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#1 and #2 are directly about modeling dating as a short-term transaction. #3 is indirectly the same: ime, professing deep interest in women's biological clocks covers a strictly penile preference for youthful bodies.
But family formation and successful childrearing is a very long-term project requiring daily emotional, not just financial, investment on the scale of ~30-70 years, if you take grandchildren's success into account. Women are aware on some level that the costs will be borne by them on this time-scale. But the only remotely reliable way to ensure similar long-term male commitment is through intimacy, strong emotional ties and deep social affiliation.
It's pointless to talk through dating-market fantasies as though rational self-interest could somehow be massaged into intimate pair-bonding. Better just to filter out people with that frame, because they're not looking for the same thing.
Let's be realistic, a husband who's initially obsessed with looks, SMV and biological clock is somebody who gets bored after a couple of years of sex, is mad about inevitable body changes with pregnancy, won't coparent kids or co-maintain the home, then runs off with the now-higher-SMV secretary 15 years in, leaving his wife permanently companionless with decimated career prospects and the burden of coaching the kids through the trust issues he created. Nothing a man could offer within a few dates is worth the prospect of single-grandmothering the early children of your damaged daughter between shifts at a shitty midlife job, or caring for your disabled child alone while your husband fights your child-support claims in court. Who needs that?
I tend to disagree with this for a couple of reasons. First, pretty much everyone is obsessed with looks, SMV and (indirectly) biological clock. Perhaps not at a conscious level, but certainly at a subconscious level.
Second, the trope of the man who ditches his wife for some young hottie is kind of like stranger kidnappings and police shootings of unarmed black men. These things get a lot of attention because they resonate with peoples' emotions but in reality they're pretty unusual. Most men in middle age simply don't have the combination of looks, social status, and wealth which would allow them be attractive to young women. Most young women don't want a guy who is balding; out-of-shape; broke because he's paying alimony and child support; etc. Of course it's different if the guy is highly successful, is in good shape; etc. ;or if he's mediocre but the woman has a thing for older guys; but these are both very unusual.
I do agree that if a man is constantly using buzzwords like "SMV," it's a red flag that he might be part of a certain online subculture which is hostile towards women. However, I'm pretty sure that most men who take part in that subculture are careful not to use that kind of language in their ordinary lives. So I would guess that in practice, if a man is talking like this in his regular life, it's more of a red flag that he has autistic tendencies. Because he doesn't grasp that in regular life, the social rule is that you pretend that you are a blue-pilled normie.
This seems like unfalsifiable typical-minding. Glancing at the world outside TheMotte suggests that many men do, indeed, have rich interior lives, are capable of deep emotional attachment and lifelong, mutually self-giving marital love and commitment.
Then there are the men memorably described as "likes boobs, but doesn't like women." Those are the ones who tend to develop elaborate theories of dating as free-market exchange.
"On the bright side, if your husband is mid enough, maybe in middle age he'll hang around to treat you with cold contempt while he dreams of the affairs he's too unattractive to have!"
Now this looks like unfalsifiable typical-minding. Glancing at the entire world, including TheMotte, it seems clear to me that there is nothing contradictory or even slightly conflicting about having rich interior lives with deep emotional attachment and lifelong, mutually self-giving marital love and commitment while also having theories of dating as free-market exchange. Empirically, those seem positively correlated in my experience, but there's no a priori reason why they would have any correlation, positive or negative.
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That doesn't necessarily exclude being obsessed with looks, SMV, and biological clock. How many of those men are married to women who, at the beginning of the relationship were far lower than the man in conventionally defined SMV? In my experience, such relationships are very very unusual. Which suggests that SMV is super important.
I think "cold contempt" is an overstatement. Even among men who marry the highest SMV woman they can attract (i.e. almost all men), it's pretty common to love and cherish that woman even as her SMV fades. If such a man were suddenly thrust into a position where lots of young attractive woman were throwing themselves at him, would he be likely to stray? I would say it's pretty likely, but regardless, I doubt that the comments the man had made 15 or 20 years earlier about SMV would be much of a predictor.
