Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
How are women attracted to men?
I have spent far too much time trying to build a mental model that is somewhat of an ensemble model of the Blue Pill, the Black Pill and the Red Pill.
But to be honest, the more I read, especially if its from the horses mouth, the more confused I get. For reasons that I cant say in polite company, I have concluded that just about anything women say on this matter can be more or less discarded.
For example, a lot of women claim that they might not like a guy initially but familiarity grows on them. So is the level of familiarity a variable I should add to my model on top of other variables like looks, height, wealth, status ? Because I am extrmely skeptical it is a variable at all and see little evidence of it. Maybe it passes through some kind of non linear activation function..
Or when they talk about "emotional connection", yesh wtf is that? Its probably an activation function not a variable.
I dont know... My absolute lack of contact with any humam female (literally didnt talk to a human female my age since i graduated college 8 months ago) is making me turn crazy.
Also reading GenZ women talk online I get the feeling that the human race is probably going to become like pandas soon, women dont seem to be attracted to men at all.
Ahem, personal miniscule sample size anecdata not surveys but...GenZ women are just as horny as their foremothers were at that age. If they don't seem so, it's because you aren't finding them in the right context, but that's been the case throughout history. Whatever happy nonsense they bring up in public, they get horny when they're presented with an opportunity to feel sexy with a man they find sexy.* I've had enough experiences of girls who went from frigid to freak, or girls who one partner described as uninterested and their next partner called insatiable. Get really blasted and watch Eyes Wide Shut; the whole movie is about the Tom Cruise character realizing that women are horny too.The giant high class orgy in a castle is a psychological metaphor/hallucination of a man who previously thought of women as frigid and withholding sex suddenly seeing that women will also want to fuck, that's why the journey into the night starts with him finding out about his wife merely having the passing desire to fuck some navy officer which blows his mind; he slowly realizes that women are sexually available all around him, but only to men who also realize the secret that women are sexually available. The masks provide a thin veneer of respectability separating their quotidian identities from their sexual selves, playing a sexy character, as Dan Savage has put it BDSM is playing cops and robbers with your pants off. After journeying through the implications of this realization, the protagonist then rebuilds his relationship with his wife on the basis of this realization.
A guy grows on you because you learn more about him, it's not an independent variable it is just enhanced knowledge. This might improve your knowledge of his status, some forms of status are immediately legible while others become apparent only after exposure. A lot of valuable facts about you aren't immediately legible; your background, your hobbies, your personal care for those around you. If I met a woman at a dive bar where I was watching MMA, she wouldn't know from looking at me almost any of my personal traits beyond appearance because I don't talk a lot or make jokes anyone gets at a bar, she might even think I'm kind of slow or not particularly intelligent because my thoughts are unintelligible in a loud bar.
You also need to balance within your model likelihood of interest in/commitment to the woman involved. The FDS game is to get the highest status man you can get to commit. Women might get confused about balancing those, but that always plays into it. Familiarity tends to show that a guy is genuine and likely to stick around in a way that nothing else can.
So to give my answer to your question: what do women want?
Different things at different times. "I am large, I contain multitudes." Girls just want to have fun, offer them an adventure, a romance story. Our brains are built to run on narratives, give them space to write one, and the opportunity to feel like an archetype.
Come on, this isn't polite company, at least give us a hint. Change names and dates to protect the innocent, but there's no reason to make a secret of your sex life here if you're going to trade on it.
I'd be curious to hear what you've come up with. Genuinely.
This is a serious problem, nip it in the bud now before it hits a year and gets worse.
I've come up with not much.
To summarize I would say that there is varying degrees of wheat and chaff in all 3 competing views of sexual relations. The wheat and chaff are as follows.
Red
Wheat - Status is important. Extremely important. Proxies of social status can be emulated and transmitted effectively if done right.
Chaff - Macho bullshit like "spinning plates", is of dubious value. Machismo is signal of weakness not strength.
Wheat ratio - 75%
Black
Wheat - Physical Attractiveness is probably the single most important variable.
Chaff - Anything to do with Penis size. Not acknowledging that its not all looks even if looks are 90%. Failure to explain the remaining 10% can throw the explanations way off base.
Wheat ratio - 75%
Blue
Wheat - Sometimes a girl likes you just because. Those reasons can be as mundane as the shape of your thumb. Being a "good person" TM doesn't hurt.
Chaff - That doesn't mean attraction is completely stochastic. Being a "good person" TM doesn't help either.
Wheat ratio - 15%
I'm not in the state of mind to write out a mathematical formula right now because the thought of syntax formatting in this comment is giving me a nightmare, but imagine a formula with 50 delta signs, many nested activation functions, and many piecewise functions. If I were given infinite time and money, I would turn this formula into a reality because I am not at all convinced that attraction is stochastic or chaotic enough that it can't be predicted at all, if anything, I think given the data, predicting it should be trivial, to the point that simple statistical/ML models would be enough had the data existed.
My gut instinct tells me a tree based model would be excellent at predicting attraction.
Impossible. I WFH and am far far far too busy with gym, house errands, helping aging parents, side hustles, applying to grad schools, for anything that would require any significant time commitment.
I think there is a certain programming in the female mind that just makes it impossible for them to clearly lay out what they actually like in a partner. This is in contrast to most men where they can tell you exactly what makes a girl attractive.
The anecdotal literature on this is vast. What they say they want and what they take are often totally at odds [Henry]. It might be a case of fish being in water that what they want is so obvious that it needs not be said. For example in this book the author actually puts effort into making a list of all the things she wants from a guy. She later confesses that not only are items in the list contradictory, no such human probably exists to begin with.
