What are your citations

It's kindof late in the discussion to ask people to get out of their armchairs. A good deal of the disagreement here has been people disagreeing about the bare facts.

Actually, I think joe might be right. Think of it this way: Women are dramatically more selective than men about sexual partners. Yet are they dramatically more selective about relationship partners than men? I doubt it, and I would anecdotally suggest that:

P( man is interested in a relationship with a woman | he is interested in sex with her ) < P(woman is interested in a relationship with a man | she is interested in sex with him )

So the selectiveness would then be more symmetrical for relationships than for casual sex.

This is compounded by the fact that since women are hypergamous and tend to try to "date up," the men at the top of the ladder have lots of options and can afford to be very picky about relationship partners. Anecdotally again, at the highest ranks of desirability, men seem to be at least as picky about relationship partners as women are.

which is false, as evidenced by the large number of men who are willing to enter into a relationship just for the sex and still aren't getting any.

But these aren't the men that women are most likely to want relationships with. Men at high levels of desirability don't need to enter relationships to find sex. Getting those dudes into a relationship is much harder for a woman, and takes skill. (This is where I think many female dating complaints come from. My suspicion is that females are typically trying to "date up" in terms of percentile attractiveness, while males struggle to date at their same level (or lower) of percentile attractiveness, because their female counterparts are busy chasing men of higher percentile attractiveness who just aren't that into those women.

If I'm right about the math and the empiricals, then we have an inevitable situation where both sexes experience a challenge: what you want, you can't get... and what you can get, you don't really want. Women (on average) are struggling to date up, which means that men are struggling to date people of similar percentile attractiveness.

So who wins in this situation? That's a complex question, and all I'll say for now is that the variance in the advantages of this system are probably greater for men than women: I bet the men at the top do better than most women, who in turn do better than most men, but I'd need to think about it more and conceptualize how I'm defining "better."

Alpha men have are just as disproportionally desired as relationship partners, as they're as sex partners.

Are they? ISTM the men most likely to have been in a stable, happy relationship with an awesome woman for years don't much resemble the men most likely to have one-night stands.