SIO190: Dating Economy Inequality? with Kristi Winters

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:28 Thomas: Hello, and welcome to Serious Inquiries Only, this is episode 190, I'm your host Thomas Smith, and I've got an interview for you with Kristi Winters, back on the show for the nth time, n equals not enough, so I'm sure we'll have her back again, more than a couple, but not enough I think is the answer.

We are discussing this Quillette article, I will link it in the show notes, it is called It's called Attraction Inequality and the Dating Economy, and it certainly caught both our eyes, our sets of eyes, because it has a lot of talking points that are used by incels and red pill people, but it also tries to put like a scholarly shine on it, which is, I guess that's a good summary of Quillette, in my opinion, trying to put a scholarly shine on some of these more awful talking points around the internet, and so I had her on to discuss the The data they used and how it does or doesn't actually support what they're saying. Okay, so let's hop on over to my interview with Kristi Winters. Up. It's Doctor Kristi Winters, back on the show, welcome back, good to speak to you again, how you doing?

0:01:54 Kristi: Oh, my goodness, it's been quite a week and it's only Monday, fine, happy to be back on and talking with you about something that's very nerdy, which is kind of my, you know, that's my area of YouTubing and social media, so, yes, that

0:01:58 Thomas: Yeah, it's like both nerdy and not nerdy, I guess. Well, any non-nerdy thing can be nerdy if you get enough data about it, right?

0:02:19 Kristi: Is true, you can make anything sexy or nerdy I guess, there are lots of things, surprising, yes.

0:02:21 Thomas: Yeah. It just how much stats are involved, that's all. All right. Well, yeah, there was a Quillette article, you know, the esteemed publication Quillette.com had an article. This was in early March and it made, right away, my alarm bells kind of went off because this about, the title is Attraction, Inequality, and the Dating economy. And right away, it introduces and talks about the sort of 80-20 concept that I've seen referenced by, you such like incels. And I think it's in the red pill documentary thing where it's like, oh, it turns out men are the real victims here and that kind of thing. Now, I don't know, though. It references some studies. So I thought, you know, it'd be great to talk to you, somebody who is a social scientist, who's more literate in data and studies on this stuff.

0:02:28 Kristi: Yes.

0:03:21 Thomas: And we'd see kind of separate fact from fiction, or at least data from extrapolation inappropriately of the data, maybe that kind of thing. What do you think?

0:03:31 Kristi: Well said. Very well said. Yeah, I think that's a good way of putting it. Right. So just to recap what you said, there's this Quillette article that came out and it has the idea of attraction inequality, the dating economy.

0:03:49 Kristi: And the article itself kind of goes through, as you were saying, this narrative where they talk about, they set up the thing about the dating and then they start to point to some studies, and studies that look at at dating, it would seem to be, but when I started unpacking and looking deeper into the studies they used, I realized that the story was one way more complicated, and not even more complicated than they've, they've just misinterpreted the data in some important ways to create a narrative that, you, as you, you mentioned, fulfills this men are the victims, incel mentality. I think also, I would say, probably the intellectual dark web, there's a sort of tinge of that roaming around in that area as well. Now, when you read the article, it sounds really impressive because there's this person that they're citing, and he used something called the Gini coefficient, which is something that has been used. The problem with that article, though... So anyway, actually, let me get to their conclusion, and then we'll go back and look at the studies to see whether or not the studies actually say what they say, uh, you

0:04:53 Kristi: Know, they say they say definitely

0:04:41 Thomas: Right. Sure. Let me give a few disclaimers. Of course, we are going to be speaking broadly about men and women in hetero relationships. That's going to be probably the focus because that's what the data available is for this particular discussion, but just wanted to emphasize that that is So just discussion, but hetero normative discussion, but that's because that's the topic of the article and the data. I can't wait to hear what you're going to say about this because it seems like there is something to it. Like there's some amount that's real data here.

0:05:25 Kristi: The, the way they have it in the article is they do provide links to what the things that they're citing, and so then you can go and click on the links and see if they're actually accurate, and that's what we're going to do. Anyone can, by the way, follow along if you want to find the study online, I'll go, go back up to the top, and we'll start with the Gini coefficient one. But let's start with one of their conclusion paragraphs. It's kind of halfway down, but they do, like I said, they go through a list of a few studies, and then they write this. If these findings are to be believed, the great majority of women are only willing to communicate romantically with a small minority of men, while most men are willing to communication romantically with most women. The degree of inequality in likes and matches credibly measures the degree of inequality and attractiveness and necessarily implies at least that degree of inequality in romantic experiences.

0:06:20 Kristi: It seemed hard to avoid a basic conclusion that the majority of women find the majority of men unattractive and not worth engaging with romantically, while the reverse is not true, stated in another way

0:06:33 Thomas: That all sounds true to me. When I talk to my female friends, that's, you know, that lines up.

0:06:41 Kristi: That's how we talk about men all the time, yeah that

0:06:43 Thomas: Yeah. Well, I mean, but I mean, joking aside, when I, like, I, I have a couple, you know, female friends who are, who are trying to date on, like, Bumble and all that stuff. And you can, if you have any female friends who are going through this experience, you can be like, and there's Twitter accounts devoted to this as well, in Instagram or whatever, that's like, hey, check out my inbox, it's fucking nonsense. You know, like, it's just awful, billion messages that are like, hi, hey. You know, like, just nothing, or dick pics, or whatever, like, it's so, you know, it wouldn't surprise me oh

0:07:15 Kristi: Is true, but this is it, they're not talking about only online dating, they're not talking only online interactions, they are saying it seems hard to avoid a basic conclusion that the majority of women find the majority of men unattractive and not worth engaging with romantically not in online communication yes, they slide. Right, so how does he say this?

