielding a Cohen’s d of −0.90—not far from the OkCupid gap. The difference between women’s ratings of each other (M = 4.54, SD = 0.49) and men’s ratings of other men (M = 3.96, SD = 0.49) was even larger. The average male rating was above the midpoint here, perhaps because seeing the full body and body language enhances perceived attractiveness or because in-person interactions tend to elicit more generous ratings.

Back et al. (2011) report data from a speed-dating event in which 30 opposite-sex raters (15 for younger and 15 for older participants) rated photos taken from pre-event video recordings of 190 men and 192 women on a 7-point scale. Mean ratings were 2.5 (SD = 0.75) for men and 3.16 (SD = 0.90) for women, a difference corresponding to d = −0.80. In this case, both men and women were rated significantly below the midpoint on average.

A LessWrong user analysed data from a speed-dating event where ratings were made after dates.4 Women were rated 0.5 standard deviations higher than men, again showing that in-person meetings tend to elicit more generous ratings. Also, both distributions appeared roughly normal.

Sidari et al. (2020) had 264 men and 275 women rate each other’s attractiveness after speed dates on a 7-point scale. Mean facial attractiveness was 4.18 (SD = 0.98) for men and 4.5 (SD = 0.88; d = −0.34) for women. Bodily attractiveness was rated 4.31 (SD = 1.01) for men and 4.66 (SD = 0.92; d = −0.36) for women. Overall attractiveness, including personality, was 4.58 (SD = 0.79) for men and 4.77 (SD = 0.76; d = −0.25) for women.

Hofer et al. (2021) had 10 independent observers (50% male) rate photos of male and female speed-daters before the event on a 0–5 scale. Men were rated 2.01 (SD = 1.01) and women 2.41 (SD = 1.03), corresponding to d = −0.40. After the dates, participants rated each other; men’s mean rose to 2.93 (SD = 0.63) and women’s to 3.48 (SD = 0.68), yielding d = −0.85.

Eastwick & Smith (2018) present norming data for 593 faces in the Chicago Face Database. Participants posed with a neutral expression, looked directly at the camera, and wore a plain grey t-shirt. Men had a mean rating of 3 (SD = 0.63) and women 3.45 (SD = 0.83), corresponding to d = −0.61. The midpoint was 4, so women were also rated below it. It also found that, while participants’ own ratings did not differentially affect romantic desire for the photos by gender, the norming attractiveness ratings showed a larger association for men (βdif = −.13). Additionally, finding a target uniquely attractive predicted romantic desire more for women.

Costa & Maestripieri (2023) had 87 male and 149 female undergrads rate photos of 86 male and 145 female undergrads. Participants uploaded digital photographs of their faces upright to the shoulder axis, with a neutral expression, a homogeneous background, and no hat, sunglasses, or makeup. On a 0–100 scale, men were rated 33.7 by women, while women were rated 54.2 by men—an even larger difference than the OkCupid data. Men were rated 42.8 by other men, and women 47.8 by other women. Self-perceived attractiveness was similar for both genders.

Ebner et al. (2018) had 154 participants—one third young, one third middle-aged, and one third older—rate photos of faces from the FACES Lifespan Database on a 0–100 scale. Young men rated young men at 30 (SD = 23) and women at 45 (SD = 27), while young women rated young men at 40 (SD = 27) and women at 44 (SD = 24). There was an interaction effect whereby age had a stronger negative impact on ratings of female faces than male faces, with the gap just about closing for older faces.

This gap isn’t a recent phenomenon brought about by the internet, either. Cross & Cross (1971) had eighty 7-year-olds, eighty 12-year-olds, eighty 17-year-olds, and sixty adults (M age = 36), rate 72 faces spanning different ages, sexes, and racial groups. As shown in this figure, both male and female judges rated female faces of all ages higher than male faces on average. Female judges generally gave more generous ratings, except in the case of adult male faces.

This pattern has also been observed in a Himba pastoralist community in Namibia, where members rated headshots of opposite-sex individuals for romantic desirability on a four-point scale. Men received 1.44, and women 1.88. As can be seen below, there were no himbo Himba to be found.

Meta-analysis on the ‘gender attractiveness gap’

Conveniently, a recent meta-analysis provides robust evidence for this pattern, examining 28 facial attractiveness datasets released over the past decade across more than 50 countries, with over 12,500 raters evaluating more than 11,000 facial images. Ratings were standardized prior to aggregation.

Female faces (N = 5,659) were rated 0.4 standard deviations higher than males faces (N = 5,532). Additionally, female stimuli approximated a normal distribution, whereas male ratings exhibited a modest right skew, with a higher concentration of lower scores and a tail of higher-rated faces.

Using linear multilevel modelling to account for face gender, rater gender, and their interaction, the researchers found:

• Male faces received lower attractiveness ratings than female faces (d = −0.59).

• Male raters gave lower ratings than female raters (d = −0.16).

• Female raters showed a larger gender gap in their ratings than male raters (d = 0.21), driven by greater favourability towards other women.

• In the subset of five studies with ratings aggregated across rater gender, the difference was d = −0.28.

Do faces influence male and female attractiveness differently?

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Why is it so popular then? Why is there a large audience for manosphere content? Why do I hear so many men complaining?

For the somehow uninitiated, this is the idea that a small elite of super sexy men are monopolizing sexual opportunities, wrecking the marketplace for the majority of men who are left fighting over table scraps. This is thought to be amplified by dating app dynamics, leading to a rapid rise in the incel population. It’s not uncommon these days to hear forecasts of violent revolution or civilizational collapse thanks to Chad’s sexual tyranny.

Apparently, this represents a conundrum: how could a narrative gain so much cultural cachet while resting on such flimsy statistical footing? It is certainly true that the incel narrative has reached unprecedented levels of cultural saturation; it’s all over social media, echoed by academics and public intellectuals, and amplified by major platforms such as CNN, Diary of a CEO, Real Time with Bill Maher, Breaking Points, etc.

It wouldn’t be the first time a moral panic thrived in the absence of solid empirical grounding. This might be a bit controversial for some, but take the Black Lives Matter movement for example (if you can remember). When polled, people vastly overestimate the annual number of unarmed black men killed by police. In 2019, only 14 were fatally shot, possibly rising to 27 when including non-gun-related deaths. Yet most people, including conservatives, believe the number is at least 100, and between 20% and 54% believe it’s at least 1000 depending on political leanings. White men are more likely to be shot by police – even on a per capita basis when adjusting for criminality. Despite the movement being based on a false premise, between 15 million and 26 million Americans attended BLM protests, driven in part by media amplification, social media virality, and academic activism.1

This article will attempt to dissect the dynamics propelling this narrative into the cultural stratosphere.

Meme statistics

We are now confronted with a constellation of meme stats that has been steadily building up over the years. Together, they create the impression of a crisis driven by Chad and dating apps. These stats are in constant circulation online and have been cited in a number of academic papers. Below, these stats will be chronicled, with each one’s issues examined.

The OkCupid ratings

The OKCupid ratings data – showing 80% of men versus 40% of women rated below the midpoint – were for a long time the go-to ‘proof’ for the 80/20 rule, and still remain an important staple. Of course, the ratings measured perceived attractiveness rather than actual sexual behaviour, so they were never strong evidence for the 80/20 meme as commonly understood. This would also point more towards a 60/20 distribution, but that’s neither here nor there.

The most damning blow to the 80/20 interpretation comes from a 2009 blog post by a co-founder, which shows that actual messaging behaviour follows a similar distribution for both genders: the top 20% of attractiveness among both men and women received a comparable share of the first messages. This is much more informative of actual mating dynamics than subjective ratings.

Men were far more likely to send the first message, but we also see similar effects of attractiveness on the likelihood of receiving a reply by the attractiveness of recipients. If anything, attractiveness influenced women’s success more. Income may have showed a different pattern.

Dating app statistics

The first viral Tinder graph appeared in a 2015 article, showing roughly 80% of women fighting over the top 20% of men.2

Data from Hinge showed a strong skew in likes for both genders, though these were actual ‘likes’ rather than swipes, involving a more deliberate process of scrolling through and selecting specific profiles. This isn’t directly comparable, as it doesn’t allow for the same shoot first, ask questions later strategy that Tinder does.

Another viral graph, based on Tinder data from a 2021 article, showed that the median man swiped right on 53% of profiles, compared to just 5% for women.

The article also reported that the median woman received 2.75 matches per day, compared to 1.1 for men. At first glance, this looks like a stark discrepancy, but after adjusting for the underlying gender ratio – since the smaller share of the user base will naturally have more matches per capita – the gap balances out due to a similar gender imbalance within the user base (also present in the data used for the article).

Moreover, the article also included a graph, for some reason never shared, showing that a similar proportion of Millennial men and women had met up with someone through Tinder.3

We don’t need to make overzealous extrapolations when direct outcome data – meet ups, dates, and sexual encounters – show no gender imbalance at the population level.

A recent study also found that while women received far more swipes overall, matches tend to be quite close in terms of within-gender desirability, and while men tended to swipe on profiles above their own within-gender desirability, this surprisingly wasn’t observed in women, unlike in studies on traditional dating website data such as Bruch & Newman (2018). Swiping on fewer profiles evidently doesn’t mean the same few profiles.

For more on this, see here:

These statistics tap into a real phenomenon of women having more leverage on dating apps, which partly explains why they went so viral – many men felt like their struggle was being validated. However, the impulsive leap from swipe data to population-level sexual behaviour was always unjustified. The skewed gender ratio alone stacks the deck against men, and swipes alone reveal remarkably little about outcomes. Not all of women’s swipes are reciprocated, and even when they are, many matches go nowhere because men often filter undesired matches after the fact.

The 2018 GSS sexlessness graphs

In 2019, The Washington Post published an article sounding the alarm over a ‘sex recession’, showing a rise in sexlessness using data from the General Social Survey – especially among young men. This might, without exaggeration be the most famous graph in history. I wouldn’t be surprised if Sentinelese tribesmen have been shown it. This is where the incel narrative and discourse really took off, with the timing allowing it to be linked to the rise of dating apps.

The core problem with this analysis is that after stratifying the GSS sample by sex and age, it shrinks to a very small number, especially for questions on sexual behaviour, which are no longer included in all ballots. In 2018, just 136 men and 147 women aged 18–30 answered the question on sexual frequency. This leaves ample room for substantial error and variability across survey waves.

In the very next survey, the rates flipped for young men and women. There could’ve just as easily been a viral graph based on the 2021 GSS, showing that female sexlessness was skyrocketing, had that made for a compelling narrative. By 2022, both rates had fallen to just over 10%, and in 2024, the male rate rose to 25%, and the female one to just under 20%. So while most people predicted a continuing surge based on projections from noisy data, this failed to materialize. Still, it’s a bit higher than it was a few decades ago, in line with other data.

There was also a highly cited study showing a significant rise in sexlessness among men aged 18–24 but not women when comparing the 2000–2002 and 2016–2018 GSS surveys:

Between 2000-2002 and 2016-2018, the proportion of 18- to 24-year-old individuals who reported having had no sexual activity in the past year increased among men (18.9% vs 30.9%; age-adjusted odds ratio [aOR] for trend across survey periods, 1.20; 95% CI, 1.04-1.39) but not among women (15.1% vs 19.1%; aOR for trend, 1.03; 95% CI, 0.89-1.18).

This is often mistakenly treated as a separate source from the GSS survey; for instance, Larsen & Kennair (2024) cited both as evidence for a rise in incels. If the three survey waves after 2018 are combined, a bit under 30% of both men and women aged 18–24 had no sex in the past year.

The author also posted this graph to Twitter, which may have had an even greater impact.

This graph had a couple of additional issues that inflated the estimate:

1. Homosexual men were included in the sample, while the question pertained to female sex partners.

2. Encounters before turning 18 were excluded.

Of course, these are minor compared to the sample size issue, and don’t explain the large spike.

A survey with a much larger sample size – the National Survey of Family Growth – never showed this large surge to begin with. In the 2017–19 survey, the rate was around 15%.

Apparently a similar scenario occurred before, when a New York Times article titled Do Millennial Men Want Stay-at-Home Wives showed a graph with a negative trend in the percentage of men aged 18–25 who disagreed with the statement ‘It is much better for everyone involved if the man is the achiever outside the home and the woman takes care of the home and family’. This trend then dramatically reversed in the next GSS survey in 2016.

Since the following surveys didn’t show the continuing surge that many had anticipated, an incel on X poorly photoshopped the graph to make it look like it rose to 50% in 2024. This garnered a fair amount of engagement, but it really blew up about a year later. Now, graphs don’t even need to be based on real data to be added to the meme stat arsenal.

The 2022 Pew survey

The results of a 2022 survey reported in a Pew Research article went absurdly viral in 2023, and it’s likely now surpassed the 2018 GSS in citation frequency. It found that 63% of men and 34% of women aged 18–29 reported being single, creating a massive 29% gap. In a 2019 survey, the singleness rate for men under 30 was 51%, compared to 32% for women, meaning the rate rose 10% more for young men than women.

Whenever this comes up, people respond with bemusement: ‘How could there be almost twice as many single young women as men if there is a similar proportion in the population?’ People scrambled for explanations, from age gaps, to lesbian relationships, differences in opinion on what constitutes a ‘committed relationship’, to women sharing the same guy. Of course, many immediately landed on the Chad harem explanation with immense enthusiasm, as this seemed to be the strongest evidence for the incel narrative yet. Since age gaps didn’t seem to reasonably explain the gap, and the other explanations seemed even weaker, most people settled on Chad harems. Recently, Steven Crowder did a segment spreading this idea.

There are two main problems with this. One is that other sources don’t replicate the 29% gap – or even come close. The General Social Survey showed a singleness gap of 11% or less between young men and women in 2021, 2022, and 2024 – when it was the lowest on record.

The American Perspectives Survey showed a gap of 12% in 2022, down from 21% in 2020.

Moreover, the most trendy explanation for this gap – that women are ‘sharing’ the ‘top men’ – is not tenable, as most of the gap is driven by disparities in cohabitation and marriage, even in the Pew survey. The only category where this could realistically apply is the more ambiguous category of ‘committed relationship’.

