Why are all the ladies chasing the Chads?
Who is Chad, and to what degree does he exist?
One of the core claims from the incel subculture is that 80 percent of women are after 20 percent of men. Those numbers can be discussed, but does anybody really doubt that too many women are after too few men? To be fair, a large majority of men are after the top 20 percent of women too, but there is an important difference: Most of those men will be interested in women from the bottom 80 percent too. Women, on the other hand, are known to be picky. They want the men they want or no man at all.
However exaggerated the 80/20-rule, more young men than young women report having no sex at all. Women 22-35 years have as much sex as in the early 2000s, but more non-married men in that age category never have sex. With such age limits there is of course the possibility that women under 35 have sex with men 35+ to a higher degree than twenty years ago, while more women 35+ abstain. But the numbers probably indicate some degree of polygyny too. Some of the men who had sex last year tried two, three, four or ten women, while the women in question tested fewer men.
Out of fashion
Since there are roughly equal numbers of men and women, strict monogamy will lead to almost every woman having a man and almost every man having a woman. If fewer women than men are celibate, that is a good sign that women have become pickier.
This should be no surprise, given that commitment has fallen out of fashion. In the old days when monogamy norms ruled, there was a very important way men could make themselves more attractive to women: They could commit to invest. They could concentrate their romantic energy on one single woman and convince her that they would invest what they had in a future with her. Every able-bodied man could do that, also the not so handsome, not so rich and not so smart. In general, women accepted those sweetened deals and most men and most women had romantic relationships and sex, of varying quality. So although both men and women tend to prefer the top specimens of the opposite sex, society organized a remedy to that problem. Not a perfect remedy: People probably continued desiring more attractive partners to some degree. But the system at least prevented everyone's love of attractive people from causing ubiquitous loneliness. There was a framework for settling for the less perfect and for many people it worked quite well.
Today, however, commitment is out of fashion. There is no longer an established framework for showing commitment. Everyone is supposed to design their personal relationship norms, with the result that people don't know what to expect from each other. While yesterday's culture gave men the opportunity to make promises (valid or not), today everything is about "consent" in the very moment. Everything else is seen as a bit hyperbolic.
Sex has explicitly become decoupled from investment. A process that happened in certain steps. Seventy years ago, people were supposed to abstain from sex before they could invest. That went so-so, with many decent people breaking the rules with unwanted pregnancies as a result. Some societies, for example my favorite minority the Amish, cherish the link between investment and sex so much that they are prepared to clean up the mess that is caused by people breaking that rule. They encourage instant weddings between young people who went a step too far and do their best to take care of the illegitimate children if that is not possible.1 They rather do that than teaching their teenagers that sex can actually be decoupled from investment if birth control is used.
Mainstream society took a different path. It figured out that if it allowed people of pre-investment age to have sex as long as they used birth control, the problem with unwanted children would be eased. This decoupling of sex and investment allowed investment age to rise significantly. If people had a fairly good time while they built up resources for investment then it was more attractive to postpone investment a little further. Step by step, investment became an optional addition to a sexual relation.
Economic factors play an important part here. The Amish can maintain their ideal of no pre-marital sex rather well because Amish people in general marry in their early 20s. Also in mainstream society, many people don't have any regular sexual relations before that age. But an important difference is that in Amish groups, parents are considered to have a duty to help young people establish joint households. In mainstream society, young people are told to have as much fun as possible while they are working on their own fortune. Investment has been replaced by freedom.
Why so picky?
Freedom opens up for polygamy. When no investment is required, the most attractive people can afford more sexual partners. That way, more people can hope to get some physical contact with the upper 20 percent of the opposite sex. Apparently, women make greater use of this opportunity than men do.
The question is: Who are those upper 20 percent of men? Classical, hard-core evolutionary psychology would have it that they are simply genetically superior. When there is not much investment to get, women instead opt for superior genes, the theory goes. A number of researchers have tried to show that women are savvy gene-hunters who prefer the most masculine-looking men when they are the most fertile. But so far, the results are mixed. A study from 2010 shows that women rate more masculine faces higher when they ovulate. But that study has failed to replicate (1, 2).
Managing discomfort
Although I hold hardcore evolutionary psychology in high esteem, I don't think human females are that well-adapted to casual mating (mostly because female sexuality is not very well-adapted at all, which I wrote about a week ago). There is another, much simpler explanation to why women share partners to a higher extent now than they did 20 years ago: Because casual and semi-casual sex is in itself uncomfortable for many people, especially women. Those men who can successfully handle that discomfort get many more partners. Those who are bad at handling it lose out.