0:07:17 Thomas: Okay uh there's the, there's the leap, okay gotcha wait

0:07:40 Kristi: You know, like, so, the degree of inequality in likes and matches credibly measures the degree of inequality in real life, no it doesn't. You know, and so then it seems hard to avoid this basic conclusion, women are the real problems in relationships. That is my really big problem with how, how they slide from the online data into making sort of essential claims.

0:07:59 Thomas: Was that was that a quote, or were you, some, right, did they say women are the

0:08:02 Kristi: Nope, this is it. I'll say it one more time. So the paragraph itself starts, if these findings are to be believed, if you want to do a quick find search down the page. Yeah, it seems hard to avoid a basic conclusion that the majority of women find the majority of men unattractive and not worth engaging with romantically, while the reverse is not true. Stated another way, it seems men are collectively creating a dating economy for women with relatively low inequality, inequality, while women collectively create a dating for men with very high inequality. No parsing there about, yes, because women are bad. I don't know, but they want to date them, but we're bad. They're so confusing. This is where I want to get into this idea of sampling and data and go back up into the articles and really look, I don't want to go deep into what the articles say, but I want t look at what they're drawing from, and this is the important

0:08:09 Thomas: Yeah I see it it's women's faults, I see yeah, they're creating this in unequal economy, all right

0:08:53 Kristi: Thing. If you go back up, if you're following along in the article and go back up closer to the top, the first and like premier study that they list here is the one that's probably, I think if I could ever read it, the most maybe mathematical. And they talk about using this measure that economists use to study inequality, which is the Gini coefficient. They then go on to describe what they say the study does.

But the problem is when you try to, when I at least tried to click on the actual study, the link didn't work. So then they said someone else talked about it as well. So I went, I think it was here when they talked about a data scientist reported on the GINI coefficients, and that one didn't works either. So, I can't tell you about those papers because I can find them, or at least they didn't work with the links that I have in my article, so, so we just have to, like, I can't say anything about that, we can't accept those, that characterization, we can throw it out because we just don't know, but we can make any conclusions from it either, because I won't accept if I can see the original work, like I with the other ones

0:08:53 Thomas: Oh So just to recap, the links aren't broken, you're saying, it's just they don't get you back to the actual source data? It's just somebody's summary of it? Oh huh, okay

0:10:05 Kristi: One of them just would spin and spin and spin and spin, and I don't, um, maybe it's been moved to a different one, but I was having a problem, uh, seeing that one. Yeah, so I can't speak to that one, but we'll talk about all the other ones because my links worked on all the others. Now so, going down, they now talk about a study reported in Business Insider, and that was run on data from OkCupid which is fine, but dating websites aren't actually, like, the encompassing the entire dating world, and OkCupid is just one of these sites. So, um, when I looked at it, uh, and that one, the one from the, the Business Insider, sorry, study, and there's actually two. There's one from a company from Business Insider that is a dating company called Are You Interested?

But the article is from 2013, and the company itself has rebranded. So I don't know who they were targeting in 2013. If you've got a dating app that's going for people in their 20s, that might look really different in terms of behavior than one targeted at people who are middle-aged, or remarried, or or something.

0:10:26 Thomas: Yeah

0:11:20 Kristi: So we can say that when somebody like AYI, Are You Interested, reports their data, they're probably being accurate, but it's just one little data point. We can't make any inferences from that one study. And what the article wants to do is sort of say, well, here's one study that says something, and another one from OkCupid, and here's another one form Tinder. They're all based on social media apps. Tinder especially is known for hookup culture. So all of these, they're picking up on behaviors that people have who use those apps. But that isn't then a basis for describing how men and women think about each other in dating in their sort of in their real life as well.

0:12:05 Kristi: So we talked about the business insider one, are you interested? This is pretty old data from 2013. And when you do these studies, too, you can't infinitely take a study result and say it worked five years in the future, or we can apply it five years into the future. You just have to say that's a little snapshot in time. So you can'T, again, sort of aggregate all these studies up. The OKCupid one, now that I'm looking at is actually the most interesting, I think, of all the articles that they talked about. But OkCupid was writing an article on how to get your profile noticed by taking attractive pictures of yourself. And they're going, hey, you know, we're looking at how attractiveness works and getting your profile to be more successful.

0:12:50 Kristi: And here are some descriptive statistics we have about how it works. And that one, like I said, was really interesting. And I'm sure it was entirely fairly accurate for people who are using OkCupid, but for anybody else that doesn't, you can't just stick everybody else in that category and say that this applies, if you see what I mean.

0:13:11 Thomas: I think, so, full disclosure, uh, my wife and I met on OkCupid

0:13:16 Kristi: Yeah, and that's, I know a lot of people who've actually met and had relationships and got married off of, you're like the third or fourth couple I know who've done that.

0:13:22 Thomas: Yeah yeah it was a nightmare, and it was as brilliant as just a stroke of luck that I happened to message Lydia, because I sent some other messages and was like, I hate this, I can't do it, and I was, like, was going to quit, and I sent, like, one more message, and then somehow Lydia saw, and uh, there you go, yeah exactly it was it was mainly Jesus who did it, is what I'm trying to say, yeah

0:13:25 Kristi: Yeah.

0:13:40 Kristi: Yeah, face, there you go, you know, did that one thing changed your whole life but yeah, yeah, I know people want to give, you know, sort of retro, retroactive meaning to those things, but yes, it's the uh, contingency of lived experience, you never know what's going to happen, and so, so I would say if anyone wants to look at that, they do have some interesting descriptive statistics, and this is another point I want to come to on the OkCupid one, in these studies, they just lump everyone into men and women. They don't do what we would call a linear regression.