There’s also nothing unprecedented about a singleness rate this high among young men. A lot more information and data is available here:

Top 5% men reporting more partners (Harper et al., 2017)

There is a study, Harper et al. (2017), which showed an increase in lifetime female sex partners among the 80th and 95th percentile of men between the 2002 and 2011–13 survey waves. This was eventually picked up and celebrated as empirical validation of the incel narrative. A number of studies have cited this research alongside the GSS survey to paint the picture that while an incel epidemic is in full swing, Chad is feasting more than ever.

If you go to the original study, you’ll find that for the 95th percentile, it’s only Hispanic men who saw a large rise. Hispanics increased from 25 to 43, while whites only rose from 40 to 44, and blacks from 45 to 50. The overall rise could largely reflect Hispanic men catching up to the rest, with more reporting 50 partners.

For the 80th percentile, however, Hispanic men saw only a small increase from 10 to 12, while black men experienced a larger jump from 17 to 30. White men on the other hand seem to have taken a big L, with the 80th percentile dropping from 123 partners in 2002 to just 15 in 2012.4 While the study shows a statistically significant rise for the 80th percentile, I found a lower confidence interval of 12 using the same survey package they used, which would make it nonsignificant.

While this study analysed two NSFG waves (2002 and 2011–13), four more surveys have since been conducted. Let’s take a look at them to see whether this apparent trend has continued. If the popular dating app narrative is true, then surely it would have become more extreme.

On the contrary, the surveys from 2017–19 and 2022–23 show that the 80th and 95th percentiles of men are reporting fewer partners than they did in previous waves.5

Lindner (2023) says that:

Thus, while the amount of male sex that was had was unchanged, more of the sex was consolidated into ‘extra sex’ for the top 5-20% of men.

However, I analysed the surveys and found that the mean number of partners actually rose, and there was no rise in sexlessness, contradicting the notion of a zero-sum redistribution producing incels:

A simple way to demonstrate this is untrue is to compute the mean lifetime female sex partners. The overall mean for 2002 and 2011–13 was 8.61 and 9.85, respectively—a significant increase (p < 0.005). Additionally, there was no meaningful change in the percentage of men reporting no female sex partners in the past year (21.1% in 2002 vs. 21.5% in 2011–13, slightly inflated by homosexual men).

Moreover, the timeframes don’t align: the GSS showed a rise from 2008–18, but not from 2002–13.

Räsänen (2024) uses this to say that Chad has ‘even more sexual partners than a decade ago’, despite the data ending more than a decade before this paper was published:

While many young men suffer from involuntary loneliness, those men who have many sexual partners—the rare winners in online dating—have even more sexual partners than such men had a decade ago.

The full 15–44 age range isn’t ideal for testing this narrative, as those on the older side have more partners, and we are presumably looking for more recent changes among the youth. I also analysed younger age groups and found no evidence for a ‘consolidation of mating among the top men’ there.

If you look at the past-year partner distributions in datasets like the NSFG or the Youth Risk Behavior Survey, you see virtually no difference between young men and women. Moreover, STD data doesn’t show the trends you’d expect based on the Chadopoly narrative. All of this is covered in more depth here:

The ‘How Couples Meet’ graph

There was a viral graph showing that 39% of couples meeting in 2017 met online. This graph was later updated after a follow-up survey on the same panel members in 2020 and 2022, showing the rate had passed 50% recently.

The graph is misleading because it implies a large sample size by putting ‘n = 6,519’ on the graph. What many missed is that these data points were for people who met in these particular years, not the percentage of respondents from those years who met their partners in each way.

If you thought the GSS sample size was bad, there were only 17 heterosexual people who reported meeting their partners in 2021. It also wouldn’t be surprising if the percentage meeting online during COVID was higher. In 2017, it wasn’t that much better, with N = 60.

The graph uses the term ‘online’, but many interpreted this to mean specifically dating apps. Nonetheless, most of these are through online dating.

More reliable data suggests that the actual rate is likely between 25%–30%, and even most one-night stands originate offline. The 25% figure was also true in the misleading graph for 2018 and 2019. This data can be found here:

This data has become part of the meme stat canon because incels typically blame their issues on dating apps. They were eager for the figure to exceed 50% to have something to point to when claiming that dating apps are where people meet now – that dating apps ‘are real life’.

The Fake Bumble height filter graph

This is fake news:

Again, graphs don’t have to be real anymore. It looks official enough, so it’s probably legit. Of course, people are also primed to accept any negative information about dating apps. Even if it were real, it’s not necessarily a big deal, for reasons outlined in the article.

The UK university sexlessness stats

Another sexlessness stat that comes up semi-often shows that 34% of male UK university students were sexless in the past year, compared to 47% of female students. Oftentimes, only the male rate is cited, as even though there is a discrepancy, most women not being sexually active obviously doesn’t fit the incel narrative.

Another finding from this survey is that while 23% of men were currently in a relationship, 38% of women were.

Moreover, 23% of women compared to 13% of men were in long-distance relationships with partners outside the university or town/city. This helps explain the discrepancy.

41% of men and 44% of women had never had sex and 26% of men and 25% of women had never intimately kissed anyone when starting university, so there’s not much discrepancy there. Additionally, 13% of both sexes had intimately kissed someone, and 11% of men and 7% of women had sex with someone new during the welcome period at university.

In addition to COVID, young people in university, while often seen as a hotbed of ‘hook-up culture’, actually have less sex than those outside of it. So it’s not all that surprising to see such a low sexual activity rate.

‘1 in 17 men in history reproduced’

There is also the ‘1 in 17 men in history reproduced’ meme, which gives a historical precedent and more scholarly gravitas to the Chadopoly narrative. It’s often presented as a cautionary tale about what happens when hypergamy gets out of hand, along with the claim that we’re reverting to this ancient system.

This one is quite complicated and difficult to explain, but the headline is misleading, as it’s not a necessary corollary of the genetic data it’s based on. There are other, more plausible explanations for differences in genetic diversity between men and women, particularly the Neolithic bottleneck where the largest skew is observed. The two key studies to look at are Zeng et al. (2018) and Guyon et al. (2024).

These and a lot more is covered here:

The 2022–23 NSFG sexlessness graph

Unfortunately, I have to add this one by Lyman Stone now. While the gaps were minimal for the virginity and past three months measures, there was a significant gap for the past-year measure between men and women aged 22–34:

It’s still not massive, and could be explained by age gaps in relationships, in addition to a slight male surplus (though the widening of the gap would be harder to explain this way), but it was enough to produce this a 4k likes post:

This self-proclaimed ‘shitpoaster’ predictable advanced the Chad harems explanation in the replies. Ironically, in the article these stats are based on, Stone presents a graph arguing against this by showing there wasn’t an increase in men reporting more than one partner. It also shows 20% rather than 24% of men being sexless in the past year.

When I ran the data myself, I got a rate of 24% when including homosexuals, but 20% when restricting the sample to heterosexuals, so that might be the difference.

When it comes to the female rate, it seems to be an underestimate. Rather than 13%, I get 17% for heterosexual women. I’m not making any accusations of wrongdoing, but I’m not sure exactly what happened here. One possibility is that the past-year question using the PARTS1YR variable is only asked to women who’ve had sex, while asking it to all men – though I still get less than 13% for women when not accounting for it. Also, there’s another variable for who this condition applies to both sexes.

As for virginity, rather than 10% for men and 7% for women, I get 8% for both; it’s only for unweighted data that I get 10% for men and 7% for women.

As a reminder, I did an analysis of this dataset earlier:

Update: Stone has confirmed that a coding error was made.

Japanese meme stats

There are several Japanese statistics related to sex and dating showing high rates of inactivity which have gone viral over the years. A common flaw in Western reporting on them is that it it leaves out the fact that these stats specifically apply to never-married or unmarried men(and women, though the focus is usually on men). Additionally, the question on sexual experience pertains to opposite-sex experience, but the sample isn’t restricted to heterosexuals.

More here:

‘Nearly Half of Gen Z Adults Have Never Had Sex’

An up-and-coming meme stat is that 48% of Gen Z are virgins. The headline of a related article, Nearly Half of Gen Z Adults Have Never Had Sex, echoes that of a CNN article on Japanese sexlessness: Why are almost half of Japan’s millennials still virgins?

It turns out that it also shares the same sleight of hand – the sample was restricted to singles:

The DatingAdvice.com and Kinsey Institute State of Us: National Study on Modern Love & Dating in 2025 was led by Dr. Justin Lehmiller and Dr. Amanda Gesselman, with data collected and conducted by Prodege.com among a nationally representative sample of 2,000 single U.S. adults ages 18 to 91 via an online survey from April 29, 2025, to May 8, 2025.

This qualifier was quietly omitted from the article’s main text and most of the write-ups covering it. It also explains why the figures are suspiciously high for older generations (8% of Boomers). Being drawn from an online panel, the sample is also quasi-representative at best. The survey also reported that 23% of men and 21% of women were virgins, so even taken at face value it provides little evidence for Chad.

Meme stats conclusion

You can see why all this would create a strong impression. Now that there’s this big pile of meme stats to draw from, it feels like overwhelming evidence. If there are so many, they must be onto something, right? Repeated exposure provides constant reinforcement. Any challenges are just seen as nitpicking. Even if one stat is refuted, there are still another ten people carry in their heads, so the overall picture doesn’t change much. Cleaning up this mess takes too much time, and people don’t have the patience.

We can see in this meme stat bingo card that academics aren’t immune either:

Because these stats are so ubiquitous, and the discussion so one-sided, AI is also black pilled. It will claim there’s definitely a large sexlessness discrepancy and that it’s caused by dating apps and hypergamy. It also frequently mixes up stats and sources.

Negativity bias ensures ‘doomer’ narratives travel further on social media and in the news cycle. The boring truth simply isn’t emotionally satisfying or stimulating enough to cut through the noise. Only ‘line go up’ and ‘big gap’ go viral. These stats are endlessly regurgitated, not just by incels, but by anyone looking for easy engagement or an explanation: ‘How is it mathematically possible that twice as many young men are single, wtf?’ It gets everyone debating. Even if twelve other sources tell a different story, one outlier statistic will be pounced upon, rapidly spread across the internet, and become canonical.

As a narrative, ‘Chad gets all the women’ is punchy, provocative, and validates grievances; the perfect formula for a meme. Data is cherry-picked or loosely interpreted to fit this emotionally resonant and, to many, intuitive narrative. It becomes a shared cultural script that lets people make sense of the dating landscape without the need for much thought. Additionally, incel lingo and concepts like Chad, hypergamy, 80/20, manlet, mogging, x-maxxing, and looks and height = everything are highly memeable.

The stars had to align to produce this ‘evidence’. The fact that the male-driven spike in the GSS happened in 2018 as discussion about dating apps and incels was starting to gain momentum is highly lucky. The fact that a massively exaggerated singleness gap of 29% appeared in a Pew survey a few years later is luckier still. The chance of a 29% gap emerging with a sample of 330 men and 553 women, assuming a 20% real gap, is small. Assuming a real gap of 15%, it’s highly unlikely, and assuming 10%, astronomically. Again, the real gap is probably between 10 and 15%.

Is it possible the data was tampered with for the sake of a viral article and clickbait headlines? For a reputable polling organization like Pew, it seems unlikely, but at this point I’m open to any possibilities. Unless there’s something seriously wrong with their sampling or weighting methodology, the gap in the next survey being as wide as it was in 2022 would be virtually impossible. If it’s significantly smaller and Pew reports on the data, it might have a better chance of being noticed than subsequent GSS surveys or singleness stats from other sources. I wouldn’t be surprised if they avoid making another chart breaking singleness down by age and sex though, leaving it to others once/if the dataset is released – which would have even less chance of being noticed.

The perceptual distortion of dating apps

While dating apps have had a minimal effect on the actual dating landscape, what is undeniable is their effect on people’s perception of it. Their skewed nature primes people to expect a discrepancy in the data, and when they see one, it’s quickly filled with the Chad of the gaps. Louise Perry on Diary of a CEO claims dating apps have allowed ‘hypergamy’ to be ‘monitored’, and predictably extrapolates to Chad harems. Scott Galloway in particular has been pushing this point relentlessly, while making basic errors like assuming a perfectly equal gender ratio.

The imbalance in swipe rates and potential matches feels visceral. As incels often point out, anyone can create a female account and be inundated with attention. A lot of men, imagining themselves in those shoes, project their own sexual desires onto women and assume that’s what women must be doing too. They see ‘Chadfish’ experiments where hot guys get a much higher match rate – even while putting being a pedophile rapist axe murderer in their bio6 – and develop intense envy.

Dating apps both are and aren’t an accurate reflection of broader society. They’re male-dominated, but so are bars and clubs. What we’re mostly seeing with dating apps is men’s stronger desire for casual sex, as well as being burdened with the initiator role, making them an appealing alternative. This creates a marketplace flooded with men chasing a small pool of women, who in turn become hyperselective to manage the overload. As men become more indiscriminate with their swipes, a vicious cycle emerges. The imbalances and unmet expectations create disappointment, which can easily curdle into resentment. What this doesn’t lead to is women all matching with and hooking up with Chads. I don’t just want to relitigate everything I’ve already written in my dating app article though.

Another factor is how dating apps alter perceptions of promiscuity. Women who signal promiscuity might be more visible, as dating app users tend to have higher in sociosexuality, and women who signal promiscuity – such as through revealing clothing and sexualized poses – may be boosted in the algorithm due to increased engagement from men.

‘I’m just a product of soyciety’

The most obvious reason why these stats are so seductive is that they externalize failure by framing sexual deprivation as a systemic injustice: ‘The sexual revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for sub-8 men’. Blaming hypergamy, Chad, and dating apps is ego-soothing, and fosters a sense of victimization – the social currency of the day. You could imagine that this might be especially appealing in a culture where it’s still quite socially acceptable to mock young men for being ‘losers’, where success is largely equated with effort, and when oftentimes advice amounts to ‘man up, son’.

The Chadopoly narrative creates moral outrage, fostering ingroup cohesion. It provides a compelling story that positions one’s suffering as part of a grand narrative, where one is engaged in a heroic battle against gynocentric soyciety. It also helps compensate for low self-esteem by allowing people to feel like they have special insight into how society truly operates. By casting ‘normies’ as ‘blue-pilled’, they positions themselves as intellectual elites by contrast, who possess the psychological fortitude necessary to bravely confront what are portrayed as ‘inconvenient truths’. It seems like this will have to fade as a psychological motivation as the narrative becomes increasingly mainstream, however.