What is the mechanism by which a man would continue to "love and cherish" someone who was only ever interesting to him because his genitals told him she was 7.3 fuckable versus the 6.8 over there? Free markets presuppose exchange value, and that implies fungibility.
If we're operating on free-market dynamics, then genuinely free markets require transparency and good information. You've asserted, presumably from introspection, that it's "pretty likely" a man will lose romantic attraction to his wife and start sleeping with other women within two decades, given the opportunity. So if that's what you're putting on the table, let's write out the contract in plain English: "I promise to be faithful to you for at least the next fifteen years or until you get fat or sick, and to cherish you until a hotter girl asks me to leave my wife, and you can always sue me for child support if you can find a better attorney."
With those terms being made extremely clear, how many women would still choose heterosexual marriage over self-partnership, careermaxxing and a sperm bank?
The question presupposes that (1) among people who care a great deal about SMV (which is pretty much everyone), SMV is the sole reason for attraction; and (2) among people who care a great deal about SMV and enter into long-term relationships, SMV remains the sole reason for attraction.
I reject both of those presuppositions.
But it sounds like your position is that among people who care a great deal about SMV, SMV is the sole reason for their attraction to others and remains so throughout the course of a long term relationship. Do I understand your position correctly?
That's an exaggeration, but yeah, let's suppose there was a marriage contract which said something along the following lines:
"It's pretty likely that I will lose attraction for you over the years, and in any event, there is a good chance I will cheat on you if the right person throws herself at me."
or perhaps this, from the other perspective:
"There's a good chance that I will get bored with you and leave, in fact there's a decent chance that I never had all that much sexual desire for you compared to the men I dated in the past who wouldn't commit to me. If I do split, you're in for a very expensive and unpleasant legal proceeding and I may decide to turn the children against you as well as mutual family and friends."
That's the reality of marriage, and yeah, a lot of people wouldn't get married if that reality were starkly presented to them.
Anyway, I would appreciate an answer to my question:
It sounds like your position is that among people who care a great deal about SMV, SMV is the sole reason for their attraction to others and remains so throughout the course of a long term relationship. Do I understand your position correctly?
With the caveat that there's an important distinction between "caring a great deal about SMV" and merely thinking sexual attraction is important.
This post is a great example, from a guy who appears to love his wife and also find her hot (sorry @zeke5123a!).
Everyone enters dating with various desiderata, and generally those work like Boolean filters at the acquaintance-to-dating stage: the ass man doesn't date any flat-butt girls, the lady who prefers brunets declines the blonds. That way, by the time you start bonding with somebody, you've presumably clarified that you do find them hot and you can focus on also enjoying their personality and connecting with them as unique (and hot!) individuals.
By contrast, "caring a great deal about sexual market value" implies approaching dating with the basic premises of market thinking: interchangeable, quantifiable and commodified products with purely instrumental value, plus a focus on pursuing rational self-interest through utilitarian consumer choice among equivalent market competitors.
Thing is, that's a very natural way to think about objects, but it is not a natural or common way for humans to think about social affiliation. Relationships aren't normally a competitive optimization game: everybody should be willing to ditch their vegetable-oil brand for a competitor offering 10% more for the same price, but most men and women would be baffled by the suggestion that they should gladly trade their best friend/ mom/ dog/ nation/ sports-team loyalty if they found an equivalent with 10% better stats. Normally, there's even a mild disgust reaction to contaminating an affective relationship with quantified consumer utility in this way.
Ontologically, a thing whose purpose is to be ranked, quantified and consumed is not a thing to be loved faithfully with all your heart, and vice-versa. Thus, although people may have a vague sense that partners should "match" in their attractiveness level, the only way I can see to care a great deal about SMV, to the extent of habitually comparing/strategizing SMV and considering marriage with SMV in mind, is if you have zero experience of women as lovable human beings beyond the strictly competitive-consumerist framing, which doesn't even seem to reflect genuine sexual desire as much as a kind of status panic.
