The Economy of Sex

[Admin]

I work over and over with clients that use rhetorical tactics to fight data.  Talk louder, build coalitions, claim one data point is bad, the context was off . .  We call them Shaman or Hand Wavers.

Sampling only this group you could similarly offer that 100% of men belong to a cheese dating site. 

[SUPcheat]

Well, in spite of Dr. Wendy's effervescent, whimsical and optimistic talk before a group of young tech nerds with their mouths full of luncheon potato salad about their sex prospects, some things just don't change.

A woman who is educated and making 250K a year in an executive position really only wants to date a man who is making 500K a year and is in a much more powerful and prestigious executive position.

One of my wife's oldest friends in California got married at 67 to a very nice guy.  I was talking with him, and he told me about his internet dating experience, which he was involved with for a few years.  He was actually shopping for a wife and companionship, not just a leering old goat looking for sex.  He told me how expensive it was, because he had to pick up to tab for everything.  He would sometimes meet and greet women a couple of times a day, and pay each time.

When he told me the amounts he spent, it made it sound like hiring a shrink to get over your internet dating habit (as a male) and hiring ladies of the night would have been a lot cheaper than internet dating.

Of course, he wouldn't have met my wife's friend.  However, her expectations, even at her age, was that the men should all be running after her.  If the men expressed interest in sex too soon, like on the third date, she thought that was just icky.

Of course, the scandals on some of these adultery sites have revealed that the sites are actually 90 to 95 percent males, with a lot of the "female" profiles just sham or bait to get the men into the fantasy that they will be scoring. 

I thought that was kind of funny, but then, I have a strange sense of humor.

[PonoBill]

I'm not sure what the value of this revelation is. Men of all ages are attracted to young women because they are at their peak fertility? Ok, good. What happens because of that?  The article claims to have correlating data from other sources without showing or just naming examples. Who does that?

So what do we learn. Put a hot young woman in your advertisement rather than an older, homely one? Wow, stop the presses.

But my question would be, does that attraction geared to fertility change the behavior of people in relationships. Here's the average age difference in couples in the US, gay and straight:



I think that's a pretty interesting graph. If attraction is a significant influence on who you partner with, then why is the age spread more or less constant with straight people relative to gays, who would seem a bit less concerned with fertility, but exhibit a larger spread that grows with age. I don't have any way to answer that question, though I suspect that data from general social sites could do a better job of delivering useful data than specific population of a dating site. People over 30 on dating sites are a special slice of the population. Lots of things going on there that the data won't reveal.

According to the last census the average age difference in married couples is 2.3 years, with 64 percent of the difference being men older. You might say that people in relationships aren't relevant to attraction since the relationship can continue on some sort of intertia and responsibility. But the data includes all those divorces and new relationships--50 percent of first marriages and 60 percent of second marriages end in divorce.

And cheat, your wife's friend's husband is a sap--or he just likes to brag about how much money he has. The first time you meet a blind date it's for coffee. If there's a second time you cook for her--if there's a more effective tool to capture the interest of a desireable woman than a perfectly prepared omelette, I don't know what it could be--playing the ukelele maybe. If she doesn't reciprocate on the third date then it's time to look further.

[SUPcheat]

I am certainly no expert on dating.  The only dating I did was in school or training.  It was strictly intermittent, and I had so little money, it was more like hanging out.

I did date a girl for a brief time from Beverly Hills, who was raised with friends from some very famous show biz and monied families.  She basically had to pay my way, and took me to some unusually strange wealthy environments and night clubs.  It was kind of embarrassing.  I had a few wealthy girls who took an interest in me.  However, I came to the sad conclusion that I did not want to spend my life carrying around a rich girl's luggage, and if I was doomed to be poor, I would just have to learn to live that way, so I never kept up relationships with them.

My wife and I have a good laugh on occasion about the wealthy people we SHOULD have hooked up with instead of poor each other with our life struggles.  All in all, though, the more I have learned about life, the more fortunate I feel. Many of the wealthy people I have known have wound up dead in odd circumstance and ways.

[PonoBill]

It's been a long time for me as well, but I'm a geek, I analyze everything, which made me very good at it--or at least helped me understand how to accomplish what I wanted. At first of course it's just getting laid, but later it's finding someone you like to be around. That mostly comes down to expectations and whether they can be met or adjusted. I soon determined that insecure, thoughtless and undereducated was a challenge I didn't care to undertake, no matter how well other qualifications were met.

It's probably why I suspect I'm an outlier on the "what's attractive" curve. When Diane and I started our business together I considered her enormously talented, but much too young to be of interest. It was only when I discovered that beyond her technical qualifications she was not a typically insecure young woman that I became interested in a relationship beyond business. We've been married over 20 years and she continues to amaze and impress me.

[pdxmike]

I'm not sure what the value of this revelation is. Men of all ages are attracted to young women because they are at their peak fertility? Ok, good. What happens because of that?  The article claims to have correlating data from other sources without showing or just naming examples. Who does that?

So what do we learn. Put a hot young woman in your advertisement rather than an older, homely one? Wow, stop the presses.

But my question would be, does that attraction geared to fertility change the behavior of people in relationships. Here's the average age difference in couples in the US, gay and straight:



I think that's a pretty interesting graph. If attraction is a significant influence on who you partner with, then why is the age spread more or less constant with straight people relative to gays, who would seem a bit less concerned with fertility, but exhibit a larger spread that grows with age. I don't have any way to answer that question, though I suspect that data from general social sites could do a better job of delivering useful data than specific population of a dating site. People over 30 on dating sites are a special slice of the population. Lots of things going on there that the data won't reveal.