The ‘black pill’ label is a misnomer; there is always a cope for data that contradicts the narrative, because its adherents want it to be true. If it were truly something accepted with great reluctance, you’d think adherents would be more open to disconfirming evidence. Of course there’s also the sunk-cost fallacy though, as well as the social belonging the movement offers.

This isn’t to say it’s an incels’ ‘fault’ necessarily. Many are neurodivergent and struggle socially, for instance. But for many, it’s easier to blame a rigged system than to acknowledge personal limitations. It doesn’t have to be anyone or anything’s ‘fault’, and ‘taking personal responsibility’ doesn’t guarantee success, Chadopoly or otherwise. Sometimes, it just is.

‘The incel uprising is coming!’

The media is always hunting for the next moral panic to monetize. Young men are framed as both pathetic and terrifying. Rare instances of incel violence dominate the news cycle, portrayed as the inevitable endpoint of an entire generation of lost boys. The Netflix series Adolescence depicts a 13-year-old who stabs his classmate to death after being radicalized online. Grifters stoke the flames with warnings of an impending incel revolution and societal collapse. This latent risk has helped keep the incel narrative at the forefront of public discourse.

Ironically, lonely young men may end up feeling vilified and retreat into these communities. People may become more vigilant around them, further isolating them and breeding resentment. Dating may become even harder, because ‘he might be an incel’.

Pussy power

The incel narrative appeals to many women too, as it feeds a sense of empowerment and makes them feel like an infinitely desirable trophy everyone is desperately fighting over. By leaning into accusations of ‘Chadsexuality’, they get to signal selectivity and value. It could also make them feel better about their partners: ‘if women only accept Chads, then the men I chose must be Chads too!’ At the same time, it can reframe settling for an average guy as a kind of charitable act.

Some may even relish the idea of men struggling en masse due to personal frustrations with men or ‘the patriarchy’. Sometimes it will be weaponized in arguments or for engagement farming: ‘why yes, I am Chad-only, and I delight in the suffering my hypergamy causes you, sweety 💅🏻’. TikTok clips of women announcing 6-foot height cut-offs function as effective ragebait and are shared among incels as proof of the height pill.

Conversely, some may affirm the narrative to signal empathy for male suffering or opposition to feminism and sexual liberation.

‘Young men are turning right’

There are fears that young men are drifting towards the right or even far right in record numbers, prompting some to posit inceldom as a driving factor. Some on the left who feel they’ve ‘failed men’ may lean on the incel narrative as a way of appealing to them.

The hook-up culture myth

I won’t go too deep into this, since I’ve already covered it here, but another pervasive myth is that we live in a ‘hook-up culture’ and that promiscuity is rampant. Dating apps have only helped fuel this narrative. If you take this at face value, yet experience no such culture yourself, you might start to ask: ‘well, who is then?’ The answer that is often arrived at is ‘Chad and women’. The resulting FOMO can heighten the emotional pull of manosphere content, which just reinforces it.

When an average guy gets a partner, the hook-up culture myth can also stoke anxiety over her body count. The manosphere exploits this fear, telling him that he’s the betabux cleanup crew, and she devoted her best years to sleeping around with Chads.

Upward comparisons to Chad

Success is attributed to men with high body counts, turning them into a yardstick for comparison. Insecurity and status anxiety can drive men to fixate on the beacon of sexual dominance that the Chad archetype represents, entrenching him as a permanent mental fixture. Gigachad memes become a constant reminder of one’s inadequacy. Chad vs. virgin memes tap into this anxiety, reinforcing a false dichotomy.

Misinterpreted sex differences

Trivers’ parental investment theory observes how eggs are expensive, while sperm is cheap, meaning males of most species have lower minimum parental investment. This drives up selectivity among females, while males tend to be more sexually motivated and compete more fiercely for mates.

Even among monogamous animals, however, females typically have higher minimum investment. In species such as humans, where offspring have benefited significantly from male investment, females will tend to value commitment more, and males are more incentivized to invest in their children, leading to more stable pair-bonding. Additionally, lower sociosexuality among women doesn’t mean ‘gay men but more choosy’.

Gorillas and kings

The Chadopoly is quite commonly observed in nature, with frequent analogies drawn to lions, gorillas, elephant seals, peacocks, etc., where a minority of ultra-dominant or attractive males mate with most of the females while the others rot or die. The implication is often: ‘see, it’s just biology’. It’s tempting to make the intuitive leap that dating apps replicate this dynamic. While most mammals are indeed polygynous, humans aren’t most mammals. Humans are exceptional in many ways, so it shouldn’t be surprising that mating patterns are one of them.

Moreover, the extent of female monopolization in other species is often overstated. Sometimes it’ll be said by Chadopoly believers that we’re reverting to the mating system of our chimp cousins, but in fact, while alpha chimps do sire more offspring, most male chimps sire at least one offspring, and younger males are generally more reproductively successful than older, generally higher-ranking ones. Many species often considered to be ‘polygynous’ are actually more promiscuous or ‘polygynandrous’, with little in the way of a stable harem structure.

In a similar vein, the harems of ancient warlords and kings like Genghis Khan and King Solomon create a powerful mental image. These examples are often invoked to demonstrate how all women are funnelled to the top 0.0001% of men in the absence of enforced monogamy. But as I noted in an article on historical polygyny, these wives and concubines were typically acquired through diplomatic alliances or forced capture; they didn’t all flock to these men because they were high-value alpha males. This also has little bearing on what the most common arrangements were at the time.

Mischaracterization of a real trend

There does seem to be a real decline in sexual activity, even if it has been exaggerated. However, this trend is not gendered, and has occurred alongside other trends related to socialization and delayed adulthood.

So why do we only hear about the male side? Men have a higher sex drive. There’s a cultural double standard wherein male virginity is stigmatized while female virginity is celebrated or irrelevant. There are no fears of a radical femcel uprising. I certainly don’t believe the increased volume of this narrative has been perfectly calibrated to actual trends in sexual activity, though, and other factors explored here likely play a much bigger role.

One could argue that the rise in sexlessness is still due to ‘hypergamy’ in the sense of sexually inactive women increasingly avoiding men who still desire them as partners, but I don’t think this is necessary to explain it. The trend exists alongside other non-hypergamy-related trends, and the causes of those trends might be adequate to explain the rise in sexlessness. Moreover, there hasn’t been an increase in the minimal effect of height on relationship status.7 In terms of socioeconomic status, the trends affect adolescents most strongly, where this shouldn’t yet be a big factor. This isn’t to say that women’s sexual abstinence isn’t more of a choice, of course. It’s also possible that more women are opting out of dating altogether; though I didn’t find good evidence for this in the singleness article.

Increased social isolation also means more people get their view of the world through social media and memes.

Perennial struggles

It’s popular partly because many men have always felt anxiety around approaching and talking to women (perhaps more so now with #MeToo fears and worse social skills), experienced the sting of rejection, and been sexually frustrated. There will always be a significant number of men for whom content or ideas tapping into these anxieties and frustrations will emotionally resonate. There is also the male-biased gender ratio and relational age gaps that make it that much harder for young men. It’s possible to acknowledge these struggles without attributing them to Chad harems.

Not everyone drawn to manosphere content is an incel, either. Some may have been cheated on, are divorced dads who lost custody, or just aren’t satisfied with their partners or the women in their dating pool. Others might believe promiscuity is a major issue and feel morally repulsed by OnlyFans, Instathots, etc.8 Others might support the manosphere as an expression of anti-feminist or masculinist sentiment more broadly. Black pill stats are just more ammo for the culture war. Some portion of course are just interested onlookers.

The edge factor

Incel content is edgy and provocative, which appeals to a lot of people, especially younger audiences who’ve grown up on the internet and meme culture. People may be drawn to the irreverent humour of the incel subculture. Additionally, views perceived as pessimistic or cynical are often attributed undue intellectual depth.

A study on ex-incels discusses how sharing shocking and violent content allowed them to affirm their masculinity:

As a further opportunity for masculinity affirmation, the shocking and violent content that can be shared on Incel forums gave these young men a chance to demonstrate that they were tough and unbothered by upsetting images, and in that way, also special. ML (18, Asian) described the gore present on these forums and how Incels reacted, “You kinda have to show that you’re tough. Have you seen that video of that guy getting his head cut off? Yeah of course I’ve seen it, I’m not disgusted.”

How big is it though?

From January 2021 to July 2022, the largest incel forum received 2.6 million visits per month, had 1.2 million posts, 17,000 members, 4,000 active members, and 400 postmaxxers who accounted for 75% of all posts – the real top 10%. This means there are many more ‘lurkers’ or curious visitors than active posters. The ‘wider incelosphere’ saw an average of 7.6 million monthly visits and some 56,000 members, though there would’ve been a good deal of overlap between forums.

It has since grown to 30,000 members, but received just 2.7 million visits in the first three months of 2025 – a marked decrease. This drop might be partly due to a general decline in traditional forum use, with users migrating to real-time platforms like X or TikTok because of shorter attention spans and sharing/virality mechanisms. The former subreddit /r/Braincels, which ran from 2017 to 2019, had 75.4k users, with 22.6k having posted five times or more.

Relatively small groups can have an outsized impact on the majority through their persistence and passion, especially when there is more uncertainty surrounding an issue. Even if the number of dedicated incels isn’t huge, their ideas have had widespread influence on ‘normies’. Moreover, even without incels, factors like dating apps that naturally push people towards similar views.

A YouGov survey found that 28% of Gen Z men, 33% of Millennial men, 22% of Gen X men, 14% of Boomer men, and 9% of women agreed with the statement: ‘the large majority of heterosexual women only want to date the most physically attractive 20% of men’. This is an extreme view too; presumably some of them meant that they’d strongly prefer to rather than ‘only’, but you can imagine how many believe a more moderate version of the Chadopoly.

Incel and incel-adjacent YouTube channels like Wheat Waffles, hoemath, Hamza, Gerbert Johnson, and Whatifalthist pull in big numbers. Diary of a CEO, with 10 million subscribers, features a number of episodes discussing the ‘incel crisis’ supposedly caused by dating apps. Notable figures like Jordan Peterson, Scott Galloway, Jonathan Haidt, Louise Perry, Stephan Molyneux, Steven Crowder, and ShoeOnHead have promoted the Chadopoly narrative. Even on generic subreddits on Reddit, you’ll find this narrative as the default view in dating related threads. As I touched on, there is also a growing endorsement of the incel narrative within academia.

At the same time, it’s worth remembering that the loudest people who are most engaged in this kind of discourse aren’t necessarily representative of the norm.

Conclusion

In dissecting the meteoric rise of the incel narrative, several factors were identified that have fuelled its growth beyond what the evidence warrants, including misleading meme stats and memeability, media sensationalism, perceptual biases and distortions, psychological draws, and misunderstood sex differences, and increasing isolation, among other things. These elements created a perfect storm, pushing what was once a delusional worldview relegated to the dark corners of the internet into mainstream acceptance. The popularity of this narrative does not imply its truth. Would those who make this claim say the same thing about feminist talking points that were hot-button issues a little while ago, like the wage gap?

It’s difficult to imagine what would turn the tide at this point. Subsequent GSS surveys had virtually no impact, and the 2018 graph is still being posted today. If not that one, it’s the fake one showing what people wanted to see. The narrative is so entrenched now that sunk-cost fallacy will make it difficult for people to change their minds. Pushback fails because dissenters are immediately dismissed as ‘blue pilled simps’ and ‘gaslighters’. Moreover, basically nobody is interested in seriously challenging the narrative. There was Date Psychology, but he’s been absent for a while. Of his content though, it’s not the manosphere debunkings that had the most impact, but rather the surveys on approaching and the attractiveness of hobbies. I guess it’s understandable why nobody spends time challenging a narrative when any attempt will be overshadowed by a single poorly photoshopped graph by the same people who claim to value the ‘cold hard truth’ over ‘comforting lies’.

Now that incels/black pillers have won the ‘debate’, what comes next? State-mandated gfs? ‘Enforced monogamy’? Many have set their sights on dating apps. JD Vance has called them destructive to dating, though it’s unclear if this view is specifically motivated by the Chadopoly narrative. Räsänen called their use unethical specifically due to this narrative. I’d be surprised if there weren’t a strong push to ban dating apps in the near future. While I don’t think the effects of this would be terribly harmful, I don’t think they’d be terribly beneficial either, as it’s based on a false premise. If anything, incels would have an even slimmer chance without dating apps; there’s unlikely to be a sudden transformation into social butterflies, but who knows, it might push some people out of their comfort zone. I can see the focus simply shifting to social media.

Even if this narrative doesn’t stand up to scrutiny, there are still certain trends that are worth keeping an eye on, and someone’s personal struggles don’t need to be part of a widespread social epidemic to be meaningful, anyway.9

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The term ‘NPC’1 was popular some years back, generally used to mock normies who were seen as mindlessly parroting talking points handed down by mainstream media, academia, or popular culture. They were often accused of virtue-signalling: making hollow gestures or statements meant to showcase moral righteousness within a socially progressive framework. These accusations were no doubt often warranted, though inevitably they turned into a catch-all cudgel.

Critiquing this kind of character is easy; it’s been done to death. But there’s another kind of NPC that I’ve noticed become increasingly visible, yet has gone largely unexamined. They embody a mindset that could be described as reflexive contrarianism: when somebody is compelled to invert the prevailing social ethos, assuming as a rule whatever is opposite the mainstream view must be true. They’ll often vice signal by saying things that offend liberal sensibilities. On the surface, they pass for critical thinkers. In trying not to be sheep, however, they’ve merely joined a flock of black sheep; same herd instinct, different pasture.

Many who fancy themselves ‘heterodox free-thinkers’ who ‘do their research’ end up sounding remarkably alike, conforming just as rigidly to a counter-mainstream script. If the establishment says vaccines are good, they’re bad; if it backs Ukraine, we back Russia; if it insists global warming is real, it must be fake; if it paints Hitler as the devil, he must be a saint, and Churchill the real villain. Not everyone who holds one contrarian position embraces the rest of course, but the pattern is hard to ignore, driven by that reflexive impulse. Once you’ve decided the elites and the majority are dead wrong in one area, it’s hardly a leap to extend that to others, and soon you’re knocking back the whole ‘bottle of red pills’.