Viral short story Cat Person by Kirsten Roupenian is about a man who wasn't good at all at handling that. (WARNING: spoilers ahead). The story is about Margot, a young student who dates a fourteen years older, slightly chubby man called Robert. Margot and Robert text for a few weeks, go out together, Margot gets drunk and suggests they go home to Robert to have sex.
Robert turns out to be terrible at casual sex. He makes the mistake of taking off his trousers before his shoes, forcing him to reach for his shoelaces, looking fat in the process. He then overenthusiastically tosses Margot around in different positions, uttering insensitive comments like "I always wanted to fuck a girl with nice tits" in the process.
The experience teaches Margot that she is absolutely not interested in any further relationship with Robert, while Robert is highly interested in her. Margot doesn't find any comfortable way to break it off, so she ghosts him, until Robert gets offended by her non-response and texts her "whore".
Let's imagine a counterfactual (counterfictional?) scenario here: Despite his weaknesses, Robert turns out to be great at casual sex. He focuses on making Margot feel wanted and special. He takes off his clothes in such an unnoticeable way that Margot never gets the opportunity to think that he is fat. He puts her in the center, but also firmly takes the command, freeing her from the demands of staging a show of desire. Cat Person could have been a completely different story then.
The trump card of Chads
Basically, I think the most important feature of Chads is their ability to relieve discomfort. And I think they often use BDSM tactics to do so. What about the choking epidemic I wrote about here? Why do young men choke young women so much these days?
I think it is to relieve the discomfort many women feel from having casual and semi-casual sex. Women haven't evolved to never desire casual sex. But women have evolved to feel uncomfortable with having sex with men they don't trust. There is a wide range here and levels of discomfort vary widely. But it is almost undisputed that the average woman feels more uncomfortable with casual sex than the average man. So female discomfort is a great hurdle to overcome for men wanting casual sex.
For several reasons, I think male dominance tactics is a common and effective way to do it. A study of pornography use shows that when females search for pornography, they search for violent kinds of pornography to a much higher degree than males. There seems to be some primal female attraction to men who cause women distress. It also takes away the demands on women of staging a show of desire that might just not be there: If your partner chokes you, he shows you are not in charge anyway. Male dominance takes away the need for females to fake levels of sexual agency that they just don't possess.
Pick-up artistry for the win
I have known two Chads in my life. One was up to the stereotype. Tall, very conventionally handsome, intelligent, confident, pursuing a successful career. The other was tall, explicitly ugly, a bit fat, intelligent, confident, holding odd jobs with low status and taking a gallery of anxiety medication. Somehow, intelligence and, I believe, above all confidence made him successful in the meat market.
This tells me that pick-up artistry can probably be taught very well. If the unsuccessful men just learn that women feel uncomfortable with the conditions of modern dating and how to make them forget about that well enough to have sex anyway, then they can probably become much more successful.
The price to pay is sexual assault. The Chad playbook includes a fair amount of dominance with a sprinkle of violence. A successful Chad, meaning one with good social skills, will read the situation correctly and use precisely enough dominance and violence to make casual sex feel like the right thing to do for the affected woman. A less successful Chad, one whose social skills are not up to the task, will sooner or later misread the situation and choke the wrong girl on the wrong occasion. A few presumptive Chad men will get things completely wrong and kill the girl in the process.
The data seem pretty clear on that point: The more sex people who don't know each other and don't love each other have, the more complaints of assaults there will be.2
The lack of investment has opened for polygamous mating, inevitably leaving many people out. Basically, there are two ways of relieving that phenomenon:
Teach the lower 80 percent to be more like the upper 20 percent.
Return to the old norms linking sex to investment. Then distribution necessarily becomes more equal, because investment is by definition costly.
I would argue for option 2. Despite all its faults, male investment is one of the things that once made humanity greater than the great apes. We know of its many flaws exactly because it has been so thoroughly tested. By contrast, the current non-investment norms are presenting us with new surprising ways for people to feel miserable and lonely. It is an interesting experiment to follow. But it does not seem to be a pleasant environment to live through.
