I just saw yet another YouTube clip where some woman got “owned” by a guy using a “Female Delusion Calculator” (of which there are several online).

Here’s the problem with that, and why guys need to be realistic about what the results mean. It’s basic math, and we should be embarrassed to put this nonsense on blast. Plenty of women are plenty delusional… we don’t do ourselves any favors by screwing up 8th grade math.

Assuming that the calculators are based on accurate census data (and I have no reason to doubt their accuracy), the resulting percentage only signifies how common such men are in the population.

Most of the time the question is phrased as what the woman wants rather than what she would accept in the flesh. Even when the question is asked correctly, many women will say that they’re describing their ideal man rather than the men they would actually consider. That vastly skews the results, and we all know that what matters is what women do rather than what they say.

Another problem is that it doesn’t take into consideration how many people the average woman knows.

I’ll use the unmarried version of myself as an example of scarcity: early 60s, 5’7”, no kids, extremely fit, $100,000 per year, homeowner with no debt, white, Christian, post-graduate.

By most measures I’m a HVM in my age group (especially with regard to MMV). When I plug in the unmarried version of myself, I get anywhere from 2-6%, depending on which questions are asked and exactly where I set the upper and lower parameters. So let’s say that around one man in 25 is in the same demographic subset with regard to age, height, race, income, and fitness. That doesn’t mean that a woman who wants a guy with my traits is a “cat lady in waiting” or will soon be buying boxed Chardonnay from Costco.

The average person knows about 600 people at any one time, and half of them are men. That means that the average woman knows about a dozen men who fall into the same demographic category as I do. If she enlists the help of even a handful of friends and relatives, she could easily get access (and introductions) to 20 or more suitable men who have already been pre-screened to some degree. It’s not delusional to think that a woman who works to maximize her own mate value could snag a man whose mate value matches mine (on paper, anyway).

To make it useful, it’s probably better to assume that the woman has access to 500 men (guys she knows and guys she could meet through her network with minimal effort), and get a number of men based on the calculated percentage.

If 2% of men meet her criteria, she has access to 10 such men. That doesn’t mean that she has to be a “Top 2%” woman, either, because many of her competitors are looking in different age categories. Since I’m in my early 60s, there aren’t many women in their 20s looking for the unmarried version of me, but I suspect I could get more than a couple of takers among women in their 40s, and nearly all the single women in their 50s and beyond. (Not that I would be looking in that category much.)

A clever 40-year-old woman would have an excellent chance for the simple reason that she wouldn’t be competing against younger women, while a 70-year-old woman with the same parameters would have better odds winning the lottery.

Delusion comes into play when women want men who are near the top of multiple categories: income is usually inversely proportional to age, for example. It also appears when women who have low mate value demand men with much higher mate value, which is usually the result of women having their egos constantly fluffed. Nobody is going to tell a fat nerdy guy with no game that he deserves a supermodel, yet people will tell an obese baby-mamma with maxed out credit cards that she deserves a 6/6/6/6/6/6 man.