They're not saying, okay, well, what about women who live in the North who are over 45 years of age? What is their pattern of behavior like? And So if you have a lot of people in their 20s and some people in the 30s and some people on their 40s and 50s on these sites, all the data is going to really skew toward the the behavior of the largest group. And this kind of comes back to the issue of sampling that we can talk about in relation to generalizability. So in terms of the article, going through it, I looked at the Business Insider, we looked at The OK Cupid. Was there one more?

Oh, oh, I yes, there was. And it was, this is, there was one called Tinder Experiments, and that one, if you just looked at the front of it, it looked kind of impressive because it has an abstract and it says "data science" on it, and it reads, "Tinder Experiment Two: Guys, Unless You Are Really Hot, You Are Probably Better Off Not Wasting Your Time on Tinder, a Quantitative Socio Socioeconomic Study," and to be fair to this person

0:13:58 Thomas: Right I

0:15:23 Kristi: I think it is really important that you read the caveats. He has, it says, "Caveats, skip this section if you just want to see the results." Although it should say, caveates, read this section so you can better understand the results," because what he says is, "At this point, I would be remiss not to mention a few caveats about these data. First, the sample size is small. Only 27 females were interviewed."

0:15:51 Kristi: "Second, all data is self-reported. The females who responded to my questions could have lied about the percentage of guys they like in order to impress me or to make themselves seem more selective. Additionally, I'm only accounting for the percentages 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 the analysis, but there's currently no other way to analyze the data." You need to read the the caveat section, because what he describes in his data is probably somewhat accurately what 27 women in the world think.

0:16:28 Thomas: Was Gonna say, like, you can't call 27 women data. Like, that's, I mean, that's interesting to interview 27 women about something, but like 27, that's a tiny sample size. That is hardly data. Like, I feel like that is very generous. If I ask 27 of my listeners something, I'm barely going to call it data. It's a little bit better than a handful of stories.

0:16:54 Kristi: Really, it is. I mean, at that point, and so one, sampling. When you do a survey, you want to have a representative sample. And so we work really hard in social science to come up with, well, obviously random sample is the best, but to do a truly random random sample in the United States would be ridiculous because of the size of the country.

0:17:17 Thomas: Yeah.

0:17:17 Kristi: It would just be way too expensive.

0:17:18 Thomas: I was just going to say, when they do political polling, I know they're calling in the least, at least thousands, if not sometimes tens of thousands, but at least 1000s. Yeah, good.

0:17:26 Kristi: Well, so yeah, so here's the thing. If you, sorry, I should say face-to-face random surveys are the best. They're considered the gold standard because you have an interviewer there and a person and they can clarify some questions maybe or whatever, but that's considered the golden standard. But you couldn't have a truly random sample where everyone in the the United States had an equal chance, and then fly the interviewers across.

0:17:47 Thomas: Right. Right?

0:17:49 Kristi: So we find ways of making it better. But

0:17:51 Thomas: Oh, right. I I was just talking in terms of sample size. I know that if you're trying to accurately or somewhat within margins of error, obviously, represent the political views of the country, you need in the thousands. So if you are going to try to represent the dating preferences of the whole world, I'm just saying you are gonna need more than 27 people. That's all I'm saying.

0:17:52 Kristi: Yeah, if you have a really good sampling frame, and you know your population pretty well, you don't actually need like 10,000 cases, the difference between the accuracy of 10,000 cases and 7,000 cases isn't as big as the difference between 500 cases and 3,500 cases if you have a good sampling strategy or sampling frame because it's kind of like our blood. You don't have to take all the blood to get a sample and you don't have to make a point when you can do 1,500,

0:18:31 Thomas: Right. Right. Right. Right. Yeah, no, it's statistics 101. It is amazing and it's impressive what we're able to do with samples that don't seem like a lot.

0:18:54 Kristi: 2,000 and a lot of times you're right, the national election

0:18:56 Thomas: Yeah. But all I'm saying is it's not 27. That's the point I make.

0:19:00 Kristi: No, it's so not 27.

0:19:02 Thomas: It's not27 people.

0:19:02 Kristi: It is so not 27 who replied to your message and are willing to answer your questions. Yeah, it is not it.

0:19:09 Thomas: That's all I point out I was making. Like, I know it's amazing what you can do with some good random sampling, but this is not that.

0:19:18 Kristi: So not that. Yeah. And this is another thing, too. I thought it would be useful to explain because sometimes people don't get it. And that is that how many people do you need to have a good and accurate sample or an accurate result in a study, and it's more to do with how good the sampling is than how many people, because if the sampling isn't biased you can have a million people but it won't matter because the data will still be bad

0:19:40 Thomas: Right. Right. Like if you ask every single person from, you know, some random Iowa town, you could have a sample size of, you know, in the tens of thousands, but you're only getting one particular segment of the population. It's not random. So it's you would never want to use that to summarize the entire country, essentially.

0:19:41 Kristi: Exactly You would have great data on that part of Iowa is what you would have, and that would be it. And this is the kind of, what I don't want to diss, the well, the one study of the 27 females should have been called a qualitative interview of that I've just counted things up on. It's not a quantitative socioeconomic study in the least. But, you know, the OkCupid article was not nefariously written or anything.

0:20:16 Thomas: Yeah, yeah. Mm hmm.

0:20:27 Kristi: They're trying to help their people get connected up. And so the other ones, too, they're not out there trying to trash women. What this Quillette author does is to sort of cherry-pick studies that would seem to fit a predetermined narrative he already had and imposed on the data, and that should always raise a red flag on any publication that that operates in that sort of way, right?

