Most dating sites are somewhere between 75-90% men so that is a place where the "top 20% of men" have an unfair advantage. If you look around in the actual world, there are all shapes and sizes of people who are paired up - and people do still meet in other ways, through friends, shared activities, work, etc. Besides the fact that it would be evolutionarily catastrophic for the "top 20% of men" to "get all the women" there is no evidence beyond dating sites that such a dynamic actually takes place. Stop buying into this nonsense. Are you really telling me with a straight face that all 3s, 4s, and 5s women are dating all the 9s and 10s men? I hate number ranking like that, but it's the simplest way to make a point about how stupid this myth is. And a few paragraphs down is a story about a friend of mine who married a guy who probably seems like a 7 after rejecting guys who ostensibly were 9s - because A) this sort of reducing people to numbers is stupid and B) looks and money and a high status job aren't everything
Check out this story from Shani Silver about the frustrations single women face trying to meet quality partners.
I understand that you feel frustrated, but It is a sexist lie that women have all the power in dating, and positing women as gatekeepers of both sex and relationships is an inherently misogynistic premise. The fact that you feel insecure and lesser around dating doesn't mean that all men do or that men are somehow actually at the mercy of women. Most women I know of dating age would snort at that statement because that has not been their experience. See Shani’s story for more on that.
"At its core, the very notion of the “sexual gatekeeper” is flawed. Sex is something that two people agree to do together, not an inherently male activity that women permit to “happen” to them. The whole psychology of the gatekeeper theory is predicated on the subject-object dynamic, where the man is the active subject and the woman a passive receptacle. This dehumanising and archaic view of sex is not supported by any statistic, and harkens back to a time when women were sold into marriage and the notion of the female orgasm had as much legitimacy as Bigfoot."
Polyamory has no bearing whatsoever on the fact that more men are going unpartnered - and there's zero actual evidence that it does - so please don't make assertions like that. This is another misogynistic lie, I'm sorry to say, particularly since more women are going unpartnered as well - which also has nothing to do with polyamory. There was a time, not all that long ago, when women had little social, or economic power and both their status and their financial footing came from who they partnered with. Women put up with a lot of crap because they felt that they didn't have any choice. Now, women earn as much as men is some cities and age groups, and have more opportunities to create satisfying lives for themselves on their own - something that more and more young women are doing. They aren't turning to the mythical "top 20% of men" - they are turning away from dating, relationships, and marriage altogether in favor of greater autonomy and less bullshit.
"The Office for National Statistics shows that women not living in a couple, who have never married, is rising in every age range under 70. In the decade-and-a-half between 2002 and 2018, the figure for those aged 40 to 70 rose by half a million. The percentage of never- married singletons in their 40s doubled."
Married women still do the vast majority of child, home, and elder care - even if they work outside the home - and even if they earn more than their husbands. And even before you get to that stage, dating has become such a horrid nightmare a lot of the time that many women are forgoing it completely. Divorced and widowed women are declining to marry again at astounding rates. Too many men still subconsciously or consciously believe that women exist for their pleasure and enjoyment - to make their lives easier and better and more and more women are done with that outlook.
My friend Jane just got remarried. She is beautiful, smart, kind, vivacious, and has a good job. Several years after getting divorced from a guy who never wanted to do anything but go on long runs by himself, leaving her with the kids, she went on three Match.com dates because her friends insisted she get out there again and at least do that. The first guy was kind of short, nice looking in an ordinary sort of way, but really just a salt of the earth kind of person. She hit it off with him but had promised her friends she'd do three dates, so next she went out with a tall, stud who immediately grilled her on whether or not she was a "liberal snowflake" and otherwise proceeded to talk at her the whole time. The third guy was a handsome doctor with great hair. He spent the date complaining about his ex wife. She went back to the ordinary guy, and is so glad that she found him because she thought the dating scene was a dumpster fire. So much for the mythical "top 20%."
You know I have a lot of sympathy for you, but if you are "excluded from the world of dating, sex, and relationships" that is mostly about you somehow. Women do not owe you those things, and although you have worked on yourself, you still are the common denominator in this equation. Go to Walmart and look at all the guys who are paired up who do not fit this red-pill narrative. There is not a "certain subset of men" that all women pursue. It’s just so obviously not true by simply looking at the world.
And what guys find who seek to have radical surgeries to make themselves more "Chad-like" is that it doesn't really change anything because their insides are still the same. I know it's hard to believe this, but even if a woman suddenly started liking you, it would help a little, but a lot of your insecurities and scarcity mindset would still be there. It wouldn't all just magically be better. External circumstances never matter as much as we think that they do and we all have the capability to work on our inner landscape no matter the circumstances.
If you feed your brain and your heart daily doses of resentment and desperation, it's unlikely that your circumstances will ever improve. Start a gratitude practice, read Brené Brown's "Braving the Wilderness", become a Big Brother and mentor a child in need, join a kink community, or whatever else you can think of to start feeding your brain and heart on better, more empowering stuff. If Viktor Frankl and other people who have lived in concentration camps can do this, so can you.
Every single time something has been suggested something to you, you have a negative response for why it won't work. Perhaps you think you are being "realistic" but all you are actually doing is poisoning the well. If you are tired of complaining about this and actually want it to change, you are going to have to find a way to shift your mindset. What you've done already to work on yourself is a good first step, but clearly there is room for more. As Elizabeth Gilbert says, "You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestations of your own blessings. And once you have achieved a state of happiness, you must never become lax about maintaining it. You must make a mighty effort to keep swimming upward into that happiness forever, to stay afloat on top of it.”
I'll say it one last time - no one is owed sex or relationships and asserting that women should pair up with people they aren't attracted to is misogynistic — no one ever suggests that to men. The 20% thing is a lie. Stop buying into disempowering drivel and work on relentlessly cultivating your self-confidence, and your blessings instead.