That's vastly different from just thinking you'd like to fall in love someday with a girl who also has big tits.
Well, I'm not sure you are understanding the phrase "caring a great deal about SMV" the same way I meant it.
Let me ask you this:
Do you agree that in the absence of factors such as money or social status, people who enter long term relationships have a strong tendency to end up with their looks match, i.e. someone who is roughly at their level of physical attractiveness? For example, it's very unusual for a very attractive man to marry an average-looking woman?
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If you'd started out with this, I would not have posted my other reply, and if this is what you've been trying to assert all along, I retract my fangs. This sounds like we're in substantial agreement on the facts on the ground here.
The issue I still have, though, is twofold:
First, it seems to me that what you're objecting to is the word "market", and I worry you're importing connotations into this word that aren't there. Dating obviously isn't a commodities market, it's not about frozen concentrated orange juice, but there are other types of markets. The best version of economic modeling of relationships talks about them in terms of matching markets which line up perfectly with your model of desiderata and selection:
So the idea that stating "dating is a market" means the person making the statement believes that relationships are a competitive optimization game simply doesn't hold water for me.
But in terms of Sexual Market Value -- well, even products that aren't raw commodities like FCOJ often reflect idiosyncratic and unique preferences, yet a price for them can still be set. The 'value' of something under orthodox economic models has to do with the amount people are willing to pay, which reflects, at its heart, how low the supply is, and how high the demand is.
I don't think Sexual Market Value, to steelman it in its best and most useful formulation, is about one person's assignment of a "raw fuckability score." It's not even, necessarily, about the 1-10 ranking system, or whatever. It's about how many people in the population, in the matching market that is dating, would find that an individual meets all their 'various desiderata' such that they pass the initial Boolean filter. The value of someone on the "sexual marketplace" -- or if you don't like that phrasing, let's taboo it and go with "matchmaking environment" -- is determined by how many people would consider that person a greater catch. Lower supply and higher demand -- understood here as being considered uniquely, highly attractive by a greater and greater share of the population -- equals higher value. It's a property of the matching environment, not a metaphysical ranking of human ontological worth.
What's the benefit of this "higher value?" More choice. More attractive partners. Better suitors. Obviously there can be downsides, particularly for women who can be faced with lots of attention they don't really want, but even in your own framing -- "people may have a vague sense that partners should "match" in their attractiveness level" -- being more attractive means you end up with a more attractive partner. The value of this goes beyond the purely puerile: any feature that makes a person of the opposite sex highly desirable to a large number of people, like being really sweet, or very caring, or having a great job or a home owned outright or a kind smile, increases demand, and increased demand means the competition for that person's hand is harder. This isn't even a particularly male thing to comment on -- read Jane Austen.
I'll also note that male attraction, even at this level of abstraction, simply works differently than female attraction -- it's not so much a boolean as it is a gradual scale upwards in terms of excitement and interest, with a floor set somewhere, there is a Boolean at the most basic level. I actually believe there's more to this in many women's psychology than you're letting on here; obviously Orlando Bloom is a more exciting catch for any woman than Frumple McFrumpelstein.
My other point is this: the reason you see men talk about Sexual Market Value much more than women, especially in environments like this, has to do with the fact that, for many men, clearing that first boolean hurdle is really, really hard. There are a lot of men, and I've talked with them on here, as have you I believe, who will state honestly that they want nothing more than to focus on the pair bonding and the faithfully loving and the enjoying of personality elements of dating, but they seriously struggle to get to that point because they can't find a woman who meets their boolean floor and whose boolean floor is met by him. Again -- matching market.
When men talk about "increasing their sexual market value," they mean doing things that will make them cross that boolean threshold for a greater and greater number of women, not because they want to personally have sex with all those women (of course, some do), but because they as individuals have desiderata and more attention means they have more of an ability to pick someone who actually satisfies those desires. This also means they will thereby have more of an ability to select a partner who doesn't present with red flags and can find someone that is a good match in terms of their personality and values. You need optionality to select well.
