[Lazare]

I would be somewhat skeptical of that without hard evidence.

It's certainly trivial to find (many, many) examples of single men complaining that there are literally no women in the dating pool while simultaneously discounting out of hand all women who are too fat, have had too many prior partners, are too ugly, are too tall, are older than them (or in extreme cases, are the same age as them), make too much money, have incompatible political or religious views (generally but not always being too leftist), violate some cultural norm (piercings, dyed hair, vegan, etc.), and so forth. And none of those are hypotheticals, but actual examples I've seen in the wild. Repeatedly!

So while yes, I would be willing to believe that more men than women might report that there are "no available partners", that may have more to do with a difference in language than a difference in the actual objective dating landscape.

(To be clear, I don't have hard evidence to prove this is the case; I'm just noting I've seen plenty of anecdotal evidence to support that it could be the case, and haven't seen any hard evidencr to the contrary. Hence, my skepticism.)

[jojobas]

Would you count that women consistently rate 80% of men as below-average-looking for evidence? Source: okcupid.

[Lazare]

Absolutely not. If anything, that's further evidence of my point, and I literally almost mentioned it before deciding my comment was getting a bit rambling already.

Anyhow, assuming for the sake of argument that OKCupid's data is valid and replicates, then there's two responses:

The short and somewhat silly argument is that women also say they care about attractiveness a lot less than men do, so it all averages out. Men care about attractiveness and have an accurate perception of it; women don't care about it and have an inaccurate perception of it. Neither a big deal nor surprising.

The longer point though is that yes, men, judging women's attractiveness, say very different things than women do, when judging men's attractiveness (again, if we believe OKCupid's data). But that doesn't tell us anything about how men and women perceive attractiveness, it just tells us how they talk about attractiveness, and in the exact same way that we might be skeptical when a man says "there's literally no one to date" (and suspect they mean there's just no one they feel meets their standards who will date them), we might be skeptical of a woman that marks most men down as being below average attractiveness. Is there, say, some bit of cultural conditioning pushing women to rank men as unattractive when they don't want to date them for a non-appearance reason? Or to rank men as unattractive to avoid seeming too eager, even when they do find them attractive? How often do women end up dating men they rank as unattractive, and how does this rate compare to the rate of men dating women they rank as unattractive? And we could go on, but the point is that when you start to dig into it, the pattern falls apart, suggesting this is a quirk of the survey design at best, and not an real insight into meaningful differences betweem male and female bahaviour.