0:20:47 Thomas: Right. Right, right. And sometimes, like, you know, you read studies where there are just limitations in what you can do, you know, and they might do the study and present it with those caveats, like this is the best sampling we can do. Here's our methodology. And, you Know, you can still read into it a little bit. You can still use it for what it's useful for. But to take it and represent it as a, you Know, representative automatically of the whole population is suspect.

0:21:24 Kristi: And I'll say his name, by the way, I'm looking up. I didn't have it to hand because I was fixed on the one conclusion paragraph I wanted to read earlier, but Bradford Tuckfield is the author

0:21:32 Thomas: I know. I saw that, too. That's gotta be, that's got to be a nom de plume, right? I mean, I don't know. Maybe that's, it could be Bradford Tuckfields. That's their real name. But also if I know Quillette, it might not be, That's all I'm saying. It might not be their real name.

0:21:45 Kristi: But If Bradford Tuckfield wants to get in touch and have me explain and vet his next articles or her next articles, whoever Bradford Tuckfield might be. I'm lending my sort of services to them through your show right now, because this really should not have been written. Based on these studies, just articles reporting on things, this was an agenda piece.

And the other thing, too, I really, really, really, really, really want to stress is the universality of this application about women and men when Again, especially with social media dating, I think that that's going to skew in terms of participation to much younger age ranges when women probably are looking for a guy who's more mature and, you know, has a job and is settled down, whatever, and and guys are on there, like, trying to, you're sending out thousands and thousands of messages to the, you know, maybe 5% of the app population that are women, you know. And this is also, I know ContraPoints, have you seen Contra Points video about, I think it was the incels one about being on social media, dating apps, you know, as a man and as a woman, and

0:21:56 Thomas: Yeah. Oh yeah.

0:22:55 Thomas: I love country points.

0:23:04 Thomas: Hmm.

0:23:05 Kristi: The, you know, which one was a bit better, it's better to have more options than not, but also then I'll getting the harassment and things as well, so it's, um, yeah, I just had to, I don't know if you, I mentioned it's on Twitter and you said, do you want to talk about it, and I went yes, but it's, it's the misuse of social science, this, this kind of article gives social science a bad name, especially when they treat the behavior of women from the ages of, let's say, you know, 19 to 26 or 29 or 32, and use that as, you know, to apply, apply to me as a 40 plus, 40, like, whatever, I went on 47 now, like, I had a birthday, I forget, but, you know, like that behavior doesn't apply to be, but that label they will try to apply to me, or to any women, just to sort of, you know, discredit us in that incel men's rights fights against women, um, or fights

0:23:19 Thomas: Yeah, that yeah

0:23:57 Kristi: Against activists.

0:23:58 Thomas: That's the thing about, so the thing about this article is it's so loaded in terms of all of the assumptions people are bringing this to and all the ideology people, you know, like, it'd be one thing if you looked at this just in a vacuum with nothing else and you're like, okay, here's some interesting data that shows it might, you know, that if you're a man and quote-unquote your attractiveness, however you measure that, is a certain level, it might be tough for you on this thing. Okay. You might have some data to look at that, but to put this into a really loaded ideological landscape where, you know, like, there's so much going on because there's the incel portion of it. There's also another thing with Quillette is there's kind of the right-wing free market look and the Jordan B.

0:24:48 Thomas: Peterson Anderson hierarchy is part of it, you know, and there's this weird dance they do where it's like, okay, we know like we don't care about regulating markets. We love unregulated markets, but we know that like the SJWs don't like that. So we're going to write something that's like hey, if you don't like inequality, then you also shouldn't like this. But we're fine with it over here because is like, you know, we were all about inequality and lobsters and stuff and like hierarchies.

0:25:20 Kristi: Yeah.

0:25:20 Thomas: But like, You know what I mean? It's, it's this weird kind of, I don't know if bad faith is the right word, but it's like this, Oh, you should be, I see this a lot on the right where it's like, well, if the right cares about inequality, here's the inequality they're not looking at. And it tries to, or sorry, if left cares about it and quality, and then they try to write an article about that, like you should really care about that.

And then at the end, you see them try to kind of walk it back a little bit, you know, even though I agree with you that it ultimately that, that sentence, it says, you know, it's women's fault, but then it tries to walk it back of like, well, it is no one's fault really, you know, It is just how the world is, you know, but, but like, but I, I love, and again, here is what is funny about this.

When you, even if you take the stats at face value, like, which you shouldn't because you have outlined very well why you shouldn t, but But like, even if you took that, now I'm blanking out, was it Gini? Even

0:25:20 Kristi: Yeah, yeah, yes, yeah.

0:26:13 Thomas: If you take that Gini coefficient at face value, it's more equitable than the US economy, right? So like, they're fine with the US economy. And in fact, they always want to make it even less equal. But they're not okay with this, even though the actual numbers they're using show that that it's more equitable than, it just goes to show how unequal the U.S. wealth is, I guess.

0:26:13 Kristi: Gini coefficient.

0:26:41 Kristi: Yes, yes. Even, um yeah, the, the data scientists who are using the popular dating app Hinge and his Gini coefficient, even women's terrible, unequal, uh, you know, dating economy is still fairer than the United States.

0:26:54 Thomas: Yeah. But like, if you, if we try to go big picture here, this, let me, let me go to the 80-20 thing, because people might not be familiar with that. This is this like incel theory that 80%, what is it? 80% of women are competing for the top 20% of men. Right. And so and kind of vice versa, like the bottom 80 percent of men are competing for the bottom 20 percent of women. And so that's why it's unfair. It's a men's rights argument, basically, like those men have it so hard because you can't if you're not born with like these nice features, you have no chance because because of this unequal competition. But like the.