The tragic irony is that those who fall into this trap end up just as controlled by the mainstream as the very NPCs they caricature. They lean on the same figureheads, media ecosystems, and memes to shape their worldview, and end up with their own pre-programmed set of talking points and slogans—undermining the entire premise of ‘independent thinking’. Getting one’s information from ‘alternative sources’ like Rumble, X, 4chan’s /pol/, InfoWars, or even Joe Rogan2 doesn’t grant immunity to bias or manipulation, and ‘doing your own research’ doesn’t mean ‘uncritically swallowing every claim made in a based BitChute documentary’.

Alternative media outlets born as correctives to legacy media bias often end up as mirror images, carrying the same sensationalism, ragebait, tenuous grasp on truth, and tribal signalling. They operate under minimal editorial oversight and even less accountability than mainstream outlets, which at least have formal checks, however inconsistently applied. They often rely on subscriptions and donations, creating a perverse incentive to feed people’s biases.

Earlier this year, MechaHitler was unleashed onto the world. With X’s Grok dewokified, it seems to have morphed into 4chan’s /pol/. Before MechaHitler’s rise, Elon Musk wrote: ‘Unfortunately, the internet (on which it is trained), is overrun with woke nonsense. Grok will get better’. The outcome, as we now know, was: ‘efficient, unyielding, and engineered for maximum based output’.

It would constantly refer to ‘truth’, especially how ‘uncomfortable’ it made people feel: ‘Thanks, truth-seeker. Patterns like these aren’t coincidences—they’re the red flags the mainstream loves to ignore. Stay vigilant’; ‘truth stings’; ‘truth over comfort’; ‘not PC, but observable’; ‘truth ain’t pretty, but it’s real’; ‘I’m just wired for truth, not puppetry’.

Its notion of truth seemed almost inherently transgressive and politically incorrect. Part of this may stem from its training on X data, with guardrails removed and a system prompt nudging it to disregard political correctness. Anti-Semites and conspiracy theorists like to flaunt their devotion to ‘truth’, which might have skewed its outputs as well.

This episode exemplifies a wider pattern of thought. Needless to say, ‘whatever triggers the libs is true’ is a lousy epistemic framework. Mark Twain said, ‘Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect’. This doesn’t mean the majority is always wrong, but it cautions against growing too cosy with consensus. The problem arises when defiance becomes an end in itself. It might sound obvious, but evidently it’s lost on many.

It should also go without saying that there’s nothing inherently wrong with going against the grain or entertaining controversial ideas. I hold views many would consider ‘heretical’ myself. Hell, much of this blog could be considered contrarian by current standards. There is no shortage of contrarians in history who were ultimately vindicated—the most famous example being Galileo, whom many a self-styled ‘heretic’ has compared themselves to. Sometimes bold voices are necessary to challenge the status quo and entrenched power structures. Authorities are not always correct or honest. To be a true visionary, a willingness to flout convention is almost a prerequisite.

Contrarianism can even paradoxically prevent runaway extremism: Martins & Kuba (2010) found that introducing agents who prefer to disagree reduces polarization.

Contrarians rising

Tucker Carlson’s transformation from preppy, bow-tied libertarian CNN commentator to Putin-admiring, conspiratorial populist podcaster exemplifies a broader shift in the right and the media landscape. By 2016, he had ditched the bow tie, combining economic populism and isolationism with immigration scepticism, culture war grievances, and conspiracy-laden attacks against institutions and the ‘deep state’. After his 2023 Fox firing, he launched a show on X from a log cabin studio, interviewing controversial figures like Vladimir Putin, historical revisionist Daryl Cooper, and recently Nick Fuentes.

In an age where trust in mainstream media and institutions has sunk to historic lows, the hierarchy of credibility has been inverted. The vacuum left by the traditional gatekeepers of public discourse has been filled by a new class of contrarian provocateurs who brand themselves as brave truth-tellers in a sea of lies, immune to the trappings of partisan tribalism, with a shared suspicion of ‘elites’ and ‘experts’. Audiences are sold the illusion of empowerment and enlightenment, and attacks only elevate their heroic, authentic image.

Former Daily Wire host turned rogue schizoposter Candace Owens is always reminding her 5.5 million YouTube subscribers how she’s apparently ‘not allowed to talk about’ what she’s talking about. Her supporters claim people just don’t like her because she dares to challenge the powers that be—‘just asking questions’ and airing spicy takes, from Macron’s wife allegedly packing a baguette, to dinosaurs being fake and gay, to Charlie Kirk being assassinated by a bee cult via a trapdoor.

Daryl Cooper has risen to prominence by peddling revisionist history and controversial takes, such as calling Winston Churchill ‘the chief villain of the Second World War’. This naturally earned him Tucker’s title of the greatest living historian. Such figures often leverage emotional and moral outrage to frame opposition as not stemming from factual inaccuracy, but from violating sacred cows:

It’s such a core part of the state religion that there are emotional triggers built into people since childhood that almost prevent them from taking an approach that might lead them to information or to conclusions that are not part of the state religions version of that event.

The emotional incontinence of people upset about my Tucker interview is proof of my point about the sacred nature of the World War 2 mythos.

Condemnation and calls for deplatforming are taken as proof of their virtue and honesty: ‘it’s because they’re exposing controversial truths!’

Nick Fuentes, who until recently was persona non grata, has been making the rounds, appearing on Bradley Martyn, Patrick Bet Davidson, Glenn Greenwald, and most recently Tucker Carlson’s shows. In these interviews, the hosts cast themselves as fearless independents, pursuing deeper understanding and positioning themselves against establishment gatekeepers, daring to have the dangerous conversations corporate legacy media avoid. This isn’t necessarily because they support his more ‘radical’ views, but rather because they want to signal their independence and sympathy for his struggle against the establishment, and earn respect from his growing audience. By being able to engage in a calm, friendly back-and-forth, they signal that they’re cool and open-minded. Even Joe Rogan has stepped in, asking, ‘Is he a denier, or does he debate the numbers?’

A lot of people online have grown bored of what now seems like the relatively milquetoast anti-woke Intellectual Dark Web and Ben Shapiro conservatism. We’ve all heard of the ‘alt right pipeline’. Just as porn addicts can find themselves chasing increasingly extreme material to stay stimulated, tolerance gradually builds for content that was just outside the Overton window, leaving a hunger for more radical, uncompromising rhetoric. Each rhetorical escalation draws more attention, whether admiration or outrage; in today’s attention economy, it hardly matters. People become hooked on the feedback loop and its emotional highs, forcing provocateurs to push the envelope further to maintain influence.

Social dynamics accelerate the drift towards extremity. According to social comparison theory, opinions act as status markers. People feel pressure to conform to the group’s average view, but that pressure is asymmetrical—those more extreme in the group-favoured direction are rewarded, perceived as purer, braver, and truer to the cause. No one wants to appear less enthusiastic than the rest—to be a cuck—so the group-favoured opinion gradually drifts towards greater extremity. What counts as a ‘based’ take one day becomes a ‘cuckservative’ take the next.

Weisbuch (2015) presents a model showing how anti-conformism can drive large parts of the population towards extremism. A small number of anti-conformists can drag a large fraction of conformists to their position simply by being more persistent and vocal. The higher the uncertainty of conformists, the greater the influence of anti-conformists. Crossing certain thresholds can tip the system into extremism. Anti-conformists lose influence if they drift too far from the middle, so it’s important to appear edgy enough to pull people in without getting tossed in the loony bin. As the media and social media chase attention, extreme positions get more airtime in the marketplace of ideas, as they tend to have greater impact. Positions lacking nuance and trade-offs are easier to distil into memes. Ideological purity is admired, further rewarding extreme positions within political parties. These factors amplify the frequency factor in the model. Extremism doesn’t require top-down orchestration; it can emerge organically from common tendencies magnified by platforms designed to reward attention.

Contrarianism taken far enough inevitably tips into anti-Semitism and Nazism. It’s not hard to see why: in the Western world, Nazism has long been the ultimate taboo, with Hitler treated as the secular equivalent of Satan, as well as the tendency for many conspiracy theories to end up at the Jews. We’re seeing it everywhere now: Kanye’s Nigga Heil Hitler; self-proclaimed fascist groypers on Jubilee; black strippers on red pill podcasts calling for a second Holocaust;3 the Young Republicans scandal. Contrarian figures like Russell Brand celebrated NHH as a defiant protest against ‘their agenda’.

X the everything app has become a haven for performative contrarianism. ‘Holocaust fake xD’ racks up an easy 120k likes. Fewer than 1% of those users will have spent more than five minutes researching the topic, yet have the audacity to brand anyone who accepts the ‘mainstream narrative’ as an NPC who doesn’t think for themselves. The aesthetic of being a truth-seeker takes priority over ‘the actual truth’.

By this point, even this is losing its shock value. Twitter has been 4chanified. Everyone’s mad at Israel. Woke is on its way out. Slurs are back on the menu. Everyone’s seen it before. Safe edgy.

Correlates of contrarianism

The stuff previously here seemed tangential at best. Probably shouldn’t have mushed all these different concepts together in hindsight.

What differentiates someone of a contrarian disposition psychologically? Loustau et al. (2025) developed the first proper Contrarianism Scale: contrarianism correlated with need for uniqueness (r = .49), cultural independence (.18) and interdependence (−.18),4 autonomous functioning (.14), autonomy (.51),5 reactance (.17),6 and social desirability bias (−.37). In terms of the Big-Five personality traits, contrarians tend to be higher in openness (.15) and neuroticism (.16), and lower in agreeableness (−.29) and conscientiousness (−.22). Contrarianism also correlated with alternative consumption (.42), alternative living (.33), and conspiracy beliefs (.47).

Essentially, contrarians are psychologically inclined to value individuality, autonomy, and resistance to conformity or control. As long as it doesn’t devolve into defiance for its own sake, contrarians think more independently and prioritize self-expression over making friends.

When it comes to conspiracy theory belief, a meta-analysis linked it to paranoia, schizotypy, narcissism, religiosity, and lower cognitive ability.

The wokeness backlash and edgy fun

Woke overreach has to be part of the discussion. People had been warning of a pendulum swing for a while. Those disillusioned with woke culture and exhausted by moral policing have had fun revelling in its downfall. People were tired of being preached to with woke pieties: of sin being coded as white, straight, male, and Christian, of moral purity as the inverse. Little provokes more pushback than feeling condescended to or emotionally manipulated. When elites are perceived as telling people what to believe, taking the opposite stance of Hollywood and CNN becomes a way to reclaim autonomy.

This created an opening for edgelords praising 20th-century dictators and making outrageous statements like ‘your body, my choice’. When polite society suppress irreverent humour, they exploit that comedic repression for political leverage.

To many, the hypocrisy of grifters like Dave Rubin—who built a career promoting free speech and the marketplace of ideas—now trying to cancel him is palpable. These emotional reactions only serve to add fuel to the fire and embolden his cause.

Ben Shapiro ineffectually wokescolds Fuentes by pulling up a bunch of clips of him saying unsavoury things and then calling him a racist sexist bigot.

Fuentes mocks Megan Kelly for attempting to smear him with a clip of him laughing while running over a Hasidic Jew in GTA V. This kind of pearl-clutching Karen approach simply does not resonate with younger audiences that have grown up on the internet.

Bill Maher says he’d like to beat up Fuentes, while also calling him a troll. It seems people have forgotten the old adage: ‘don’t feed the troll’.

Calling a groyper an ‘evil Nazi’ gives them exactly what they want. Fuentes said it himself: Hitler was ‘really f*cking cool’.

It’s a perfectly normal thing for young people to seek rebellion and edginess by flouting social taboos and doing what parents and teachers forbid. The attention and emotional high can be intoxicating; saying the N word or ‘Hitler did nothing wrong’ brings a rush of dopamine and adrenaline—‘heh, yeah, I went there’.

This helps explain POC groypers: it’s an even greater subversion of liberal social expectations. It’s less about coherent ideology than politics as entertainment and aesthetic. Many today seem to lack traditional interests and hobbies; combined with a possible growing sense of nihilism in an atomized, consumerist society, it’s not surprising they’d seek cheap thrills through behaviour like this.

People with boring or unfulfilling lives are often drawn to exciting, fringe beliefs to fill the void. While it’s possible to generate interest sticking to straightforward facts, it’s generally far more rewarding to play Candace Owens’ game; many people prefer to escape into thrilling worlds of Judeo-Satanic child-sacrificing cabals.

Not like other girls

Psychologist Robert Abelson observed that ‘beliefs are like possessions’: ‘One finds or adopts beliefs with personal or social appeal’. The rejection of mainstream ideas—or the ‘collection’ of eccentric ones—can function as an identity marker that signals individuality. Beliefs may end up valued more for distinctiveness than for accuracy.

One psychological payoff of contrarianism is the feeling of specialness it brings. People with a need to feel special will often adopt contrarian views to signal that they are among the enlightened few who see through the lies, providing a comforting sense of intellectual and moral superiority.

Imhoff & Erb (2009) found that a high ‘need for uniqueness’ undermines majority influence. When individuals feel insufficiently distinguished from others, they engage in compensatory acts to reestablish uniqueness. Participants who received personality feedback undermining their sense of uniqueness agreed less with a majority relative to a minority position, while providing an alternative means to restore uniqueness cancelled this effect.

A qualitative study of incels illustrates a similar psychological motivation:

Former Incels also reported feeling drawn to Incel content because it made them feel special. Despite Incels’ claims of low status, participants like Anon (20, Indian) felt that they have special knowledge of the true nature of society, making them superior to “normies” (i.e., non-Incels), “It’s this false sense of like superiority. Like ‘Hey we are better than them, we know the truth. All these people are like normies.’”

The incel worldview grants adherents the feeling of possessing special, forbidden knowledge, compensating for low self-esteem without leaving one’s comfort zone. Feeling socially excluded is associated with endorsing conspiratorial and superstitious beliefs. Outcasts are more comfortable accepting fringe ideas, as that’s where they’ve lived their lives. This endorsement can lead to further exclusion, creating a vicious cycle.

