The Dating Game As An Asshole Filter

Epistemic Status: Wild speculation

I wonder how much of the complaints a lot of straight women have about men being jerks to them in romantic contexts are because being the responsive partner is probably an asshole filter?

That is, a filter that’s easier to pass through if you’re an asshole than if you’re not. An asshole filter need not keep out all decent people or accept all assholes, but the set of people who get through will have a larger proportion of assholes than the general population.

And, if you only get dates by being asked out by someone else, the set of people you interact with will be the set of people who are most willing to ask people out. Unfortunately, the people most willing to do so will probably also be the ones most willing to cross boundaries, because asking someone out is the type of socially fraught issue that’s way easier to handle if you just don’t give a fuck.

Add to this the fact that high socio-sexual orientation (ie: high willingness to sleep with a lot of people) is positively correlated with being an asshole, and you find that it’s a double asshole filter: The people who feel comfortable making a thousand approaches are more likely to be assholes, and the people who want to make a thousand approaches are more likely to be asshole.

This doesn’t mean that everyone who has a high willingness to seek out new partners and feels little anxiety about doing so is an asshole. However, it does mean that that set will contain more assholes than the population at large.

It’s also partly a numbers game, because someone who approaches people very often will have an outsized impact. Let’s assume a group of 100 straight men has 90 decent people and 10 assholes. 30 of the decent people are terrified virgins who never hit on anyone. 50 of the decent people and 5 of the assholes have a reasonably normal approach rate and hit on 20 people a year. Meanwhile, 10 of the decent people and 5 of the assholes are active pubcrawlers who hit on 20 people a month.

If you’re a woman who’s mostly around this group of men then, even though only a tenth of them are assholes, more than a quarter of the times you’re hit on will be an asshole. The rate goes way up if you’re in an environment that encourages frequent, casual, low-effort approaches (like a bar or club), because that environment will attract assholes and allow them to out-compete non-assholes by being pushier. At the extreme end of ease-of-approach, you get dating sites, where you’ll often find that a majority of the messages in your inbox will be from assholes.

(Which may explain the saying “you won’t find a good man at the club”)

Meanwhile, if we assume an equal distribution of decent and terrible women, a guy who’s hitting on them should encounter far fewer assholes. Even if he’s doing nothing to screen out assholes, sheer chance should lead to him hitting on an asshole only one in ten times, instead of nearly three in ten times.

Add in the fact that most people prefer not to hit on assholes and this man’s asshole hit rate should go down even more. I would not be surprised if the median man is dealing with an asshole:decent ratio five times lower than the median woman - at least in any community where frequent, casual, low-effort approaches are possible. Adjust for the fuck-huge sex-gap in physical strength and having five times as much contact with assholes starts becoming positively dangerous.

Other things that writing this out caused me to notice which I wasn’t originally thinking of:

This could actually do a lot to explain the observations that 1) assholes have a surprising amount of sexual success, given that 2) women don’t actually want assholes. I’ve seen red pill folks argue that the latter is a lie while their opponents argue that the former is a lie, but “being a straight woman on the dating market is an asshole filter” actually explains both pretty well. You may not be interested in assholes, but assholes are certainly interested in you.

This might also explain why conservatives often claim that cultures that make it easy and shameless to have frequent, casual relationships are uniquely bad for women. I’d been kind of confused by this, since none of the claimed negative effects seemed obviously sex-specific (other than pregnancy, which contraception largely obviates).

On the other hand, if dating is an asshole filter, they might actually be right that strong constraints on socio-sexuality might decrease the effect. After all, those same dark-triad high socio-sexuality personalities are highly concerned with self image and really don’t want to be known as a dangerous rake. I still don’t think that re-imposing those restrictions is a good idea, but it’s interesting to see where they’re coming from.

It also gives an interesting, plausible etiology for the thing where feminist women keep complaining that the feminist men they date are assholes. It seems likely that this is an area where the asshole filter is being made stronger on both sides: sex positive feminist women are more open to casual relationships than average, and non-asshole men who care about feminism are more cautious and careful about boundaries. Thus, the expected value to the asshole of lying about feminist beliefs is higher and their competition from non-assholes is lower.

Overall, I don’t really have a good solution to this. The inequality, at least, would be solved if both groups were equally willing to approach. But, lol, good luck getting that to happen. Alternatively, it might be helped if non-assholes made more approaches. However, there’s still the problem that the average non-asshole doesn’t want to make as many approaches as the average asshole, as well as the fact that his awareness of when his approaches might be unwanted is part of why he’s not an asshole. Tackling the problem on the asshole side is harder, because assholes don’t actually want to be told how to be less sexually successful.

In conclusion, the world is broken and I’m not sure what to do about it.

Monday, May 15, 2017