0:27:33 Kristi: Well, Yeah, because back the day, before women had contraception and access to abortion, they couldn't hold out for the their ideal guy, so they have to find somebody reasonable to settle down with, and that's the problem that's causing.

0:27:40 Thomas: Hmm. Oh, That's where it ties in. You talk about all these ideologies. Ideologies, yeah, that's where it, like like, ties into, like, hey, so let's all get back to the conservative framework of relationships and we all should get married at 20, you know, like it's funny how that does eventually tie back in, but Like, another component of it, I just want to look, though, big picture, we're not, it's not like we're a polyamorous society, you know, it's not like top 20 of men have, like, harems of, what, you know what I mean, so like I don't really really understand how, how do they think it's working is what I want to know. Like, it might be true that on certain apps, as you say, apps that are geared toward making a quick superficial decision about somebody like, sure, you might see some discrepancies where, you know, men are going to have like, I don't know what the word would be like broader standards or something, but just numbers wise, I do not see how that could possibly bear out in terms of like the marriage economy or the, you know, it seems weird.

0:28:00 Kristi: Yep. No, No, it doesn't represent, and this Is it, this is kind of coming back again to the, the effect that that is being skipped over in the article, which is maybe people's online behavior in dating is completely different than in person, because of the low risks, and because there is little cost for men to just basically throw out and, like, everyone to have a chance no matter what. And women, you know, who get more stuff and can be choosy, or just, you know, give up or whatever, but that again is because of apps that are focused on visuals and instant reactions and other, I mean, I honestly I don't use dating apps, so I don't know, but I'd imagine that the interface itself structures how you can interact with people, and that, that isn't being accounted for in these, these, these analyses, in my

0:28:55 Thomas: Hmm. Yeah. Right. Yeah, and

0:29:31 Kristi: Opinion.

0:29:31 Thomas: You know what, I'm just remembering an example that somebody I know, or it might have been a listener, I can't remember which, but somebody also mentioned, like, it could be that there's a small percentage of shitty men who are kind of ruining it for other dudes, because, like if they batch spam out, you know, like either dick pics or boring uninteresting messages all the time, Because on a lot of these apps, there's very little cost to doing that. That means that there's so much more that women are going to have to filter through. And so if you're a nice guy who wants to send a good message to somebody, in their inbox is going to be so many shitty messages. It's going to make it harder for you. And then you have to send it out, so it might spiral out of control. So there's a lot that could go into it,

0:29:31 Kristi: Yes.

0:30:19 Kristi: And I know that there's a discussion about how women tend to, like, go for, you know, more attractive guys and not reply to regular looking guys, and, like, well, maybe she's got a lot of regular looking boys in her life and this is her chance to sort of be daring and fantasize and try something she maybe wouldn't have the courage to do in person. Again, does the medium itself, yeah.

0:30:30 Thomas: Right? Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, another thing I wanted to just grab, because that sentence you read, maybe I'll go back to it, that paragraph you read where it says, if these findings would be believed, the end said, yeah, I just want to repeat that. It seems hard to avoid a basic conclusion that the majority of women find the majority men unattractive, not worth engaging with. While the reverse is not true, stated another way, it seems that men collectively create a dating economy for women with relative low inequality, while women collectively create a dating economy for men with high inequality. Like, if I took all this on its own terms and like, you know, if I went along with this author and believed all their assumptions, you could just as easily say men are systematically creating a bad product for women. Like, you know, it's weird to put it the way that he does.

0:31:23 Kristi: When you say, but you say, if you have, have to wade through 50 dick pics to find one nice guy, yeah.

0:31:29 Thomas: Yeah. To find one good dick pic. Oh, no. To find one.

0:31:33 Kristi: You know, if you have to mentally prepare yourself to look at your responses because you might be getting harassed or whatever, I mean, that cost in social interaction isn't being factored in either, but yeah, you're right, I mean, in terms of there being a lot of, uh, spam people that you're like, they're creating the obstacles for the sincere seekers from meeting each other.

0:31:40 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah.

0:31:57 Thomas: Yeah. It's a weird. It's loaded language that you, you know, homed in on there. Like, it's very, very intentional language there. Women creating a dating economy for men. It's like, yeah, okay, sure.

0:32:08 Kristi: Yes. And that's why I was like, yes, when you offer it, I was like, because of that, it's, it's that leap, and it's so subtle, you can read through and you just see that paragraph and it kind of hits you, because, you know, it's connecting the logic it's trying to set out, but it's built on a house of lies, here's

0:32:26 Thomas: Yeah, and doesn't this feel like it's kind of more or less dog whistling to the incel community a little bit? Like, is it, you Know, it makes me a little nervous.

0:32:36 Kristi: Validation, you know, the data says you're right, the data doesn't say you're right, you know, the data are about some dating app behaviors, but, you know, that's that's not reality, yeah.

0:32:38 Thomas: Yeah, yeah. It's interesting, though. Something is definitely happening to our society, and I don't know what the culprit is. I don't think it's whatever this guy thinks it is, but I don't' t want to say that everything is totally all right. It does seem like a lot of people are really unhappy, and it might be just the technology that gives us these abilities to always feel like we might be missing out on something. Who knows? I don '' t know if you saw any insights in the data you looked at. It's not as though online dating is actually completely fine in this, but you know, they're not making up that part. I think there, there are a lot of people

0:32:51 Kristi: No, Yeah,

0:33:26 Thomas: Unhappy with, with, uh, with the dating world. Did you find any insights on, on that in the data you looked at?