According to the last census the average age difference in married couples is 2.3 years, with 64 percent of the difference being men older. You might say that people in relationships aren't relevant to attraction since the relationship can continue on some sort of intertia and responsibility. But the data includes all those divorces and new relationships--50 percent of first marriages and 60 percent of second marriages end in divorce.

And cheat, your wife's friend's husband is a sap--or he just likes to brag about how much money he has. The first time you meet a blind date it's for coffee. If there's a second time you cook for her--if there's a more effective tool to capture the interest of a desireable woman than a perfectly prepared omelette, I don't know what it could be--playing the ukelele maybe. If she doesn't reciprocate on the third date then it's time to look further.

That graph makes sense.  M-F line is more straight than M-M or M-F, as are their partners.  Age difference rising with age makes sense, since percentage difference stays about the same--i.e. 4-year difference in your 40s is no more significant than a 2-year difference in your 20s.  Greater gay difference could be due to fewer available potential partners.


Since there's only a 2-or-3-year mean difference between partners in their 20s, it looks like not many of those guys in their 20s on OKCupid who like women in their 40s ended up marrying them.

[pdxmike]

Another cool graph on the skew of the male preference in case you din't click through to the OK Cupid article. 

More perfect alignment around 20.

Probably the exact same distribution from the HOT CHICKS thread.

Beasho--these are great charts--even if the data may not be representative of the general population, I doubt it'd be so different that it makes any difference in your point about the difference between men and women. 


Last chart (below)--interesting how women over 35 only look best to guys in their 20s.  I could see that being a dating site thing--not sure if it's true in general population.  It's also interesting how guys from 25-30 don't like women who are 5-15 years older than them--they have to be younger or older.  Maybe they don't allow themselves to be attracted to women 5-15 years older due to fear of rejection, since those women are older enough to be smart enough not to fall for a young guy, but not so old that their desperation will override that.   


I also wonder what the sample size was.

[Beasho]

From Matthew McConaughey in Dazed and Confused:

[Beasho]

I also wonder what the sample size was.

51 Million Data points over 3 years. So much for you Shamans and Hand Wavers considering it a small irrelavant website. 

The graphs were put together by Christian Rudder a founder of OK Cupid.

He started with blog on all the data they were collecting then he wrote a book: Dataclysm 

I pulled the above graphics from there.  I am sure there is more data than can be absorbed and it sounds like he was well positioned to hammer away at it considering he has a AB in mathematics from Harvard.

The Book is here on Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/Dataclysm-When-Think-Ones-Looking/dp/0385347375/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1412948960&sr=8-1&keywords=dataclysm&tag=bisafetynet-20

[stoneaxe]

This all makes me very happy I found my soul mate at 17.

I find it kind of bizarre though that any of this really needs data analysis. It all seems pretty self evident to me....human nature. Kind of why I've found the idea of deleting the HC thread so silly. Men look at beautiful women, women look at handsome men. They are just far more mature and circumspect about showing it. I told my wife before we got married that as long as we were together she could trust me to never cheat on her but she shouldn't expect me to stop looking at beautiful women. She was fine with that and shared why. She was a travel agent at the time, working at an agency in a mall. She and the ladies (and the gay guys) she worked with were jokingly members of a society they created....the CWA (Crotch Watchers of America)......

[PonoBill]

I don't consider it small, I consider it specialized. People who are dating. The chart I showed was from facebook data and the number I quoted was from the US census, which makes 51 million data points in three years look like a fucking rounding error. Wave your arms over that.  And answer the question--where are you going with this. What conclusions are you drawing. Data without analysis capable of predicting result is useless.

[pdxmike]

I'm going to read Beasho's book.  I'm almost done reading all the Sherlock Holmes stories again, and Dataclysm is next along with "Life and How to Survive It" by John Cleese and his psychiatrist.

[PonoBill]

Oddly enough, the next book cued up in my kindle (other than Sustainable Energy Without The Hot Air, The Power to Compete, and The War Before Independance--the three I'm reading now (it's an ADD thing)) is How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking.

Makes me laugh just thinking of it.

Christian Rudder is a really spooky name. I'd call myself Chris.

[Admin]

51 Million Data points over 3 years. So much for you Shamans and Hand Wavers considering it a small irrelevant website. 

The graphs were put together by Christian Rudder a founder of OK Cupid.

Right.  It is a classic sample error.  The members from a dating site are not a representative sample for this "study".  The vast majority of the group that they are supposed to represent is either married or in a committed relationship.  Not including any members of the majority in the sample group is...well, it ain't Galileo's telescope.

[PonoBill]

I thought about this off and on all the way on my motorcycle ride to Spokane this morning--four hours with nothing else to do. Damn you Beasho.

Actually I thought about the problems with big data and how it's used. I think the quantity of data overwhelms the questions you could ask. You wind up with ten billion bits of data that aren't quite what you need. No one gets to ask the questions they want answered, they just have a big pool of answers that they try to build questions for.

I think for lots of issues you're still much better off with a statistically valid sample that's on point.

I also wonder about what the data means. The premise is that men are programmed by a few million years of striving to pass their DNA on to be attracted to women in the prime of the fertility. And the "who are you attracted to" data from OKCupid seems to cofirm that, but to what end? Is social pressure overcoming genetic programming to the degree that the spread in age for relationships most likely to produce offspring seems to have no correlation to the dating data?

Maybe so. Facebook has a number of sites that publish summaries of data they collect. Here's another interesting chart that's sort of relevant to the overacrching issue here (which still isn't quite clear to me).  Here's an interesting one:



And this:


In all cases though the range isn't huge. There aren't millions of 40 year old guys marrying 22 year old women. Not even in egypt.