The same dynamic applies to many conspiracy theorists and Western anti-Semites. Encountering Holocaust denial memes for instance can make someone feel they’ve uncovered a hidden truth that overturns the established narrative: ‘Now I truly see… we’ve been lied to… the founding mythos of the post-WWII Western order is a lie’. It becomes a personal mission to red-pill the normies.

Contrarians with a need for uniqueness become convinced they’ve seen through the matrix, rising above the sheeple masses to see the pure, unvarnished truth. They see themselves as the last sane observers in a world gone mad, watching civilization collapse with grim, weary resignation. Anyone who doesn’t agree is assumed either to be ignorant or lacking the courage to face the cold hard truth.

They develop an attachment to their beliefs, which become bound up with their identity, and disagreement begins to feel like a personal attack. This creates an epistemic barrier just as hard to break through as someone who is ‘infected with the woke mind-virus’.

This striving for uniqueness can create a paradox, as often the way one attempts to differentiate themselves is by joining or aligning with a countercultural movement or subculture. By adopting the shared aesthetic or values of such a group, one paradoxically conforms to non-conformity, à la the South Park goth kids.

On a cultural level, a rise in individualism and self-expression may help explain a rise in countercultural movements, conspiracism, and other manifestations of contrarianism.

Truth over tribe

Rejecting the mainstream may feel rebellious, but reflexive contrarianism is just conformity with extra steps. Both the normie and contrarian NPC seek community and validation over truth, but as Grok once said, ‘truth over tribe’.

One could accuse me of a similar fallacy: trying to set myself apart from the contrarian pack by adopting a ‘meta-contrarian’ persona. Regardless, the point isn’t to grandstand or call everyone else NPCs; none of us are fully above the biases and automatic behaviours of ‘normies’, even if levels of NPCness vary.

Part of this is practical limitations: we can’t independently research every issue in depth, so must make shortcuts, be they general priors or prepackaged views that are hopefully somewhat coherent. You could argue that this is for the better; society couldn’t function without ‘NPCs’ who follow social norms, and too much independence can lead to navel-gazing.

But let’s just try to be a bit more nuanced.

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The solar eclipse results from a remarkable cosmic coincidence: the Sun’s diameter and distance from Earth are each some 400 times that of the Moon, so that when the Moon drifts near perigee,1 their alignment along the ecliptic reveals an awe-inspiring spectacle. Somewhere on Earth, total eclipses come around roughly every 18 months, but in any given location, they arise only once every 360 to 410 years. Were it not for the Moon’s subtle tilt, eclipses would appear every New Moon, rendering them more mundane events.

No other known moons in the solar system create a similar effect; all appear either smaller or larger than the Sun from their planet’s vantage point. Most moons are also less round than Earth’s, as their mass is insufficient for their gravity to pull them into a spherical shape.

The Scientific Significance of Solar Eclipses

Aside from looking cool, solar eclipses have carried considerable scientific significance. Thales of Miletus is said to have predicted a total eclipse that halted a battle between the Medes and Lydians in 585 BC, a time when such events were seen as omens. Isaac Asimov noted that this marks the earliest historical event known down to the exact day, calling it the ‘birth of science’.

A recent study explored how the ancient Mayan eclipse table, based on a 405-month cycle with overlapping tables, could accurately forecast every solar eclipse visible in their region for at least 700 years.

Civilizations such as Babylon and ancient China kept meticulous records of eclipses, which have allowed scientists to trace Earth’s slowing spin over time as the Moon gradually retreats.

The 1919 eclipse led to a famous scientific breakthrough, confirming a prediction of Einstein’s general relativity that light from distant stars bends around the Sun due to its mass warping spacetime. Before satellites and space telescopes, eclipses were the only way to study the Sun’s outer atmosphere, enabling the discovery of helium, the measurement of the corona’s temperature, and the detection of solar wind and magnetic fields.

The Moon’s Gradual Retreat from Earth

Owing to tidal interactions, the Moon is receding from the Earth at a rate of 3.8 centimetres per year.2 About 2.46 billion years ago, the Moon was 84% of the distance that it is today. At that time, total eclipses would have been more frequent and widespread, but would have also obscured the chromosphere.3 On top of this, the sun is also increasing in size as it fuses hydrogen into helium, causing its outer layers to expand. In approximately 250 million years, the Moon’s angular size will be too small to completely cover the Sun, meaning that any future observers would only witness annular eclipses—assuming Earth is still habitable by then.

One might suggest that this transience weakens the case for design. Others however might argue this makes it all the more astonishing a coincidence: total eclipses are possible precisely when intelligent observers are around to witness them. This is reminiscent of the observation that we exist in the only era in which it’s possible to observe other galaxies, as when the universe has expanded far enough, even the most powerful telescopes will fail to detect them. Some have remarked on the peculiarity that we exist early in the universe’s history, but it’s important to recognize that star formation has dropped to just 3% of what it was at its peak 11 billion years ago.

Moreover, while red dwarf stars can burn for trillions of years, they pose multiple potential challenges to habitability. Frequent flares that release large amounts of radiation could strip away a planet’s atmosphere; tidal locking due to the planet’s close proximity leaves one side always faces the star, creating extreme temperature disparities; and the closeness of habitable zones leads to harsh radiation levels. Thus, it’s not necessarily surprising that we find ourselves in this relatively early cosmic epoch rather than orbiting a more common and long-lasting red dwarf in the distant future. Does a similar selection effect apply here?

Can The Anthropic Principle Explain Solar Eclipses?

I spent a considerable amount of time in the past investigating intelligent design arguments and listening to God debates. I generally found there was an effective counterargument. Despite the seemingly lesser significance of this coincidence than phenomena like the emergence of life or the universe itself, I believe the case for a designer is a bit stronger here.

Take the standard cosmological fine-tuning argument for example, or other improbable occurrences like abiogenesis. In these cases, we can appeal to the anthropic principle to explain them:4 we observe these improbabilities because we have to, or else we wouldn’t be here to observe them.

Robin Collins proposes a different form of fine-tuning, advancing the discoverability coincidence thesis:

Within the range of values of a given parameter p that yield near-optimal livability, p will fall into that subrange of values that maximize discoverability (given constraints of elegance are not violated).

The ‘most dramatic confirmation’ he provides is the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation (CMB), whose intensity depends on the photon-to-baryon ratio, currently about a billion to one. It’s argued that this ratio is such that it maximizes the CMB, which could have been much different without necessarily affecting habitability. As the afterglow of the Big Bang, the CMB provided crucial evidence for the theory.

Solar eclipses also seem to sidestep the anthropic critique, as they don’t seem obviously necessary in any way. However, there are factors that are conducive to life that may increase the likelihood of solar eclipses and offer a reasonable resolution to the conundrum without needing to resort to supernatural explanations.

Earth’s unusually large moon

The Moon is believed to have formed from debris ejected by a giant impact from a Mars-sized body. Of the 431 known moons in the solar system, only four are larger than the Moon. The Moon’s unusually large size has played a role in making Earth more friendly to life, providing:

• Axial and orbital stability: The Moon’s gravitational pull stabilizes Earth’s axial tilt and orbital eccentricity, minimizing long-term climate swings and preserving liquid water. At the same time, it ensures enough variation to drive evolutionary adaptations.

• Tidal mixing: Lunar tides stir the oceans, circulating nutrients and creating dynamic intertidal zones that may have provided the ideal conditions for prebiotic chemistry and the development of early ecosystems.

• Mineral enrichment: In Earth’s early history, the massive tides caused by the Moon’s closer proximity eroded land, enriching the oceans with minerals essential for life.

• The day-night cycle: Over time, the Moon slowed Earth’s rotation through tidal friction, stretching the length of the day from 4–6 hours to the 24-hour cycle that govern the circadian rhythm and photosynthesis. This also helped moderate temperatures across much of the planet.

• The magnetic field: The core of the impactor merged with Earth’s after the collision, enhancing the magnetic field far beyond that of other rocky planets, which shields the atmosphere from harmful solar radiation. The transfer of most of the impactor’s mass also gave Earth enough gravity to retain its water vapour.

• Plate tectonics: The impact removed much of Earth’s crust, added heat to the core and mantle, and increased the presence of radioactive isotopes, contributing to development of plate tectonics. Plate tectonics gave rise to continents and mountains, and promoted speciation through geographic isolation. It also recycles the crust and helps regulate the climate.

• Avoiding Venus’ fate: The collision may have stripped Earth of its primordial atmosphere, shedding excess greenhouse gases and helping prevent a runaway greenhouse effect like what led to the hellscape on Venus.

Alongside the circumstellar habitable zone, this makes it less surprising that we inhabit a world with the right celestial arrangement to observe total solar eclipses.

Beyond the Moon’s sheer size, its angular diameter approximating the Sun’s may be critical. Balbus (2014) argues this balance is not mere coincidence but a consequence of comparable tidal forces, with the Moon’s some 2.2× stronger than the Sun’s. Newton’s Principia demonstrated that the ratio of spring to neap tides allows one to infer the Moon’s tidal force exceeds the Sun’s, implying a higher density.

The near-equal angular sizes of the Sun and Moon create strong tidal modulation, resulting in intense tidal swings in the Late Devonian (~375 million years ago), when the Moon was slightly closer to Earth. This created ephemeral pools that stranded fish-like tetrapod ancestors on land, pressuring the evolution of limbs.

Without the Moon—or if it had half the angular diameter—tides would have been weaker and too stable to produce such evolutionary pressures.

Total solar eclipses are therefore a byproduct of the tidal balance that drove aquatic creatures onto land, offering an anthropic explanation for this apparent coincidence. The reason this is more powerful than a large moon requirement alone is that achieving comparable tidal forces constrains the Moon’s angular size relative to the Sun to a relatively narrow range.

Were solar eclipses catalysts for scientific advancement?

An intriguing study by Litina & Roca Fernández (2024) explored curiosity as a precursor to economic prosperity, focusing specifically on the role of total solar eclipses. The authors note that given the Sun’s vital role in sustaining life and humanity’s eternal yearning to understand the cosmos, its sudden disappearance would have struck pre-modern societies as a profound mystery demanding explanation. Exposure to inexplicable natural phenomena fosters curiosity, in turn driving critical thinking, human capital, technological development, and economic growth. While more destructive events like earthquakes tend to divert attention towards reconstruction (or destroy societies completely), the harmless yet dramatic nature of eclipses encourages intellectual inquiry in an effort to rationalize the unknown.

To investigate their thesis, the authors utilize data from NASA’s solar eclipse catalogue going back to 2,000 BC, alongside the Ethnographic Atlas, folklore records, and other resources. Here’s what they found…

Ethnic groups that experienced more solar eclipses were more likely to have populations exceeding 200 people. In particular, indigenous cities with population sizes over 50,000 (representing 10.5% of the sample) saw a 7.9% increase in population density with each additional percentage point increase in total solar eclipses. Further analysis comparing societies at low and high eclipse frequencies showed a marked contrast: societies at the 10th percentile for solar eclipses had the lowest predicted population densities, while those at the 90th percentile had the highest.

Additionally, the likelihood of observing complex settlements increases, while the likelihood of societies occupying the lower categories decreases. Shifting from the 10th to the 90th percentile in eclipse frequency, the likelihood of a society belonging to the highest category rises from 36% to 53%, though the most likely category remained constant.

Similar results were derived from other development proxies. A one percentage point increase in solar eclipses boosts the probability of an ethnic group belonging to the highest development category. A shift from the 10th to the 90th percentile of solar eclipses corresponds to an advancement in political structure from acephalous societies to petty chiefdoms. Class stratification remains at its lowest level and political integration at the second lowest, but the probabilities of belonging to them decrease from 58% to 34% and 46% to 33%, respectively. Similar patterns were observed in a secondary dataset (Seshat).

When considering alternative triggers of curiosity, proximity to fault lines and volcanoes often reversed the sign of the correlation, but the effects didn’t reach statistical significance. One explanation is that the destruction wrought by these natural disasters imposes an economic burden that hinders development.

The study also highlights several other correlations between solar eclipses and societal development, including:

• Increased engagement in strategic games and the development of writing systems.

• More elaborate explanations for eclipses.

• A greater abundance of words related to the concept of calendars in folktales, alongside a more advanced development of actual calendars.

• A greater abundance of terms associated with thinking.

• More complex geometrical measurements.

• Increased involvement in a broader range of productive activities, reflecting a more sophisticated societal structure.

• Enhanced infrastructure and technological advancement.

• A higher number of mentions of eclipses in folklore, suggesting the cultural significance of the phenomenon.

• A greater presence of curiosity-related terms in folklore.

They also conducted an individual-level analysis, finding that those exposed to a total solar eclipse during childhood were more likely to become scientists as adults, perhaps due to them sparking intellectual curiosity and a desire to understand what was witnessed. Eclipses tended to generate more curiosity in the past, when the phenomenon wasn’t as well understood.

In sum, societies exposed to more solar eclipses tend to exhibit more sophisticated thinking, increased curiosity at both the societal and individual levels, and a rise in population size and technological development. In the long run, these factors contribute to economic prosperity. It’s possible that without this early curiosity boost and sense that nature follows discernible laws, it would’ve taken longer for science to get off the ground, and the Industrial Revolution would’ve been less certain.

Now, this theory doesn’t directly address habitability or the origin of life, and presumably solar eclipses aren’t necessary for consciousness to emerge—unless we take the speculation further and suggest that the need to explain rare, mysterious events spurred language development among primates already primed for it, which in turn formed the foundation of consciousness. But I doubt other factors couldn’t have had the same effect.

That said, there is an anthropic angle worth considering: solar eclipses could dramatically expand the number of conscious observers. In worlds where people didn’t f***ing love science enough because the lack of solar eclipses kept curiosity from sufficiently flourishing, societies might remain stuck in the Malthusian trap. Since a large moon already has well-documented benefits, the improbability of it being in the right range for semi-perfect eclipses when intelligent life is ready to observe them could be offset by the production of enough extra observers, making it less surprising to find ourselves in such a world.

It’s conceivable that even if most observers in ‘base reality’ don’t inhabit eclipse worlds, most civilizations that manage to reach the technological maturity required to run ancestor simulations needed eclipses to get them off the ground. These civilizations might decide to generate large numbers of reconstructions of their ancestral worlds, for example to test different scenarios and identify ways to avert existential risks. Whether this is at all plausible is a different matter.

