Edit: because a few comments make me worry that some are taking this seriously - this meme is a play on the type of hopeless dating posts you might find in less healthy corners of the internet. The joke is a suggestion that the real problem is that one man in the image has some sort of arrow-attracting superpower.
I love those edits
Is this the Lord Ruler? Thought he was supposed to look a little older, tho not much.
So what you’re saying is to go to an archery field to find a woman! I’ve been doing it wrong the whole time!
Fair warning, the naked fat guy with the bow and arrow is not Cupid. He is just an exhibitionist. An arrow to the heart will NOT make you fall in love.
So a possible answer is to live as a hermit in the middle of nowhere. And if a woman appears for some reason, she will have no choice but your long bearded, long matted haired, musk scented, disheveled, gaunt self as a possible mate.
I know it’s a joke, but I feel like to be fair to both genders, each man here should arrows pointing to every woman.
The original image, and your extension, are an emergent behavior as a result of The Algorithm - due to “scarcity”, Player B (men) is (are) encouraged to roll the dice as frequently as possible.
This whole dynamic is real, results in negative interactions for both players, and is intentionally set up by the apps to maintain engagement and extract as much money via pay-to-play advantages as possible. Dating apps are rigged to give men and women bad experiences so they (largely men) become desperate enough to pay $25 a month or whatever to have an unfair advantage.
The internet (and other players!) likes to hate the players, not the game, and the only “comfort” many young men have is Tate and Co.
Dating apps are rigged to give men and women bad experiences so they (largely men) become desperate enough to pay $25 a month or whatever to have an unfair advantage.
It gets worse, as the engagement mechanic populates the apps with a particular kind of guy who is obnoxiously aggressive, persistent, and convinced that this is a game they can brute force with time/money. So women end up being introduced to a string of guys who believe they’ve “won” a date by “beating” the game while women are left fishing for profiles that don’t look completely gross or insane.
And that’s before you get into end-users who are straight up escorts or pimps or predators, fully internalizing the idea that site participants are just resources to extract.
It isn’t merely about giving people a bad experience, but to give them a cheap thrill that keeps them coming back to the apps without ever finding a fulfilling relationship that would render the website superfluous.
The internet (and other players!) likes to hate the players, not the game, and the only “comfort” many young men have is Tate and Co.
Tate on one side and Estee Williams on the other. Men are told to treat women like a commodity - interchangeable, disposable, and ultimately hostile to your personal interests - that you rent out when you’ve accrued enough surplus wealth. Women are told to embrace submissiveness, obsess over superficial appearance, and pursue men based entirely on their socio-economic status in pursuit of the same kind of passive incomes that Tate is selling.
These conservative icons put men and women into an inherent contradictory position, with the idea of two people coming together as collaborators (much less romantic partners) is fully alien. You’re purchasing a man’s income with your looks. He’s purchasing your looks with his hustle-money. You’re both purchasing the other’s status, with an eye towards a higher rung on the ladder. Neither one of sees the other as a life partner.
The commodification of our most base needs, such as romantic relationships, is truly troubling. So much unrest because things like food, shelter, and reproduction are paywalled. Makes the population more vulnerable to fascist ideals.
This is absolutely how online dating goes. There have been studies that show women always go for the most attractive guys on the site, despite whatever BS they might claim.
Real life, not necessarily.
A more detailed description:
Provided a card stack system, the dynamic balance of liking vs. skipping tends to stabilize into a state where men like everyone reasonably cute (“to get more chances”). This is also caused by their inability search for a conversation partner in a rational manner, because it’s a card stack system. Often enough, all the information you have is a photo, age and city.
This causes women to experience a saturation of likes: everyone likes them. This causes them to be extremely picky about who they like back.
The result: unbalance. Dating sites view women as a “resource” to attract men, and men as customers to be scammed out of money to actually show their profile to someone, once in a while.
There was a blog by the creator of OKcupid, which was available on the site, that laid all this out pretty clearly. Something like 80% of the women were after 20% of the men, or perhaps it was even worse than that.
Women also, on average, rated men something like 1.5/5, whereas the average for men rating women was almost exactly 3/5.
It was a pretty depressing read actually.
You have to also look at the fact that men outnumber women on the app overall. It’s about 65% men, so women are going to have a bigger pool to reject from. And while it is true that women rate men less attractive, they also put less value on their apperence overall as a factor in dating. It also came out that this was based off of first glance only with no review of the profiles attached to them and, when looking at overall trends, it’s more even, (outside of men tending to like young women regardless of their age).
I think the okcupid data also went on about how certain races get more or less attention as well. At the end of the day, both sides can be picky. I think people like to push that data to help with the “80/20” idea to help push this idea that men are now being unfairly judged in comparison to women to help with the gender war narrative.
Edit: Just wanted to add that I don’t think that means dating isn’t hard for men, but I just don’t believe dating websites to be a reflection of real life.
This says more about how women are socially pressured to wear make up, dress well, wax, and de-age themselves or risk being labeled as ‘unwomanly’ or become irrelevant.
How many men do you know feel pressured to put the same effort into their appearances as the average woman does?
And don’t tell me how working out counts. One, there are zero health benefits to putting on make up. Two, women are incessantly reminded about losing weight rather than just be healthy whether it’s from the media, advertisements, or just people using ‘fat’ as an insult especially for middle aged women.
How often do you hear old women being complimented on their appearances compared to old men? Forget about appearances, how often are they relevant in conversations? Invisible Woman Syndrome is almost like a super power.
No, it’s like that irl too. I’m in a dance community and women are routinely all hooking up with the same handful of guys, and then being shocked that they’re not the only one booking up with that guy. It was like that in yoga when I was in yoga too
But what’s attractive is very subjective especially for women. Yes there are some general things being somewhat fit, decent hygiene, symmetrical proportions but there are plenty of studies that show women find the same man with a wide range of attractiveness vs men who have a much more narrow and agreed upon what is attractive. One thing that’s more consistent is appearance of wealth makes men more attractive to most women.
I suspect that women have dual mode sexual selection: Either dad material then attractiveness doesn’t matter as much as stable personality and material conditions, or someone with attractive exceptional genes. Meanwhile men will only judge by attractiveness but men (including the attractive ones) will still fuck anything.
Basically game theory and the structure of dating apps makes women only be able to select for the first criteria.