0:33:27 Kristi: Well, Here, what they really, the article really focuses on two things, this idea of attract- attractiveness, which is a really vague, subjective, you know, like based on likes and ratings and stuff, and it's very ill defined. But they're trying to say they're using attractiveness as a way to say women are more vain or shallow. You know, men have a wider range of women that they'll approach, but women are very narrow in their, who they'll approached, in terms of what they rate as attractive. And then this dating economy inequality. But in terms of happiness and satisfaction, I think, you know, it, it depends. We talk in social science, a very famous theory is Engelhardt and Norris, I want to say, but it's about modernism and postmodernism and the way that we value things in society.

0:34:22 Kristi: And if you grow up in a really war-torn era in time or economic catastrophe, real insecurity, this was studies after the Second World War, that people who grew up in that generation are really more conservative. They're more focused on their economics and protecting their money. They're not into social services and big taxes. And people who grow up at times of prosperity have a lot more. They're less focused on guns issues and security issues, and they're more maybe focused on civil rights. So we see how our physical conditions shape our social perceptions. And I think what we really don't understand, because it hasn't been around long enough, is the impact of technology on our sense of happiness and purpose, because it is such a double edged sword. So that's a really long, boring, roundabout way of saying, I think people who grew up in times of relative prosperity and who have technology, what we have to realize as a species is our happiness will never be sated if we look to the material world for solutions.

0:34:37 Thomas: Right.

0:35:27 Kristi: That there has to be an ins- I personally think, and this is me getting, you have to find internal happiness because you can't get it, you might get momentary pleasure from an, I new iPhone, or a Mac, or your Netflix or subscription, but to find that kind of human connection, you have to have more of a real basis for that, and you have to know yourself. And I think technology makes it easier and more difficult, so in some ways we're able to be more immediate with our emotions, emotions, but we have no contact, you know, through Twitter. You can be alone in a room and having an argument with somebody and be by yourself. It's very weird.

0:36:02 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah.

0:36:04 Kristi: And I think all of that's very displacing in terms of coming offline and knowing where the lines are. Even it feels like sometimes my life is so blurred between behind the screen and in front of it. And I think a lot of that is more complicated if you're in your twenties and you are trying to meet somebody and connect. How do you do that when you, you So I understand that the generation, what they're experiencing, is a new kind of anxiety or malaise or ennui that comes as part of being a member of the digital age.

0:36:36 Thomas: You know, I was curious if you saw the, uh. The New York Times. Well, I think it's based on some study, but the New York Times article I saw that was talking about the fact that people are having less sex than like ever now. I wonder if you saw that and had any thoughts on how that connects with this, because there are a lot of theories.

0:36:53 Kristi: Well, Yeah, I would have to look at that, because I would be interested in knowing, and we know that there's a little bit of over reporting because of social desirability when it comes to reporting sexual partners. And so I wouldbe interested in that, comparing what women's responses were, and if women's responsives have really changed, because I think, okay, maybe I'm biased, but I think men would tend to over, you know, exaggerate, women would tend to under, if they're going to do anything, under report. And I, I think if, if women's numbers are pretty close to the same, but men's came down, I would be more, I would want to know whether or not it's with the advent of porn, uh, the availability of it and the sexuality and stuff, that people are maybe just more honest about their sexual partners now, not that, they're having

0:37:43 Thomas: You know, I heard an angle that was interesting that I hadn't considered is that it's actually because marriage is going down. You know, like a lot of people think, oh, you know, marriage prevents, you know, it's, people don't have sex, but hookup culture, that would mean more sex. And it's actually, like, if you look at the numbers, it's like, no, people who are married have way more sex than single people. It would be very difficult to you know, to have a prodigious dating life that allows you to have as much sex as a married couple who can, who are just together all the time and can easily, you know, so, like, one theory was like, it was, it's frequency.

So that's the thing. It's not, it might be a little different, you Know, depending on what you're looking at. So we have to pull up the, the actual data, but this, this was the percentage of people who, and actually it was pretty bare bones, uh, the question. So it wasn't, you KNOW, like it wasn'T, I think it was have you had, uh either one partner in the last year or have you had sex at least once in the last year? It was one of those.

And it's like the number who haven't has gone up, at least for men that I saw. And, uh, it's interesting. It might be that, um, less marriage does mean less sex. I could say, you know, it's certainly a quantitatively like in the numbers that might be true. Like people aren't, people aren'T hooking up as much as some people think, you Know, like it's actually, don't know. I don't think the numbers bear out the theory that it's just like crazy wild hookup culture all the time.

0:38:18 Kristi: Was It frequency or partners, okay. That does seem to be the image that the old generation has of the younger generation. All this hookup culture, hookup cultural, one night stands, Tinder, uh, Grinder, all of this stuff. But, yeah, who knows, I, it's, it's, you know, um, all kinds of things can explain increases in decreases at any one person. You know, so, also there's reporting, again, like I said, maybe people are just feeling more open and honest about things now, and so, yeah, I mean, I think the sexuality behavior studies are probably the hardest to know how accurate they are, and also what they mean in the aggregate as well, I mean, it's it gets kind of easy when they have baby booms after a war, you know, a bunch of people come together, you know, afterwards, and then you see the consequences. And also, too, with, um, marriage and sex, it might just be, the you know, a lot of it is just opportunity, you know, like you wanna, like, okay, and if you're single, you don't get those um, so, like, you said you know, it's like um,

0:39:12 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, right, right. Right. Hmm. Hmm, yeah. Well, I just, yeah, yeah exactly. Right, but you know, sorry, sorry I sprung a thing on you that I, you know, we hadn't prepared to talk about. I was just curious if you saw it, but going back to the, to the stuff that we, we did prep, I just want to make sure, was there any, anything more interesting from these studies that you wanted to make sure to get to that you didn't get a chance to talk about?