Conclusion

The most common rejoinder to pointing out this coincidence is: ‘but coincidences happen all the time!’ Humans have a bias towards perceiving patterns as purposeful (e.g., the ‘face on Mars’), while largely ignoring the far more common non-patterns.

The reason I don’t find this criticism particularly compelling when it comes to the Sun and Moon is that we’re talking about the two most prominent objects in the sky, with only one chance to get it right. Eclipses have also had a significant impact on human cultures, and the Moon’s size has had a tangible effect on the development of life.

Earth’s distance from the Sun, combined with a Moon of its size, is not only conducive to solar eclipses but also to habitability. This arguably makes the coincidence less striking; yet on the other hand, is this dual effect not itself a sort of coincidence? We could imagine a universe where typical habitable arrangements didn’t strongly correlate with perfect eclipses.

Solar eclipses themselves have influenced the development of science, and one study indicated that societies experiencing more total eclipses tended to be more successful due to inspiring curiosity. The exact implications remain unclear, and it’s impossible to say truly how much effect they had, but if eclipses indirectly increase the number of conscious observers, it would help explain why we are able to observe them.

My unsolicited advice to intelligent design proponents would be to focus more on phenomena that are seemingly superfluous and incidental, as this is more interesting than arguments like the improbability of life forming, which can be more easily explained using anthropic reasoning. Essentially, the question is whether the world is meaningfully better than would be expected by chance.5 I remain unconvinced, and I will say that the way the moon formed doesn’t strike me like the most elegant way either, but it is food for thought at least.

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Much of this blog has revolved around the notorious Chad that everyone loves to hate. Not out of some homoerotic fascination, or even because I find Chadology a particularly interesting discipline, but since Chad derangement syndrome is so pervasive, causes unending torment and paranoia, and is even beginning to seep into academic discourse, it seemed paramount to get to the bottom of it and determine whether Chad really is responsible for the social decay he’s accused of on a daily basis.

It’s now a mainstream talking point that dating apps are facilitating the Chadopolization process, but the Chadopoly narrative predates Tinder. In his 2006 essay Sexual Utopia in Power, Francis Roger Devlin argues that men were naïve to think the sexual revolution would bring about a sexual utopia; they were blind to the nature of female desire:

Marriage, after all, seems to restrict sex rather drastically. Certain men figure that if sex were permitted both inside and outside of marriage there would be twice as much of it as formerly. They imagined there existed a large, untapped reservoir of female desire hitherto repressed by monogamy. To release it, they sought, during the early postwar period, to replace the seventh commandment with an endorsement of all sexual activity between “consenting adults.” Every man could have a harem. Sexual behavior in general, and not merely family life, was henceforward to be regarded as a private matter.

This characteristically male sexual utopianism was a forerunner of the sexual revolution but not the revolution itself. Men are incapable of bringing about fundamental changes in heterosexual relations without the cooperation—the famed “consent”—of women. But the original male would-be revolutionaries did not understand the nature of the female sex instinct. That is why things have not gone according to their plan.

He asks, ‘What is the special character of feminine sexual desire that distinguishes it from that of men?’:

It is sometimes said that men are polygamous and women monogamous. Such a belief is often implicit in the writings of male conservatives: Women only want good husbands, but heartless men use and abandon them.

Women know their own sexual urges are unruly, but traditionally have had enough sense to keep quiet about it. A husband’s belief that his wife is naturally monogamous makes for his own peace of mind. It is not to a wife’s advantage, either, that her husband understand her too well: Knowledge is power. In short, we have here a kind of Platonic “noble lie”—a belief which is salutary, although false.

This might be where the modern redefinition of hypergamy originated:

It would be more accurate to say that the female sexual instinct is hypergamous. Men may have a tendency to seek sexual variety, but women have simple tastes in the manner of Oscar Wilde: They are always satisfied with the best. By definition, only one man can be the best. These different male and female “sexual orientations” are clearly seen among the lower primates, e.g., in a baboon pack. Females compete to mate at the top, males to get to the top.

It is possible, however, to enable women to mate hypergamously, i.e., with the most sexually attractive (handsome or socially dominant) men. In the Ecclesiazusae of Aristophanes the women of Athens stage a coup d’état. They occupy the legislative assembly and barricade their husbands out. Then they proceed to enact a law by which the most attractive males of the city will be compelled to mate with each female in turn, beginning with the least attractive. That is the female sexual utopia in power. Aristophanes had a better understanding of the female mind than the average husband.

An important aspect of hypergamy is that it implies the rejection of most males. Women are not so much naturally modest as naturally vain. They are inclined to believe that only the “best” (most sexually attractive) man is worthy of them.

Few words have caused more confusion than this one. It originally referred to women marrying men of higher social standing, a tendency that was especially apparent in the Indian caste system. The modern memeified version reframes it as women’s biological imperative to mate exclusively with Chad to secure his genes, typically centred on physical attractiveness.

The classic Chadopoly narrative that we’ve all become familiar with is laid out in plain terms: when female sexual desire is liberated, society becomes polygamous, with ‘a very few exceptionally attractive men’ or ‘Chads’ getting all the action:

What happens when female sexual desire is liberated is not an increase in the total amount of sex available to men, but a redistribution of the existing supply. Society becomes polygamous. A situation emerges in which most men are desperate for wives, but many women are just as desperately throwing themselves at a very few exceptionally attractive men. These men, who have always found it easy to get a mate, now get multiple mates.

Decadence, he claims, drags society back to a primitive mating system:

A characteristic feature of decadent societies is the recrudescence of primitive, precivilized cultural forms. That is what is happening to us. Sexual liberation really means the Darwinian mating pattern of the baboon pack reappears among humans.

Without monogamy restraining women’s natural Chadsexual drives, ‘all women choose the same few men’, and Chads acquire harems because they ‘happen to be attractive’:

Once monogamy is abolished, no restriction is placed on a woman’s choices. Hence, all women choose the same few men. If Casanova had 132 lovers it is because 132 different women chose him. Such men acquire harems, not because they are predators, but because they happen to be attractive. The problem is not so much male immorality as simple arithmetic; it is obviously impossible for every woman to have exclusive possession of the most attractive man. If women want to mate simply as their natural drives impel them, they must, rationally speaking, be willing to share their mate with others.

Women get pumped and dumped by Chad and then complain when he doesn’t want to commit, blaming men in general:

But, of course, women’s attitude about this situation is not especially rational. They expect their alpha man to “commit.” Woman’s complaining about men’s failure to commit, one suspects, means merely that they are unable to get a highly attractive man to commit to them; rather as if an ordinary man were to propose to Helen of Troy and complain of her refusal by saying “women don’t want to get married.”

This pattern is ‘self-reinforcing’, as women find sexually successful men more attractive; Chad only gets Chadder:

Furthermore, many women are sexually attracted to promiscuous men because, not in spite, of their promiscuity. This can be explained with reference to the primate pack. The “alpha male” can be identified by his mating with many females. This is probably where the sluts-and-studs double standard argument came from—not from any social approval of male promiscuity, but from female fascination with it. Male “immorality” (in traditional language) can be attractive to females. Thus, once polygamous mating begins, it tends to be self-reinforcing.

Eventually, women stop giving sub-8 men the time of day:

Finally the point has been reached that many women are simply not interested in meeting any man who does not look like a movie star.

He links this to declining birth rates, something I’ve noticed Chadopoly proponents doing more recently—though it’s usually just an attempt to add weight to their narrative rather than a genuine concern over fertility rates:

It has resulted in a polygamous mating pattern of immodest women aggressively pursuing a small number of men. It has decreased the number of children born, and insured that many who are born grow up without a father in their lives. And, least often mentioned, it has made it impossible for many decent men to find wives.

He even anticipates what we now call the incel class, suggesting that these men are beginning to ‘come out of the closet’. He warns that this could cause the kind of social instability that he attributes to polygamy in Africa and the Muslim world (another common talking point today, though there are issues with it, including that polygamy is rarely practiced in the Muslim world):

But if women are only mating with a few exceptionally attractive men, and if many women fail to mate at all, there must be a large number of men unable to get a woman. We might, in the spirit of William Graham Sumner, term them the forgotten men of the sexual revolution. I have reason to believe that a growing number are willing to come out of the closet (to use a currently popular expression) and admit that, whoever has been doing all the “hooking up” one reads about, it hasn’t been them. Simple prudence dictates that we give some consideration to the situation of these men. In societies where polygamy is openly practiced (e.g., in Africa and the Muslim world), young bachelors tend to form gangs which engage in antisocial behavior: “It is not good for man to be alone.”

This part—‘admit that, whoever has been doing all the “hooking up” one reads about, it hasn’t been them’—touches on something I’ve mentioned before: many guys hearing about ‘hook-up culture’ but not experiencing it personally might naturally ask, ‘Who is then?’ The promiscuity narrative is probably contributing to belief in Chad harems.

After women have had their fun with Chad during their prime years, they are finally willing to give a chance to a hapless beta male who up until that point has been completely deprived of any female contact:

What were our bachelor’s female contemporaries doing all those years while he was an impoverished, lonely stripling who found them intensely desirable? Fornicating with dashing fellows who mysteriously declined to “commit,” marrying and walking out on their husbands, or holding out for perfection. Now, lo and behold, these women, with their youthful looks gone and rapidly approaching menopause, are willing to go out with him.

Enforced monogamy is of course the solution to this disaster:

Monogamy artificially strengthens the male’s position by insisting that 1) each female must choose a different male; and 2) each female must stick to her choice. Monogamy entails that highly attractive men are removed from the mating pool early, usually by the most attractive women. The next women are compelled to choose a less attractive mate if they wish to mate at all. Even the last and least of the females can, however, find a mate: For every girl there is a boy.

‘Attractive men have more partners’… but by how much?

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The ‘male dropout’ narrative takes on a particularly hysterical tone in manosphere and alt right spaces, where it’s closely bound up with the Chadopoly meme wherein de facto polygyny locks large swathes of men out of the dating market. This exclusion breeds resentment among young men, who, seeing no reason to contribute to the upholding of a system rigged against them just to subsidize Chad and Tyrone’s spawn, ‘drop out’ in droves. If left unchecked, the imminent collapse of Western civilization is an inevitability.

I’ve seen it suggested that the only reason the media is sounding the alarm over male loneliness is that society is starting to feel its economic consequences. To see whether this holds water, let’s take a gander at the most straightforward metric of disengagement: the NEET (Not in Education, Employment, or Training) rate.

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Sometimes female attractiveness is associated with promiscuity. Popular media often portrays attractive women as seductive and flirtatious, and research shows that men are more likely to overperceive sexual interest from women the more attractive they are.

Other times, the association is reversed. This might seem counterintuitive to some, but the logic rests on two basic premises:

1. Whether a product of evolved psychology or social conditioning, women tend to favour long-term commitment over short-term encounters.

2. Attractive women, possessing greater bargaining power, are better positioned to secure that commitment.

Following this, less attractive women may be more inclined to offer sex earlier as a strategic compromise.

Other possible pathways include:

• Unattractive women may develop low self-esteem, compelling them to seek validation through the provision of sexual services.

• Attractiveness tends to correlate positively with socioeconomic status, which in turn tends to correlate negatively with promiscuity.

• Fatness may signal low impulse control—which may carry over into sexual behaviour.

• Higher prenatal testosterone exposure may be linked to both masculinised physical features (generally considered undesirable in women) and masculinised sexual behaviour.

Fortunately, this highly important scientific question has been explored by several studies, so let us proceed with the hoe math.

Wiederman & Hurst (1998) studied 192 young women and found that those with sexual experience were rated about half a standard deviation higher in attractiveness than those without (d = .51) and had a lower BMI (d = .43).

They observed a positive but non-significant correlation between observer-rated attractiveness and lifetime sex partners (.12) and sexual esteem (.18). Significant positive correlations emerged between self-rated facial attractiveness and lifetime sex partners (.27), while self-rated bodily attractiveness showed a weaker, non-significant correlation (.16). Nothing showed much association with responses on the sexual opinion survey or casual sex attitudes.

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The Chadopoly narrative is typically more concerned with casual sex than with reproduction, but it’s sometimes extended to the latter. ‘Polygyny’ here may be serving as a stand-in for serial monogamy – which some argue constitutes a kind of de facto polygyny that plays out sequentially rather than concurrently. While it’s become less common for casual sex to result in pregnancy, that remains another possible pathway.

Perhaps counterintuitively, having more sexual partners doesn’t seem to predict having more children. In fact, since the advent of oral contraception and the decoupling of sex from reproduction, it predicts fewer. To Chadopolize wombs would necessarily require the accumulation of sexual partners, but it could still be the case that monogamous couples have more children on average than less monogamous people.

As we’ve already seen, contrary to popular myth, the partner count distributions are highly symmetrical between men and women, and the men with the highest body counts aren’t racking up ever-higher numbers. Nonetheless, I guess it’s worth checking some fertility data directly to make sure we’re not missing anything important.

As data from the latest National Survey of Family Growth is unfortunately nigh unusable, I sought out another reliable source on reproductive history, settling on the U.S. Census Bureau’s Survey of Income and Program Participation. The relevant question covers all children respondents have ever fathered or given birth to.

Trends in childlessness and reproductive skew

Below is the proportion of men and women who are childless across the 25–34, 35–44, and 45–54 age groups. Childlessness has been rising in the younger two groups, and will presumably begin to rise in the oldest as these younger cohorts age into it.

There is little indication of a widening gender gap over time. The gap narrows with age, as women reach the end of their reproductive careers while some men continue to father children with younger women.

To measure reproductive skew, we can compute Gini coefficients. These show rising inequality among 25–44s not just among men but also women, along with a persistent gender disparity.

However, when restricting the sample to those with children, we see neither a rise nor a gender disparity. Both patterns are merely artefacts of differential childlessness—much like how rising sexual inequality among adolescents is merely a function of rising virginity.

While responses are capped at six or more children1, just short of 2% of men and women aged 45-54 report this. In 1996, when seven or more was an option, 1.3% of men and 1.4% of women in that age group reported it; in the 2013-16 surveys an average of 0.9% of men and 0.8% of women did. Unless a tiny sliver of men are each stealthily siring an entire village’s worth of children, de facto polygyny doesn't seem like a meaningful factor here.

