A Reaction to: 45% of Men Age 18–25 Have Never Approached A Woman in Person
I read this story by Dean Brooks the other day and the statistic literally floored me. Forty-five percent seems like an astronomically high number, I couldn’t believe it. Dean writes a compelling article, rife with True Romance references (one of my all-time favorite movies), but does he really hit the nail on the head?
Thinking more about it, I started thinking about what statistics actually tell us and how sometimes we give them greater importance than what they actually hold. For example, a few decades ago a baseball player was considered a great hitter if he had a .300 batting average. Another player that only hit .250 would be considered significantly worse. But what does batting average really measure? It measures how often a batter gets a hit, but it provides no context for the damage that hit does or how frequently a batter gets on base by other means.
In the context of this statistic, all that’s being told to us is that 45% of Gen Z men aged 18–25 have never approached a woman in person (for a date). That doesn’t mean that they’re all looking to date, that they aren’t meeting women by other means, or anything else. They simply haven’t been approaching women in person in public settings, as the author of the tweet states numerous times in his tweet thread.