0:40:28 Kristi: No, I think I wanted to just really quickly take a look at the closing paragraph, because you know, that's always where you put a lot work in, and I don't know if you, if you don't mind, I'll just, just read from it and we'll kind of take it apart. "As always, the way forward will be difficult. It may be impossible to revive the religions, behaviors, institutions, and norms that have recently governed the world of love and sex but are in retreat around the world. The future of Western civilization may need brave new institutions and brave new ways for men and women to fruitfully relate to each other. Whatever rules govern the future of dating and sex, they should find a way to deal with the that our species has historically possessed and that shows up in the present day in the statistics of our dating apps, or else be willing to accept the risk of sexual conflict and war that have historically accompanied high inequality."

0:40:31 Thomas: Yeah, sure.

0:41:26 Kristi: Technologies and institutions and even religions come and go, but the evidence indicates that sexiness inequality is here to stay and that we will ignore it only peril. Do you know how hard it was for me to read that with a straight face?

0:41:36 Thomas: Wow. Yeah, that sounds like the coming robot apocalypse. That's some heavy language. I just want to point out that if you wrote that same paragraph, but substitute in the American economy that is more unequal than this, Quillette would be up in arms. They'd be like, what are you talking about? Everything is fine.

0:42:00 Kristi: That would be cultural Marxism.

0:42:02 Thomas: Yeah, that would be, that'd be, you know, yeah. And that would be actual Marxism. You know, that would be actual magazine. Like that would be, they would be 100% against that.

0:42:02 Kristi: Oh, That's a a ridiculous closing paragraph. It really is. This is, this, I didn't, I didn't make it that far because I was so caught up in all the problems with the data, and um, this is actually, it gets more terrifying as you go down the article. That's uh, it's

0:42:22 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, does that, so I guess, I mean, the only way to read that is that armies of unsatisfied men are going to get together, little militias are going to get together and wage war on us, right? I mean the risk of sexual conflict and war that have historically accompanied high inequality. Is there any other way to read this but, hey, women, be on notice that you'd better start providing for these men? Like, really? I mean, what else are we to do? How else can you read that?

0:42:29 Kristi: Yeah.

0:42:42 Kristi: And Yes. It Really reads like, satisfy their sexual urges or pay the consequences. It

0:43:02 Thomas: Yeah. I don't know how else to read that, to be perfectly honest. Like, I'm not sure what to... Unless, unless they're saying like, oh no, the government's got to step in and like, make sure that, you know, mandate some, yeah, that'd be some good, uh, The Mike Pence show. What is that one called? Handmaid's Tale. Maybe some good.

0:43:22 Kristi: The Yes, the Handmaid's Tale. That's, yeah, sort of the, you could see that that being published in a Handmaid's Tale type of world, you know, um, yeah, this is a pretty terrifying article when you get into it. So thank you for going into the darkness with me. You've got a flashlight. Your buddy.

0:43:31 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. All because 27 of somebody's

0:43:42 Kristi: System. Yeah.

0:43:43 Thomas: Friends said something or something. I guess they weren't friends. 27 people on a dating thing said something, yeah, for one of these studies. Yeah, it's, is an irresponsible article, as you see a lot with Quillette. And it doesn't mean that you couldn't take the data and write an interesting article about it. It's just turned up to 11 and, you gathering, making leaps, just enormous leaps that are not justified, Don't you think?

0:43:50 Kristi: Yes. Exactly. The Conclusions are not supported by the data presented. That's what you would see on a paper, you know, in a peer review paper. Um, going through and unpacking it is actually kind of chasing the attempts of reactionaries to justify their worldviews. Can be kind of entertaining, it's a bit of a detective story sometimes because you're like, well, this one is crap, what about the next one, well this one is okay but it doesn't say what they think it says. Um, I mean, in at least that way, when someone, if you see this on Twitter and you're talking about women and inequality and someone goes, well, what about the dating inequality, and drops this Quillette article, you're going to know how to explain why it's really, really bad. And yeah, I guess maybe that's the, like I said, recreational social science. You know, if you want a way to cheer myself up when this stuff is getting published is to demonstrate how poorly reasoned it is.

0:44:16 Thomas: Yeah, yeah.

0:45:06 Thomas: Know, and who knows if there's going to be some sort of technological, maybe not fix or whatever, but maybe there will be some app if there isn't already that can kind of calibrate things a little better so that, you You know, women aren't having to wade through a bunch of unsolicited dick pics. I'm sure that's probably already happening. Maybe there will be some adjustment to some sort of algorithm that can fix some of these problems, and then the data you'd get from that app would be way different. You just, you know, you need more data, I think.

0:45:34 Kristi: Yeah. Bumblebee. I think that's the name of the app where women are the ones.

0:45:36 Thomas: Yeah. I think it's Bumble. I always call it Bumblebee, but I think It's just Bumble, we'll say Bumble

0:45:39 Kristi: Oh, it's not. Oh, Bumble, okay. We'll call it, yes, just so you don't misadvertise it, or speak. But the one app where woman do the initiating, I would love to see their data and compare it to like a Tinder app.

0:45:42 Thomas: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Ooh, is that the rules of that app? I actually didn't know that. I, that my friend is on Bumble and she, and I didn't Know why, like she used to be

0:45:52 Kristi: No. No. No. I mean, especially a date, like, yeah, data on dating apps, I'm sure, I think that there might be ways for you to agree to use your data anonymously, you know, like in broad categories, but I don't know what their data protection policies, these that are, I'm just saying I would love to be able to see that data.

