It sounds like women may overestimate their market value. I know I personally never want to do this intentionally, but keep in mind we may be getting misleading feedback due to guys at the top of the market being indiscriminate.

What you have to realize is even a 1% “like” rate will result in a 1% match rate for attractive women, which results in more than enough options. As long as women have a lot of options in their match list, they aren’t going to be lowering their standards.

Keep in mind that, if ever I’m using apps to find new guys due to a lack of supply of dick in my life (this tends to be the impetus), I will be talking to up to 20 guys at once. This gets very time-consuming, overwhelming, and complicated. A lot of guys are flaky. Talking to 20 guys at once already gets me in enough trouble as is.

It would, of course, be useful to know if guys are really out of my league or not, so I don’t waste my time chasing. Sometimes I question this. But what I’ve discovered, from putting the guys I’ve slept with into Excel, is that lowering my standards actually reduces the success of anything working out long-term, whether it be casual or otherwise. This lack of benefit from lowering standards is counterintuitive and a tad bizarre. Maybe guys on the lower end of the quality distribution pick up on when I’m not that into them and bail. It’s hard to quantify desirability, as that’s obviously subjective, but it’s notable that the men I’ve dated are, on average, about an inch taller (6'3.7") than men I’ve only had casual sex with (just under 6'3" — I forget exactly). My overall average is still a whopping 6'3". The median is also 6'3". However, the distribution is slightly left-skewed down to 5'10" with the guys at the bottom much more likely to be one-night stands. I am, of course, told that my spreadsheet is distasteful and will scare guys away because it reveals how slutty I am.

The best solution to this problem is to get the higher quality men to be more selective. Another solution to this problem is to slut-shame women less, so they perceive that there is less to lose by giving a broader range of men a chance. If willingness to be slutty among women were equal to the current willingness among men, it is likely you’d see men competing for a smaller top range of women as well. Meanwhile, if willingness to be slutty was reduced among men, you’d see women competing for a larger top range of men, as reaching the upper echelons would be so much more challenging.

You could also get lower quality men to do a better job with their profile pics. The fact is many men are simply not very good at marketing themselves. This is readily observable in the effort men put into their photos and profiles — I have helped a number of guys with this. Men also tend to put less effort into their looks in general compared to women. This may be due to the belief that looks don’t really matter to women. However, the data is obviously showing they do. Consider how this data might look different if women stopped shaving, stopped wearing makeup, never got plastic surgery, and didn’t dress in clothing that shows off their figure. We are all artificially inflating our perceived attractiveness. Most men, by contrast, are lazy and think they can get by on personality. Then they complain that they aren’t getting matches. It’s all very silly.

I also suspect that The League solves this problem to some degree. While on Tinder, I like 1%, on The League, I like 75% of my recommendations. This is because their algorithm is set up to suggest men of similar popularity. I assume this removes the effect of gender differences in pickiness to some degree. Higher quality men on the league cannot swipe more than the maximum 4 suggestions per day. This means even the most industrious playboy swiper would not make it past 1460 women per year. But this would require getting on the app and swiping every day — how many men would be that vigilant? They also automatically unmatch you if you don’t talk to someone for 21 days.