Do 80% of women only desire 20% of men? I found the truth behind the incel myth
Using dating apps can be a disheartening experience. I’ve not been on them for a while – I’m 42 and have a girlfriend, nay a fiancée these days – but from what I remember the level of ‘rejection’ that one can experience as a man on the apps far exceeds anything that is likely to happen offline in person.
Men can swipe right (indicating that you like someone) perhaps dozens of times before even a solitary person decides to reciprocate. It’s so depressing at times that it can lead a person to wonder: who is hoarding all the matches ?
You may or may not have heard of something called the 80/20 rule. It’s a conspiracy theory that claims we live in a ‘sexual marketplace’ where 20 per cent of men are hooking up with 80 per cent of women. And it can sound scarily plausible for any man who has had a rough time of it on dating apps.
Such is the growing cultural influence of the 80/20 rule that it got a mention in the recent Netflix series Adolescence . Jamie, the 13-year-old protagonist, mentions it to his prison psychologist. “80 per cent of women are attracted to 20 per cent of men. You must trick them [women], because you’ll never get them in a normal way,” he tells her.
The 80/20 rule – sometimes called the Pareto principle – first originated in the world of self-help. The basic premise is that 80 per cent of consequences come from 20 per cent of actions. It is one of those sterile maxims – or ‘natural laws’ – whose spiritual home is the realm of productivity hacks and LinkedIn.
But in recent years, the manosphere – an amorphous array of online subcultures that includes pickup artists (PUA) and men’s rights activists but also incels (involuntary celibates) and male separatists – has taken this idea and applied it to relationships.
Though their grievances differ, all of the various groups that make up the manosphere are united in the belief that we live in a ‘gynocentric society’ (a society controlled by women). Women are also said to be interested only in a small percentage of men. As the Canadian psychologist and masculinity influencer Jordan Peterson told the Joe Rogan Experience in 2018, sexual access for males is a “Pareto-distributed phenomena where a small proportion of the males get most of the invitations.”
According to the manosphere , women pursue this small cohort (the 20 per cent) because women are fickle and ‘hypergamous’ (interested only in high status ‘alpha males’) as well as preoccupied with securing the best genes for their offspring.
The 80/20 rule is usually accompanied by the corresponding claim that western civilisation is going down the tubes because society no longer places restrictions on female sexuality. In other words, feminism and the sexual revolution have supposedly destroyed the old social contract that pressured women into marrying ‘ordinary’ men (and made it nearly impossible to leave them).
‘The guys at the bottom are surplus’
During the research for my new book Lost Boys (an investigation into the manosphere) I heard one masculinity guru explain it as follows to clients who had signed up for his £7,500 ‘alpha male’ bootcamp :
“As we got into monogamous societies, what happened was low-status men got at least one girl that they could have sex with. Then after birth control and the sexual revolution we allowed people to choose more, and what women were choosing was the high-status men, so these guys at the bottom became surplus again. That’s why you guys are here,” he explained.
And yet despite my bullshit detector immediately flashing red when listening to this sort of thing, a glance at data from some of the world’s biggest online dating apps would seem to lend weight to the idea that women really are only sexually interested in a small percentage of men.
On Tinder, where romantic prospects are largely judged on how well one presents themselves in a photo, a study found that a man of ‘average attractiveness’ could expect to be liked by less than one per cent of women. The research found that men ‘liked’ more than 60 per cent of the female profiles they viewed, whereas women ‘liked’ only 4.5 per cent of male profiles.
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Unsurprisingly the data was quickly seized upon by the manosphere, eager to be proved right and cast doubt on the prudence of granting women the same sexual freedoms as men. The data was then cited as ‘proof’ that, for men at least, being average was no longer enough.
And yet a closer inspection of the data reveals (perhaps unsurprisingly) that the doom-mongering of the manosphere is misplaced. According to the same study of user activity on Tinder, while it may be true that women on the app tend to rate men more poorly in terms of their looks, they are also more likely to message these poorly rated men. By contrast, though men tend to rate women better in terms of looks, most are only messaging the top third of women. This is a reversal of the much-trumpeted 80/20 rule.
‘A distorted sense of what is normal’
As to why this dubious piece of cod-psychology has found such a ready audience of men – men who are in some cases willing to pay thousands of pounds to escape the fate of the ‘surplus men’ – the blame partly lies with dating apps , which makes men feel like everyone else is hoarding the swipes, but also social media, which has created a distorted sense of what is normal.
It is no coincidence that the 80/20 rule started to gain cultural traction in the 2010s as image and video-based social media took off. Instagram was launched in 2012; 10 years later it would be home to a billion users – around an eighth of the world’s population. Tinder, a place where people are depicted as two-dimensional objects in a catalogue of flesh, launched the same year.
Among other things, the ostentatious world of social media has made it easier to depict dating as a winner-takes-all world in which a small percentage of ‘elite’ men at the top take the spoils.
The 80/20 rule is part of the manosphere’s relentless diet of fear porn. And masculinity entrepreneurs have a financial incentive to promote it. It is part of their sales funnel: a way of making men feel insecure about their romantic prospects so they are more willing to buy expensive courses that hold the tantalising promise of joining the top 20 per cent – the imagined sexual elite.
And vulnerable men getting ripped off isn’t even the worst of it. By depicting women as shallow, Machiavellian, and intent on pursuing a small cohort of men, the 80/20 rule is deployed as an ideological shibboleth to make the case for a return to a more traditional society (i.e. where constraints are re-imposed on women’s behaviour).
It all feeds into the manosphere’s wider agenda: to get men to part with their money – and women to part with the hard-fought human rights.
James Bloodworth is the author of Lost Boys: A Personal Journey Through the Manosphere (Atlantic Books).
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