Donald Craybill, The Amish, 2013, page 272-273
Jon Birger, Date-o-nomics, 2015, page 48
Your article made me think about many of the social theories falling out of the human genome project and comparisons with ancient DNA. The first thing I thought of was the 2:1 ratio of sexual "success" that is evident in DNA. That is, women are twice as successful as men at reproducing. Put another way, on average only half as many men successfully reproduce as women. Yet another way: we have twice as many mothers as fathers
This made me think of the polygamy thing and comparisons of who wins and who loses (genetically). With polygamous societies, a smaller percentage of (strong successful) men reproduce with most of the women. If you look at the extremes of both ends of the two status hierarchies, the biggest winners are low status females and high status males - the former get better genetic mates and the latter get more genetic mates period. The losers are paradoxically, high status females and, of course, low status males. The high status females lose the singular attention and resources of their high status male which is divided across multiple females and all their children; the low status males are the (incel) losers all the way around.
Monogamy was probably not practiced in any widespread way until the agricultural revolution - this has been argued based on archeology and anthropology and seems to be supported genetically as well. So it's relatively recent in human history. But the 2:1 persisted. And I'll throw out three examples illustrating why I think this is the case.
Many people are getting their DNA sequenced and using this to augment (or correct) their genealogical histories. On friend of mine did this in his early sixties and made a surprising discovery. His maternal grandfather was not in fact his grandfather. His maternal grandmother had conceived his mother with a neighbor. His mother - long dead at this point - had never indicated the slightest clue about this, nor had any of his other relatives. Through Ancestry.com it was actually pretty clear who his real grandfather had been. Second example was a relative in my own family. She had approached me about getting my DNA sequenced several times and for privacy reasons I declined to do it. She eventually got one of her siblings to do it and discovered that her "father" was not in fact her biological father. And - again - nobody in her family had ever whispered any doubts about her paternity before. Unlike my friend, she went through a painful process of contacting her biological father; he was in his eighties, still married to the woman he'd been married to at the time he fathered her, had multiple grown children and was frantic to keep any knowledge of her from them - to the point of begging and offering her money if she didn't.
And my third example was a kid that grew up down the street from me. His father was an anesthesiologist at one of the big San Jose hospitals. We kids couldn't play with his son and if we happened to cross his yard when he was outside he'd yell at us to go away. His son grew up an only child and pretty isolated. Fifteen years later I was living out of state and my mother mailed me a newspaper article about him. It had been discovered that he had two families - he'd secretly married a nurse at his hospital, convincing her, apparently, that he was single. He made her quit working and bought her a house in a distant part of the Bay Area. She had three children by him and he split his time between his two families. He told each wife when he was gone that he was sleeping at the hospital due to work obligations. The reason it came out was that the second, younger wife was divorcing him and her lawyer had found out through investigating his finances. At this point he committed suicide, leaving a big mess for both these women. This incident is of a different nature than my first two anecdotes, because the women were unwilling participants in this "harem". But genetically, it is the same thing.
So here's the punch line: in all THREE cases the father was a doctor (MD). In other words, a much higher status than average man. I think the principal that is being illustrated here is fairly common. In a monogamous society, many women may have to settle for a lower status male than they would like in order to gain an ally through life willing to share his efforts and resources and help raise and protect her children. But many, when the opportunity presents itself, will opt for a chance at "superior genes" - unconsciously, of course.
Modern contraception is probably going to change all this in unpredictable ways. As is DNA sequencing. Another one of these genetic curiosities is that among Asians (central and eastern) something like 8 or 12 percent (seen both numbers) are direct descendants of Ghenghis Khan. They call this sort of thing a genetic bottleneck - the amount of genetic variation pinches down to a fraction of normal in the Y-chromosome in this case. Maybe if modern women can reproduce with who ever they want (I'm sure we'll be mass-producing Brad Pitt or whoever is the current rage's sperm in for-profit sperm banks soon - probably available through Amazon) which will cut out most other males from reproducing it is going to end up having incalcuably weird consequences.
> Some of the men who had sex last year tried two, three, four or ten women,
> while the women in question tested fewer men.
This is not likely to be the case in actual fact, due to prostitution:
https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.210392097
> A study from 2010 shows that women rate more masculine faces
> higher when they ovulate. But that study has failed to replicate (1, 2).
More masculine features are more archaic, not more attractive. Femininity is attractive in female faces; neither femininity nor masculinity is overall more attractive in male faces. Men with desirable physical traits are tall, have broad shoulders for their waists, and have relatively more muscle and less fat than average.
> There seems to be some primal female attraction to men who cause
> women distress... Male dominance takes away the need for females
> to fake levels of sexual agency that they just don't possess.
This is hilarious. I'm not saying it's true, I'm not saying it's not true, but it's definitely hilarious.