#sampl

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 somewhat believe(d) that "historically not-quite-monogamous societies had less poly drama bc norms had adapted and people had cultural scripts on how to deal with competition" sometimes the script is that you chase away your rival with a knife

This is the first anecdote Nisa tells Marjorie Shostak that makes MS doubt that Nisa is telling her the truth. Shostak finds this hard to take at face value, and comes up with other hypotheses, the most compelling of which is that Nisa’s mother was using reverse psychology to get Nisa on board with a baby brother who would compete for attention and milk. 

This seems decently likely, but... I don’t find it outside the realm of possibility that a mother would consult her child about this. When I put on my “loosen assumptions about what things are or are not okay” goggles, I go, well, why not? This is a culture where half the children born don’t survive into adulthood, and infanticide is a common tool to mitigate exactly that tragedy. Nisa was a stakeholder and she was grown enough to have an opinion.

Still a hell of a thing to be asked. That’s going to stick with me for a long time.