In simpler words, I think we are asking women a question they are not equipped to answer because firstly the answers are not socially/cultarally acceptable. And secondly I genuinely do think the female mind is incapable of answering the question. Given that the most accurate answer is provided by just about THE MOST male-brained woman to have ever existed (she's a rationalist, you might have heard of her recently).
I think it requires a level of decoupling and DEEP DEEP introspection that most women are just not equipped with.
Emphasis added:
In defense of the opposite sex, this is not just a problem that women have. The Madonna-Whore Complex is something a non-negligible number of men have.
Free, endless streaming pornography I suspect has exacerbated things. Videos of two, flawed human beings cohabitating, compromising and working through the occasional petty disagreements are probably not popular.
Honestly this whole thread is redpilling me on TheMotte as a space of intelligent, self-reflective men. The 2005-Dane-Cook-Bit level of "Men are simple! Right bros?" being preached is hilarious. So many men think they know what they want, until they get it. Men all "want a virgin who is a whore", but when they get her they wonder where she learned it. I've seen so many men get overwhelmed by getting the woman who acts the way they've always said they want, I'm shocked this is still even an open debate if you have any experience in life.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
This may have been a clever plot in the somewhat victorian early 20th century where this story is from, but nowadays most boys grow up being taught this “secret” as gospel, and the orgies don’t materialize. Except for gay boys obviously (spot the difference…) . If anything, women’s sexual desire is massively overestimated nowadays. As an example, FDS has a purely materialistic point of view, I don’t see any space for female desire in there.
But they have materialized. They're all around us, if he can't see them I guess it's two movies on one screen? Arguing that sex isn't available, that women don't want to have sex, feels so strange to me, like arguing that America is impoverished.
Tiresias the seer who lived as both man and woman, when asked by Hera and Zeus whether men or women enjoyed sex more, said that "Of ten parts a man enjoys one only." Chanakya in India tells us that women have "Four times the shyness...and eight times the sexual desire." It isn't just nowadays. Women have been thought of as coyly hiding a ravenous sexual apettite since antiquity
Buddhists teach that there are three kinds of knowledge. There's rote knowledge, memorization, the ability to repeat a fact: Brasilia is the capital of Brazil. There's understanding the causes of a fact: Brasilia is the capital of Brazil because it was founded to be a city of the future in the mid-20th century, to pull the government of Brazil away from the existing primate cities of Rio and Sao Paulo. Then there's understanding a concept at a deep level, where you look at the world differently knowing what that fact means for the world you live in: walking down a street in Brasilia and looking around and seeing the world around you in terms of the history of Brazil, the economic tensions and choices that lead to what the city looks like today.
Consider that these men may not believe what they say they believe about women. They understand it at the first level, as a fact that they parrot, or maybe even at the second level of talking about multiple orgasms or a woman's sexual prime or whatever. But they don't look at a woman and see someone who wants to fuck them, they think they have to trick them or convince them or cajole them, they view it transactionally. And that's the totally wrong framing, it's not a transaction, it's a mutual benefit, we both want to be there.
I dont know if you are taking those ancient tales seriously but FtM trans people almost unanimously confirm that the sex drive with increased levels of testosterone is orders of magnitude more than what they had.
So those ancient stories probably do contain some wisdom, that is applicable in some contexts, in the general case they are way off.
I do take ancient traditions on the human condition seriously, much more seriously than I do mad science experiments involving pumping a woman's body full of test and seeing what happens. A trans man still has female anatomy, pumping it full of exogenous hormones doesn't make it male anatomy. That's before we even get into the impact dysphoria, however framed, has on psychology and sexual desire.
So, yeah, critique citing mythology and symbolism all you want, but hard science doesn't have an answer here.
If you prefer ancient traditions to any actual modern evidence, you could go read the bit in the Book of the City of the Ladies where de Pizan discusses the idea that women are more lusty than men, and points out (in more polite terms) that there are no female-serving whorehouses. As her basic premise remains true today, cross-culturally, etc, it seems like she's in the right and Tiresias is in the wrong.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Sex for het men is of course available, but not freely so, and in a limited amount. It doesn't nearly cover the demand, like it does for gay men.
The hierarchy of human couplings by amount of sex exchanged goes: gay men (high demand, high supply) > het couples (high demand from men, low supply from women) > lesbians (low demand, low supply).
Plus the well-known experiment of taking an attractive person and propositioning members of the opposite sex gives wildly differing results.
What other useful knowledge have you gathered from your study of mythology? Aside from fictional evidence, Tiresias has real-life counterparts, and trans men report vastly increased levels of sexual desire when taking male levels of testosterone.
That sounds like bullshit my man, like that movie where michael caine is drunk fake Sherlock, where he explains how he solves crimes "others see, whereas I see and observe".
Plenty of gullible men spend years waiting for women to show the same kind of sexual interest they feel and express.
Tons. Certainly more interesting, to me, than pumping a woman full of testosterone and asking her how she feels.
It fundamentally doesn't matter that lots of men aren't getting laid, or that lots of men want to have sex but can't, that doesn't really impact my little point of mysticism, any more than the existence of people who can't shoot a basketball disproves the existence of basketball. A minority of men is getting laid all the time, it ain't because all these women are just cosmically confused that I'm going to start spending money on them any second now. The whole point of the metaphor within the movie is that it's an exclusive club of men who "get it," who know that there is no second password. When you get it, you get it, and then you can get it.
OK I'm sure you drown in pussy, that proves nothing, I don't see any argument that supports your thesis.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link