There is something about the economics-inclined mind that can’t help considering what the reported numbers imply:
The average woman dates 24 men and spends more than £2,000 before finding “Mr Right”, research has shown.
Here’s what occurred to me upon seeing this article in the Telegraph. First, the average man probably dates fewer than 24 women before settling down, so once you have dated 12 women, you should have a pretty good idea of where you rate with the opposite sex. Don’t delude yourself, that’s where the market has valued you. So, if you want to get married and have children, you should strongly considering doing so with the next woman you meet who compares reasonably well with those previous 12 women and is largely compatible with your faith, personality, and finances.
Second, if you’re only interested in trophy hunting, you can also use this information. Since the average woman has also had sex with six men, this means that she will have sex with one in every four men with whom she goes out on a date. So, if you’re not having sex with at least one out of every four women you take out, you’re clearly doing something wrong and need to either adjust your approach or rethink what sort of women you are pursuing.
Third, it occurs to me that this sex/date ratio is probably as effective and objective a means of defining male sexual status as any, which is useful given the inability of many men to understand that this status has nothing to do with what a man thinks of himself, but is determined by the way women react to him. Alphas, being near-irresistible to women, would have a percentage of .850+ since even George Clooney and Brad Pitt strike out from time to time. Sigmas would be a bit less, around .750+, thanks to the strangeness and unpredictability factors. Betas would be between .250 and .400, Deltas between .100 and .300, Gammas between .050 and .200, and Omegas below .050. So, if you want to figure out to which classification you belong, just work out your historical sex/date ratio. Note that this isn’t a sex per date ratio, it is the percentage chance that a man will eventually have sex with a woman if he goes on a date with her. It would probably not be unreasonable to use this ratio as a probability proxy for the likelihood that a woman will accept a date request from the man as well.
This sex/date classification obviously doesn’t apply to women because they are the ones responsible for deciding whether a date ends in sex or not. This means that their status has to depend upon initiations rather than conclusions, but it should be possible to come up with a similar classification set based on the amount of date requests and propositions women receive from men of varying statuses. A date request from an Alpha would be worth 3x more than a proposition from an Alpha, which would be worth 5x more than a date request from a Gamma. Something more or less like that, anyway.