0:45:58 Thomas: Right.

0:46:12 Kristi: I don't know if it's available, sorry.

0:46:12 Thomas: No, I was just asking, is Bumble the one where women initiate? Is that that one? Oh,

0:46:17 Kristi: Um, yeah, yeah, it says, yeah, Dumb a Bumble Date Meet. Oh, mine's in German. Women make the first move on Bumble Date.

0:46:22 Thomas: Well, Let's I wonder what their data is. It might, who knows, it might be worse. Yeah.

0:46:35 Kristi: Well, that would just reinforce the thesis of the evilness of women that's been promoted by Quillette. But um, so yeah, it'd be interesting to compare an app, the data of an app that has a completely different structure for initiating interactions, to see how that impacts the way that people interact. So again, caution, watch the space, don't believe the Quillette article, last paragraph for sure in

0:46:39 Thomas: Yeah.

0:47:03 Thomas: Yeah, the last paragraph really is egregious. That's the thing. Like it's, you know, could be interesting data, but that is, that paragraph is just absolutely nonsense. All right. Well, thank you so much for educating us as always. Dr. Kristi Winters coming on here to break down the social science for us and let us know who this week is extrapolating from incomplete data.

0:47:31 Thomas: Hey, do you want to toss out your plugs? Where should people look to find you? Of course, you're on Twitter. Twitter. I always tag you when you come on, but anything else you want to throw out there while I have you?

0:47:25 Kristi: The nice Yeah, I I started a Sunday live show. My channel life was too busy, so now it's for Europeans, so most Americans will just have to treat it as like a podcast slash, you know, show, but it's a little bit of news, a little little bit of cute animals, a little bit of politics, and a little bit of nerdiness. So you can stop by Kristi Winters' channel on YouTube and you'll see it.

0:48:01 Thomas: Right. Thanks again so much, and we will talk soon, I'm sure.

0:48:05 Kristi: Thanks for having me on.

0:48:27 Thomas: All right, hey, I just want to clean something up, you know, I referenced the New York Times article and that was just on the fly, I should have stopped and pulled it up, but we were kind of gearing toward the end of the recording, so I brought it up and I didn't want to like pause things for that, so let me clarify quickly, sorry for doing that on the flying, not quite having all the facts, I want to just clean them up here, so this was a survey that found that actually everybody, even married people are having less sex, however, I did accurately say that, you married people have way more sex than single people on average, which is something, again, it's a little counterintuitive, but obviously it makes sense once you think about it. I mean, the opportunity is just so much easier every day for the average married couple than somebody who's single and having to meet new people or something.

0:49:14 Thomas: But I guess if you factored in people in long-term relationships or just steady relationships that aren't married yet, maybe that would throw it off. But anyway, on average, everybody, even married people, but on average the population is having sex about nine fewer times per year than we did in the late 90s. And some places, some demographic groups, that's going to be a little different. So married people it's actually gone down a lot. And you know what's funny? It's gone down an average of 56 times a year to, sorry, an average of 67 times a years down to 56 times per year. It used to be 67 times per years in 1989 is that data, and then in 2014 is certain data that says it's 56.

0:50:04 Thomas: And the final funny thing about that data shows that there's only one group of people that's not slowing down. And it's people over 70. People over 70 are having sex 11 times a year, up from 9.6 times on average in 1989. So good for them. But it's interesting. I think there, you know, there's more to be found out about this story. But I think it definitely involves technology, you It could be that we're we have so much more to do, whether it's Facebook, social media or even Netflix, you know, Netflix and stay celibate or something that it's just the time where we, you know, might have found ourselves having nothing else to do or having more opportunity.

0:50:53 Thomas: We've got things that are good at taking our attention and sort of running out the clock in a given evening. I think that's, that's one thing people speculate might be the issue. So just cleaning that up again, apologies for, for not stopping and getting those, those facts, right. It was just a product of kind of where we were in the interview. And, and I, it just occurred to me off the top of my head. So I want to, I want To make sure in the future, I'll make sure to, to either not bring it up or to, uh, to make sure I have the accurate facts, but that's why I wanted to issue this little, uh correction there. It Was slightly different than I characterized it, uh in the, the, in the interview. But that said, still very interesting. And it's, I think largely what I was saying applies and it's interesting to think about in this context, you know, online dating and technology and relationships, it's changing a lot.

0:51:41 Thomas: And I think it's going to take some time to figure out what, you know, whether it's a permanent change, whether it's something that we can fix, whether something we even need to fix. I don't know. You know, another thing that people speculate on is there's better access to pornography than ever. And maybe that's just how that could just be the new reality that people are happier with that, or at least somewhat satisfied with pornography and don't feel the need to have sex as much. Kind of interesting. Either way, though, one thing we can say for certain is that the conclusions at the end of that Quillette article that blame women for creating a bad dating economy for men seems strikingly inappropriate to me, so if you wanna check that out and read for yourself the leaps that are made in that article, feel free, but wow, that was kind of a shocking article.

0:52:31 Thomas: Alright, thanks again to Kristi Winters for breaking that down, and I wanna say thank you for listening and for supporting If you like the show, please consider sharing it. If you can become a patron on patreon.com/seriouspod, that's the best thing you can do to help the show. But if you can't, that is totally okay. The next best thing is tweet it out, share it out. Facebook it out whatever. If like what you hear, try to get it heard by more people. So, thank you so much for listening. It only continues because of listeners and patrons and all that.