Weekly Digest: Your Matchmaking Odds
Welcome to my weekly digest for June 9, 2023, with the best articles from around the web and a roundup of my recent writings and appearances.
My monthly newsletter is out Monday. It’s a look at the gender teachings of infamous pastor Mark Driscoll. You won’t want to miss it.
Newsletter Updates
I wanted to let you know about some changes I’ve made:
You can now visit my Substack homepage at aaronrenn.com.
I made a new home page layout with the new tools Substack just rolled out.
My podcast is now available on Spotify.
Hit Reply to let me know what you think or send suggestions.
Your Matchmaking Odds
There are a couple of sites out there which, after entering your criteria in a mate, tell you the percentage of the population matches it.
One of them openly calls itself the “female delusion calculator.” It lets you set age range, height, income, and race, as well as exclude people who are married or obese. For example, if you are looking for a man of any race who is age 20-50, at least 6’ tall, who is not married or obese, and makes at least $80,000 a year, that means your prospective market is only 0.61% of the US population.
A similar tool at the dating site Keeper allows men as well as women to enter their criteria. This one tells me that the number of women of any race who are aged 25-40, 5’0” to 5’10,” makes $50,000 a year or more and are unmarried is 2%.
I am assuming the data in these tools is accurate. They mislead though, because most people really don’t care about the “percent of the US population.” Instead, they are interested in the percentage of some realistic viable pool of potential mates. If I’m a man looking for a woman, then I would exclude every man in the US from my calculation, for example. This would double my percentage right there. Excluding married people from the denominator (not just the numerator) probably also makes sense, as does excluding anyone below the age of 18. Depending on the user’s age, excluding those who are greater than X years older probably makes sense. It’s not likely that a 25 year old would ever consider a senior citizen a realistic prospect.
I think tools like this could potentially be good for actually helping people understand how their standards affect their pool of prospects, but this has to be relative to some reasonable viable pool, not the US population as a whole. As constructed, these tools seem to be aimed mostly at men who want to have a good laugh at women’s standards, as the “female delusion calculator” name makes clear. Somebody should build an actually useful version.
You might also be interested in my newsletter from 2020 on the truth about online dating.
Best of the Web
Rob Henderson: What is Social Status?
Status in modern environments is prestige-oriented and depends on being well-liked. Women tend to be more agreeable than men and tend to want social approval more than men. In contrast, power actually allows you to escape from personal relationships. Men are more individualistic and disagreeable than women. Power—access to and control of resources—allows men to exist without having to rely on social connections and relationships. This is not to say that men don’t care about status, they care a lot about it. In fact, men desire status just as much as they desire power. But women don’t seem to have a strong craving for power. Perhaps because obtaining power entails the risk of being disliked, and, unlike status, power has few social payoffs.
Ryan Burge: How Many Religious Congregations Are in Your County?
The Free Press: A Church Grows in Brooklyn
The Guardian: ‘It left me with nothing’: the debt trap of payday loans - Anti-usury laws should ban payday loans. Legalizing these is one way that our leaders today have legitimized activities like loan sharking that used to be the province of shady characters like the mob. See my podcast on how American elites prey on the poor by promoting vice.
New Content and Media Mentions
This week I was mentioned in American Reformer, and apparently was also cited by the presiding bishop at a meeting of the Reformed Episcopal Church.
My podcast this week is on how culture warring, not just cultural engagement is becoming obsolete in the negative world
Paid subscribers can read the transcript.
Speaking of the culture war, major culture war figure Pat Robertson died this week.
You can subscribe to my podcast on Apple, Spotify, or YouTube.
Also new this week:
The Woke Consolidation Phase (paid only) - After an acceleration phase comes a consolidation phase. After the turmoil of the 60s and 70s came the 80s and 90s, which institutionalized much of the change. I argue there’s a desire among America’s top elites for a new consolidation phase after the turmoil of the post-2012 era.
At American Reformer, C. R. Wiley writes on bitcoin and the value of trust.
Post-Script
The self described non-woke job board Red Balloon put out this hilarious ad.
I think the really relevant metrics are: (1) how many people are chasing each member of that segment, and (2) how do I rank among my competitors.
The female delusion calculator doesn't give you an answer based on total population, but based on the percentage of men within the age range specified who meet the specified criteria. E.g., I picked 20 to 40 year old men who are any race, any height, any income, any marital status, and it told me that 100% of American men between 20 and 40 years old meet these criteria. It also told me my delusion score was 0/5 and asked, "Are you sure you're a woman?"