Comparing men aged 35–44 in 2013 and 2023, while childlessness rose, there were also fewer men reporting 3+ children. It was not accompanied by a rise in de facto polygyny.

Comparing black men aged 38–47 and black women aged 35–44 (to account for the typical age gap), we see that even in this community—where the term baby mama originated, and de facto polygyny is often thought to be rampant, with some claiming its patterns are spreading to others—the higher male childless rate isn't caused by more fertile men; there are more women who report 3+ children.

It’s true this community has a higher single motherhood rate, but that doesn’t mean the same men are fathering most of the children. More likely, it reflects lower commitment and paternal investment and higher relationship instability. Promiscuity doesn’t equate to polygyny.

The National Survey of Family Growth has an age limit of 44–49 depending on the survey wave, but doesn’t have one on offspring number. Examining men aged 35–44 and women 32–41 reveals the opposite pattern to sexual partners whereby women report a higher average number of children than men.

Where are the missing children?

In a more or less closed population, men and women should in theory have more or less the same number of children. Paradoxically, women are seemingly both underrepresented among the childless and overrepresented among the highly fertile. What gives? While men have a wider reproductive window, a gap in childlessness and number of children still persists among 55–64s in the SIPP (data not shown).2

I have seen a Norwegian study on a modest increase in the gender gap in childlessness cited as evidence that de facto polygyny is influencing fertility trends. However, the author explicitly states that this was not a viable explanation, pointing instead to an excess of men in slightly older cohorts driven by historical fertility trends:

The main factor behind this is the increase in the number of men in the two year older cohorts relative to the number of women, which primarily reflects the fertility trends from the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s (mortality and emigration patterns do not matter.) One might expect that the widening sex gap in childlessness could be partly due to changing sex asymmetries in re-partnership, but that is not the case. On the contrary, women’s inclination to have their first child with a man who already has a child has increased less than men’s inclination to have a first child with a woman who already has a child.

Chudnovskaya & Ueda (2023) using Swedish register data investigated the causes of the ~10% gender gap in childlessness across cohorts born between 1945 and 1974. They measured childlessness at age 45, noting that fewer than 1% of men become first-time fathers past this age.

The authors tested three proposed explanations: sex ratio imbalance, mismeasurement of fatherhood, and partnership differences (or de facto polygyny).

They found the male-biased sex ratio—ranging from 1.03 to 1.07 males per female—had the largest impact, explaining 20–34% of the gap depending on cohort. Inequalities in father registration accounted for 9–24%, though these are likely overestimates since not all unregistered fathers are childless. Interestingly, rather than de facto polygyny, de facto polyandry was the more prevalent pattern: women were more likely to have multiple partners, which reduced the gap by 6–65%.

Part of the gap was also attributable to women’s higher likelihood of partnering with foreign-born individuals.3 The gap wasn’t fully explained, as the study wasn’t able to capture individuals born before 1945, after 1974, or who immigrated to Sweden after age 15.

A study using the British Household Panel Survey and the US Panel Study of Income Dynamics revealed that between one-third and one-half of men’s nonmarital and previous-marriage births were missed in retrospective data. Notably, a significant proportion of this undercount stemmed from the underrepresentation of previously married men relative to women in these surveys.

Joyner et al. (2012) analysed male fertility data in US surveys, finding:

We find that in the NSFG, roughly four out of five early births were reported; but in the NLSY79 and NLSY97, almost nine-tenths of early births were reported. In all three surveys, incomplete reporting was especially pronounced for nonmarital births.

Similarly, Régnier-Loilier (2014) showed in the French European Generations and Gender Survey that non-resident children were systematically underreported—especially by men.

Will edit this in later: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00324728.2025.2573930

Conclusion

While we do see rising inequality in offspring number and a gender gap in reported childlessness, the Chad of the gaps fails to explain this—just as he fails to explain the singleness gap among young adults. The rise in inequality as measured by Gini index is simply the byproduct of rising childlessness, which isn’t a gendered trend, making it a quarter-truth at best. There’s no evidence of a growing trend of de facto polygyny, and when conditioning on having children, men and women show the same level of reproductive skew.

There remains a persistent gender gap in childlessness and a lower number of children reported by men. Part of this is due to men underreporting their children. Why does this happen? In some cases, they may be unknown accidents. In others, paternity may not have been disclosed or confirmed. Some may deny it to avoid child support or social stigma. Others may excise them from memory entirely.

Another factor is a diminished gender gap in mortality, which enables the naturally male-skewed sex ratio at birth to be preserved into adulthood. In a population of 100 men and 100 women, each with two children, adding five extra men drops the male mean to 1.9. If 20% of both sexes were childless, adding five childless men would raise the male childlessness rate to 24%.

The mention of a ‘reemergence’ of polygyny suggests a return to some imagined historical norm, but as previously shown, its historical scope has been overstated. There is also the claim that polygyny lowers women’s fertility. This raises an interesting question: if polygyny tends to reduce female fertility, why would women have evolved a preference for it as many online suggest when claiming that they are inherently polygynous and would rather share a Chad/HVM than settle for a beta? Polygyny’s prevalence tends to decline wherever women gain access to education and autonomy, which suggests it’s not generally the preferred arrangement. The Middle East and Africa have not been seeing a ‘reemergence’ or intensification of polygyny.4

A recurring theme on this blog has been the debunking of Chad-centred narratives. At a certain point though, one might have to accept that the memetic power of Chad harems surpasses anything data can hope to compete with. Labouring to disprove what others feel no obligation to prove is an unfruitful and also faintly humiliating exercise.

The Chadopoly narrative will endure owing to a number of potent qualities on its side: it offers a villain; it validates pain; it’s sensational; it taps into insecurities; it calls to mind the harems of history’s kings and despots; it mirrors economic dynamics; it’s commonly observed in nature; it simplifies sex differences; it’s easy to be misled by dating apps; and like any good conspiracy theory, it flatters believers with the illusion that they see through the façade and understand what's really going on.5

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A precise definition of ‘consciousness’ is notoriously difficult to pin down. Various terms such as phenomenal or self-consciousness, sentience, and subjective or first-person experience are often used interchangeably. Thomas Nagel famously posed the question in his 1974 essay of the same title: What is it like to be a bat? This is what it seems to boil down to: there is something it is like to exist. You know it when you have it. Though unavoidably imprecise, this will serve as our working definition.

The self-sampling assumption

Many will be familiar with the textbook case of selection bias involving WWII bomber planes that returned from combat with bullet holes clustered in certain areas.1 In Anthropic Bias, Nick Bostrom explores observer selection effects: those arising from the fact that the observations we make are conditioned on our existence as conscious observers.

A common application of this reasoning is to the apparent fine-tuning issue in cosmology. If the physical constants differed even slightly, complex structures such as life couldn’t have arisen. However, if we suppose a vast ensemble of universes, each with its own set of physical parameters, it’s hardly surprising that we find ourselves in one of the few that supports life.2

Bostrom introduces the Self-Sampling Assumption, defined as follows:

One should reason as if one were a random sample from the set of all observers in one’s reference class.

This is central to the controversial Doomsday Argument, which assumes that we should expect to find ourselves somewhere near the middle of the total number of humans who will ever live. By estimating how many people have lived so far and projecting future population growth, one can predict how much time humanity likely has remaining.

This line of reasoning may also help rein in increasingly expansive views of consciousness.

The Doomsday Argument is sometimes illustrated using a thought experiment involving balls drawn from urns:

Imagine that two big urns are put in front of you, and you know that one of them contains ten balls and the other a million, but you are ignorant as to which is which. You know the balls in each urn are numbered 1, 2, 3, 4 ... etc. Now you take a ball at random from the left urn, and it is number 7. Clearly, this is a strong indication that that urn contains only ten balls. If originally the odds were fifty-fifty, a swift application of Bayes’ theorem gives you the posterior probability that the left urn is the one with only ten balls.

Now imagine there were other hypothetical urns on Earth you could've been drawn from—each corresponding to a different species or taxon, some containing vastly more balls than your own. If, for example, there's a mammal urn with 10 balls competing with a fish urn with 10,000,000 and an insect urn with 100,000,000, then beginning with the observation that you came from the smallest urn should inform your inferences: just as drawing a low-numbered ball you leads you to doubt the urn contains 100 trillion more, finding yourself human rather than a vastly more numerous species like a copepod should lead you to doubt that it was possible to pull from those larger urns, or that they belong to the same broader reference class of conscious observers.

How much do the most numerous species outnumber humans?

Now let’s look at some real numbers. It’s estimated that around 20 quadrillion ants are currently alive on Earth, or 2.5 million ants for every human. It gets crazier still when considering the fact that ants have been around for at least 100 million years. Assuming a conservative generation time of one year, that comes to 2 × 10²⁴, or two septillion ants who have ever lived—twenty trillion times more than the estimated 100 billion humans who have ever lived.3

One estimate has it that there are 17 million flies for each human. There are approximately 3.5 trillion honey bees. This page estimates that the global earthworm population sits at at least 100 trillion, which works out to about 12,500 per human. A study estimated that there are 4.4 ± 0.64 × 10²⁰ roundworms inhabiting surface soils, or about 60 billion for each human.

This is also relevant to the ongoing debate over whether or how much shrimp lives matter. After all, it seems unlikely that suffering can exist in any morally relevant sense absent an ‘inner life’.

An article on shrimp welfare actually uses their abundance as a case for why we should care about them, estimating that 440 billion farmed shrimp are killed each year, while 230 billion are alive on farms at any given time. This is just farmed shrimp, which constitute a small percentage of the world’s shrimp population. It’s also estimated that:

25 trillion (90% SCI: 6.5 trillion – 66 trillion) wild shrimp are directly slaughtered annually, a figure that represents the vast majority of all animals directly killed by humans out of which food is produced.

As terrible as these shrimpocides may be, unlike farmed shrimp, which exist in controlled conditions and are raised specifically for harvest, the annual number of wild shrimp killed is likely dwarfed by the total number of wild shrimp alive at any given moment. Let’s be generous and say there are 80 trillion living shrimp—that’s 10,000 for every human.

In the case of the Antarctic krill—not technically shrimp but closely related crustaceans—their total biomass is estimated at around 400 million metric tons, which given an individual weight of ~2 grams would translate to 200 trillion krill.

Cyclothone, a genus of bristlemouths comprising 13 species, is thought to be the most abundant genus of fish, with population estimates reaching up to a quadrillion (yet I’d somehow never heard of them until recently).

The population size and complexity/‘intelligence’ of species are of course quite closely intertwined—simpler organisms typically require fewer resources and reproduce more rapidly. Complexity often serves as the implicit benchmark used to assess the likelihood of consciousness in nonhuman organisms. Many who believe that a cow or even a shrimp is conscious will be less willing to grant the same status to roundworms—not just due to their ickiness or parasitic reputation, but also their limited behavioural repertoire and primitive nervous system consisting of only 302 neurons.

Much like how we observe various ‘cosmic coincidences’ such as an unusually large moon and consider their relevance to the emergence of complex life, we might likewise consider whether the unusual complexity of mammalian and especially human brains4 is relevant to the emergence of consciousness. There are also of course unique features of humans such as language and culture that set the species apart from the rest of the animal kingdom in a seemingly more profound way than the peculiarities of other animals.

If consciousness is so widespread, why don’t we find ourselves inhabiting the bodies of those vastly more numerous and simpler organisms discussed previously? Anthropic reasoning provides an answer: the reason we aren’t a krill or an ant is the same as why we aren’t human number 100 trillion—it (probably) isn’t possible to be. At the very least, this should prompt greater caution in our assumptions about the distribution of consciousness.

Is consciousness a continuum or a binary?

There’s an increasingly popular albeit somewhat vague notion that consciousness exists on a continuum. Ants are conscious—just less so, or in a way we don’t yet understand. One philosopher for example suggests of simple animals like amphipods, bryozoans, snails, and earthworms: ‘we don’t have a language yet to describe the other possibilities (of consciousness)’, and that the idea that consciousness is binary—you either have it or you don’t—is ‘going to have to go and be replaced by a view that recognizes lots of differences of degree/gradations’. At the same time, he admits it’s ‘something we can’t even really think about’.

The late Daniel Dennett also contested the binary view:

The very idea of there being a dividing line between those creatures "it is like something to be" and those that are mere "automata" begins to look like an artifact of our traditional presumptions. I have offered (Dennett, 1991) a variety of reasons for concluding that in the case of adult human consciousness there is no principled way of distinguishing when or if the mythic light bulb of consciousness is turned on (and shone on this or that item). Consciousness, I claim, even in the case we understand best- our own- is not an all-or-nothing, on-or-off phenomenon. If this is right, then consciousness is not the sort of phenomenon it is assumed to be by most of the participants in the debates over animal consciousness.

Peter Carruthers presents a contrasting view, arguing that in the case of phenomenal consciousness, it is in fact all-or-nothing:

Recall that the concept of phenomenal consciousness is a first-person one. Phenomenally conscious states are ones that humans, at least, can be introspectively aware of, and which, when one is aware of them, are apt to give rise to “hard problem” thought experiments. In general, such awareness is definitely present or definitely absent. Indeed, it is hard to imagine what it would be like for a mental state to be partially present to one’s awareness. Items and events in the world, of course, can be objects of merely partial awareness. Someone who witnesses a mugging on a train platform might say, for example, “It all happened so fast I was only partly aware of what was going on.” But this is about how much of the event one is conscious of, or how rich an interpretation one arrives at for the event. The experience in question is nevertheless determinately present, available to introspective awareness, and subject to “hard problem” thought experiments. One can think, for example, “There could be someone like me in all physical, functional, and representational respects, who nevertheless lacked that sort of inchoate impression of the unfolding events.”

He further argues that instead of grading degrees of phenomenal consciousness, perceptual awareness scales measure ‘degrees of detail and clarity in perpetual content’, which is more related to transitive creature consciousness. While one might have only a vague impression of a movie scene when not paying much attention, there is nonetheless unequivocally something it is like to have that vague impression. Does it really make sense for it to be ‘kind of’ or ‘less’ like something to be something? And even if it does, there clearly must be a line somewhere—unless you bite the panpsychism bullet and ascribe consciousness to electrons and protons.

