#(content note: article does the thing where it's compensating for reader bias by focusing on poor people are Valid and Helpable)

[etirabys]

// this post is meanders a lot, and culminates in a rec for a New Yorker article that has object-level nothing to do with my starting point.

I know a lot of romantically lonely men, and my explanation for this is that they (1) are outliers on a distribution where their part of the tail end doesn't contain that many women (i.e. they have the kind of autism that makes you a programmer), (2) would be a lot happier dating women who are also in that part of the distribution.

(I am somewhat this exact guy who happens to be a Kinsey 1 female, and I think this is one of the luckiest spots you can be in vis a vis dating)

(If I were the same person I am but only attracted to women, I would give up on dating. I like dating very much, but I also think I could have a happy life being single, and the market skew would shred me psychologically.)

Since there are about as many women as there are men in the country (actually, there are more women!), it occurred to me today to ask what these men's counterpart is. Naively you'd expect it to be women who are on the tail end of a distribution that does not contain very many men. But distribution on what axis? The first guess my brain generated was "allosexual women who are so in fandom, whose sexuality is so fandom-y/textual, that they will find the sexuality of most men alien or disgusting". I certainly feel like most of my male partners' lack of interest in slow burn erotica is an impediment to our sexual compatibility, one I couldn't overcome if I didn't have physical/nontextual libido.

I wondered out loud about this to 81k, who said that Scott Alexander had asked the same question years ago and had come up with the answer of "low income black women, some women in very rural areas who can't move out, and maybe nurses". We couldn't find the post, but he pointed me at a New Yorker article about that first group.

https://web.archive.org/web/20230206160659/https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2003/08/18/the-marriage-cure

I liked it a lot.