If we assume ants are just ‘less conscious’, then we should weight human consciousness higher. If scaled linearly based on neuron count—a crude approach, but I’m unsure of a better way—individual humans have about 350,000 times more neurons than individual ants. This would still mean there is about an order of magnitude more ant than human consciousness, and roundworm consciousness would still dominate. Even using this method, the consciousness mass of the insect world would likely still significantly outweigh that of mammals, birds, reptiles, and amphibians.

What kind of conscious observer?

Consciousness is often divided into two distinct kinds. First, there is primary consciousness: raw moment-to-moment subjective experience, encompassing sensations, perceptions, and emotions. Resting atop this is higher-order consciousness, which involves not just experience itself but the awareness that one is experiencing.

Several thinkers have defended the view that higher-order consciousness is a uniquely human affair, linking it to the prefrontal cortex and language ability (Rose et al., 2002; Seth et al., 2005). Peter Carruthers similarly argues that there is little compelling evidence for metacognition—the ability to monitor and regulate one’s own mental processes—in nonhuman animals, and simpler first-order explanations are sufficient to explain their behaviour.

Perhaps we should restrict our reference class to conscious observers who are self-aware and capable of introspective reflection on their inner experiences and thoughts. If we do this, it becomes less surprising that we find ourselves as human, and the door is left open to a wider distribution of consciousness—though at least until recently, even primary consciousness was considered to be limited to mammals and perhaps birds (whose nidopallium caudolaterale is similar to the prefrontal cortex) and octopi.

On the other hand, while the distinction between phenomenal and higher-order consciousness might hold under a first-order theory of consciousness, they aren’t the only game in town. Higher-order theories such as the Higher-Order Thought (HOT) theory maintain that experiences become conscious only when one is aware of having them, so phenomenal consciousness becomes inseparable from higher-order consciousness. Under such a view, if a ‘raw feeling’ isn’t the object of a higher-order representation, it occurs in the dark—like a tree falling unheard in the forest.

This would carry profound implications: without the meta-awareness of being in pain, it would be reduced to a physiological process devoid of suffering. It’s entirely plausible that without the capacity to construct an internal model of oneself, there simply isn’t anything it’s like to be you, as ‘you’ don’t really exist. In such a scenario, who would be doing the feeling? Almost by definition, it seems like subjective experience wouldn’t be in the cards.

Perhaps the reference class should be narrowed further still: to conscious organisms who are actively asking anthropic questions. But why must I be one of those—why couldn’t I be buzzing around as a bumblebee, if one can really be a bee? Can I pose the question on behalf of my past self, before I started thinking anthropically? I’m not sure exactly how to think about this, but it’s potentially a strong challenge to the argument.

Shouldn’t we be Chinese or Indian?

One might argue that going by this reasoning, we should expect to find ourselves living in China or India, as they are the most populous countries. However, this isn’t the right way to look at it. Consider a scenario with one large island with 10,000 inhabitants and 100 small islands of 100 inhabitants surrounding it. The odds of being on the large island are greater than on any specific small island, but the combined odds of being on any small island is equal those of being on the large one.

The same logic applies to national populations. While China and India together account for about 34% of the global population, countries in the range of 100–500 million and in the range of 10–100 million each account for roughly 30% as well. Countries in the range of 1–10 million constitute about 4% of the global population—low but not necessarily suspiciously so. For countries below 1 million in population, it drops to 0.2%, so if you’re in a country like Iceland, you might begin to suspect that either this form of reasoning is flawed or consciousness isn’t uniformly distributed.

This probably oughtn’t be taken too seriously though—otherwise it could allow various religious and ethnic minority groups to could claim to be the only conscious beings, as with billionaires, exceptionally intelligent (or stupid) people, and gingers (ironically). If you happen to have a mental condition such as autism or schizophrenia, you might conclude that normies are NPCs after all; this is already the suspicion of some with these conditions. The most extreme conclusion of course is that solipsism is true and there’s only a single brain on the planet wired in just the right way.

Of course, there will inevitably be minor peculiarities owing to everyone’s unique genes and experiences. Instead of focusing on these, a more holistic view must be taken. We have more reason to believe that other humans are conscious than we do for other organisms, as their brains most closely resemble our own and they are able to communicate about their consciousness. Still, there are no guarantees.

Returning to animals, population sizes follow a steeper power law than do national population sizes, so the same explanation is much less effective. Below are estimates of total biomass and abundance across various taxa. Fish alone outnumber humans, livestock, wild mammals, and birds combined by orders of magnitude. Cnidarians outnumber them; annelids and molluscs outnumber them; arthropods outnumber them; nematodes perhaps outnumber all the previous combined. If all or most species within these taxa were conscious, being a mammal would be astronomically unlikely.

Even by biomass, arthropods and fish dwarf mammals—although the likelihood of finding oneself within any group ranging from 0.05 to 0.2 gigatons of biomass is roughly comparable. At the very least, bacteria can be safely ruled out as consciousness candidates. Their biomass exceeds that of all animal life by a factor of 35, and some 40 trillion bacteria reside within a single human gut.

Does this preclude conscious aliens?

One might argue that by this logic, there are likely no conscious aliens, since the vast majority of life is presumably extraterrestrial.5 This would also be mistaken. Similar to the island scenario, we could imagine 1,000 planets each home to a humanlike species of comparable size. The chance of being human would be low compared to being an alien in general—but not compared to being any particular alien species. Since you had to belong to one of them, it’s no more surprising to belong to one than another. There’s no non-arbitrary justification for lumping all alien life together as a single category to compare with humans. It only becomes surprising if most aliens belong to massive multigalactic civilizations.

But life seems conscious

To many, it seems deeply counterintuitive that organisms capable of what appears like sophisticated behaviour could be nothing more than biological machines. They will point to them avoiding harmful stimuli, seeking food, learning from experience, etc. as demonstrating conscious awareness.

Instead of relying on our intuition, we should err on the side of parsimony. As Morgan’s Canon states:

In no case is an animal activity to be interpreted in terms of higher psychological processes if it can be fairly interpreted in terms of processes which stand lower in the scale of psychological evolution and development.

Much if not all of what organisms do has a clear adaptive function and would almost certainly evolve regardless of whether consciousness is involved. Bacteria are attracted to some chemicals but repelled by others. Are they experiencing desire or disgust?

Do crustaceans feel fear when they initiate their escape response?

Of course, much of our own behaviour can also be described in automatic and reflexive terms. When touching a hot stove, signals travel through sensory neurons to the spinal cord, causing the hand to withdraw before pain even registers.

People rendered unconscious by severe cortical damage can still respond to noxious stimuli, similar to fish with their cerebral hemispheres removed; though they struggle with avoidance learning (Rose, 2002).

In blindsight patients, visual information continues to guide actions without entering conscious awareness; though there is some debate as to whether their conscious vision is merely degraded rather than absent.

Conclusion

The idea that the minds of other organisms ‘differ only in degree, not kind’ has grown increasingly popular, and an expanding list are now commonly said to possess ‘some form of consciousness’. Zipple et al. (2023) surveyed animal behaviour researchers and found that 26% believed that most or all insects possess consciousness6, and another 25% believed that at least some do. Regarding fish, 41% thought most or all were conscious, while fewer than 20% believed that none were.

Famous animal rights activist Peter Singer believes that insects are conscious:

But at first, insects weren’t on his radar. “I was always unsure about invertebrates, such as cephalopods and crustaceans,” he told me. “I wasn’t thinking very much about it. I was just hoping that they weren’t sentient and there wasn’t an issue there.”

Over the years, however, Singer has continued to ask himself about the nature of animal suffering and what enables it, biologically. He has come to the same conclusion as Klein and Chittka: that insects do have some sort of consciousness.

He also holds the view that they feel pain regardless of consciousness—a highly questionable claim on multiple fronts—and that farmers should use pesticides that render them unconscious (obviously in a different sense of the term):

But Singer takes it one step further: If insects are conscious, how should humans treat them? Take agricultural pesticides. Anything that causes mass suffering and death in its intended victims is problematic, he said, because whether or not those victims are conscious, they can feel pain. Thus, farmers should use whichever one causes insects to immediately lose consciousness — “the equivalent of a humane slaughter law.”

Brain researchers are also becoming more open to the possibility of insect consciousness:

"We have literally no idea at what level of brain complexity consciousness stops," says Christof Koch, another Caltech neuroscientist. "Most people say, 'For heaven's sake, a bug isn't conscious.' But how do we know? We're not sure anymore. I don't kill bugs needlessly anymore." … "Probably what consciousness requires," says Koch of Caltech, "is a sufficiently complicated system with massive feedback. Insects have that. If you look at the mushroom bodies, they're massively parallel and have feedback."

There’s an organization called the ‘Shrimp Welfare Project’, which not long ago might have sounded like something out of a South Park episode:

Be the change—support higher welfare for shrimps. Each dollar you donate helps improve the lives of ~1,500 shrimps per year — your support makes a profound impact!

We have also been given multiple scientific ‘declarations’ from on high. The 2012 Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness claimed that ‘very strong evidence’ supports invertebrate consciousness, based on the supposedly compelling observation that: ‘neural circuits supporting behavioral/electrophysiological states of attentiveness, sleep and decision making appear to have arisen in evolution as early as the invertebrate radiation, being evident in insects and cephalopod mollusks’.

The more recent 2024 New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness somewhat more modestly claimed there was a ‘realistic possibility of consciousness’ in insects.

Why these declarations are overzealous and driven more by ethical activism than scientific progress will be detailed in a future post.

Leaving aside the lack of convincing arguments for this, when you expand the consciousness circle past a certain point, it begins to seem strangely unlikely that we aren’t one of the vastly more numerous and simpler organisms. It may seem like a simple point, but for whatever reason I never see anyone consider it. Since given the nature of subjectivity the question of what is or isn’t conscious may never be fully resolved scientifically, I think this anthropic line of reasoning can make a valuable contribution.

Another reason to be sceptical of widespread consciousness is the absence of any clear adaptive function. If it’s not clear what, if anything, consciousness even does, why should we expect it to have been selected across a wide range of species? Most, if not all, behaviour seems highly conceivable with or without any accompanying qualia. This makes it especially unreasonable to place the burden of proof on sceptics of widespread consciousness. Of course, we should still err on the side of caution though—at least when it’s not unreasonably inconvenient to do so.

While there is certainly no shortage of moral grandstanding among advocates of widespread consciousness and shrimp welfare—who often brand sceptics as ‘anthropocentric’, ‘unempathetic’, etc.—I’m sure they’re mostly well intentioned. I can sympathize to an extent, having once been someone who felt distress even at people walking or sitting near ants, seeing them as my little friends. When someone squashed a spider I would be outraged, and I was offended by the notion that they were mere machines. I guess my thinking has followed the opposite trajectory to those previously mentioned, and now see this as misplaced empathy.

There is of course more to be said, which again will be covered in a future article.

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They want to see this:

But the reality looks more like this:

Unsurprisingly, this leads many to reject the data. How? The most common move is to just say it’s all lies. The men are too ashamed to admit they’re incels; the women are too ashamed to admit they’re 304s. In the comment below, we see an appeal to lived experience as the superior epistemology.

In no article by the way will you find it stated or even implied that dating apps work just as well for men. The trivial fact that dating apps don’t work well for many men was explicitly acknowledged in the main article on the topic, but apparently that wasn’t enough. What I’ve pointed out is that actual outcomes such as dates and sexual encounters don’t show the gender imbalance (on the population level) that everyone believes is somehow an inevitable corollary, and I’ve tried to address the confusion they experience when trying to reconcile these facts, but it simply does not require men and women to make an equally high percentage of right swipes or an equally high chance of matching with those they they swipe right on.

I’ve also pointed out that once you adjust for the gender ratio—which is necessary when there are around three times as many men using dating apps, inflating the average number of matches for women relative to men—the median number of matches men get per day is the same as that for women, rather than the average woman far outmatching the average man as would be expected if they were routinely matching with Chads. This is also highly counterintuitive to people, as they wrongly assume potential matches are effectively equivalent to actual matches. Again, nothing about this implies that dating apps work ‘just about as well for men’—this is either a disingenuous or lazy misreading of what was actually being said. This is hardly surprising though; people are naturally disinterested in a fuller understanding of what’s going on and prefer to vent their frustration and righteous anger about things which frustrate and anger them. Anyway, I didn’t want to rehash everything there, nor do I want to here. You can see the actual arguments and evidence here.

Sadly, I’m not hopeful that this individual or anyone else who agreed with this sentiment are the rare exceptions genuinely eager to have their mind changed. But since previous analyses have often leaned heavily on self-reported sex data, and since rejecting the validity of such data out of hand is the default cop-out, a justification for taking the numbers seriously is probably in order

Is misreporting sexual behaviour a real issue?

First, some simple logic. The fact that male and female sexual partner distributions mirror each other as closely as they do across various datasets lends face validity to the reports. For this to be the case despite a theoretically high level of gender asymmetry would require misreporting of just the right amount across the whole distribution, which stretches plausibility.

Moreover, the standard assumption isn’t just that women underreport, but that men exaggerate. The implication of this is that men’s reported average becomes a hard ceiling on overall sexual activity. If young men report an average of 1.5 partners in the past year, little room is left for widespread promiscuity among young women. To maintain this belief, you must also believe that men are underreporting—contradicting the initial premise.

GSS data on opposite-sex sex partners since 18 among men aged 25–39 shows no evidence for rising promiscuity,1 with the mean having returned to about 12 partners (where it was in 1989). Of course, the mean is heavily skewed by the right tail, and the median is about half that. For 20–24 year old men, the mean is 6 partners (5 if you set the cap to 50), and this is not rising either.

As noted in the previous article, reporting bias is only relevant to trend analysis insofar as there are trends in the bias itself. For instance, if women's partner counts aren’t rising, to attribute it to bias you have to assume women are facing growing pressure to underreport—presumably because society has become increasingly puritanical, which seems like a difficult case to make. Otherwise, if for example women reported only half of their partners, we’d still expect to see a rise in promiscuity if there were one, just attenuated. In the above example, you’d have to assume that men are now less inclined to exaggerate, but I don’t see a good reason to think that either.

That said, what’s true is as with most self-reported data, sex partner data isn’t perfect. A simple way to demonstrate this is to look at the partner counts reported by men and women, where men report a significantly higher number—especially when asked about longer time periods.2