The default state for men is no attention, or very low attention, where you have only a small ability to actually select a person who's consonant with your personality, values, and yeah, sexual desires. That makes it hard, and the ability even to try and choose a good partner from a set of suitors is a luxury a lot of men are locked out of. Many of those men end up in loving relationships with women they care for a great deal, but some also end up in terrible relationships with women who have problems or don't treat them well, and without the ability to meaningfully choose you end up either taking who makes herself available or you die alone. I get the sense that for a lot of women, dying alone is preferable to shacking up with a bad guy, and I can certainly see why, considering the possibility of "a bad guy" being pretty damn bad, but men actually do love women and they don't want to die alone, which obviously isn't the ideal for anyone.
So of course there's status panic -- dying alone is pretty low-status and sucky, and ending up with someone you don't care for and aren't attracted to, which is the other alternative, is also pretty low-status and sucky. The 'third way out,' is, of course, becoming more attractive to a greater number of women, to wit, increasing your sexual market value.
You're criticizing guys for saying things that aren't consonant with 'stage two', but many are just trying to succeed at 'stage one,' where their raw sexual attractiveness and that of the people they're trying to attract -- in terms of how valuable they are as a potential partner to them -- are highly relevant features of your experience. Some on the motte would of course charge you with despising these men for their pathetic unattractiveness and laundering this disgust through rationalization, but I've seen you extend charity to guys who admit their struggles enough times that I extend you the charity of simply believing you don't realize the gap.
Yes, it's icky to think about relationships this way. Yes, this should very much not be the end-all-and-be-all of someone's approach to dating and intimacy. Certainly no one should be considering marriage based on SMV, but I fail to see who exactly in this conversation said you should!
But the analytical and practical utility of at least sociologically modeling relationships as a matching market outweighs that it feels bad. And I don't advise that people talk about it in mixed company, or make decisions on the important things in their life based on it. Pair bonding is more important.
Stated properly, the model does real work, and it impoverishes our understanding of what's going on in society to taboo the concept.
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A guy who starts off with "the most important things about you are perky tits and big ass" absolutely is going to run after younger, perkier tits twenty years down the line.
Suppose a woman starts off with "the most important thing about you is how much money you make". Do you think that is or is not a good predictor that if someone with a fatter wallet comes along, she will dump your poverty-stricken by comparison self?
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"The horror! The horror!"
Not horrifying, but, like, "Hey, I have a high sex drive, so let me stick my dick in you right now so I can also make your life a living hell in 20 years..."? Who opts for that once it's made explicit?
That you would describe the situation as a "living hell" when it would be something, if not approaching heaven, certainly in the same neighborhood to it, to vast swathes of humanity is what I find fascinating here.
Well yeah, we know guys only think with their dicks and a tight wet hole is a tight wet hole and that's all that matters, but women need to be smarter or else they make dumb decisions then end up with two teenage kids and regrets over "why the hell did I marry this guy, the red flags were there all along".
I think the woman in this story is over-sensitive and probably was at least 50% responsible for the marriage breaking down, particularly as she went full steam ahead to marry the guy and put up with him all those years, but it's the fruits of "let me stick my dick in you in trade for making your life hell".
Everyone is better off if they take the red flags into account and do not allow themselves to be led along by their dick or womb, delete as applicable.
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Even the man who is rich enough to do so effectively doesn't usually leave the mother of his children to marry his mistress unless the first wife kicks him out.
Well, unless you're Beff Jezos 🤣
But agreed, women who are mistresses and complaining over "but he swore his marriage was practically over and he was going to leave his wife for me, and that's ten years ago!" are idiots. He's getting the best of both worlds: wife to run the house, raise the kids, make sure his meals are cooked and his shirts and clean, and then sexy fun times and no responsibilities with you. Why would he not eat his cake and have it, if he can get away with it?
"unless"? Did Bezos leave his first wife before she kicked him out? He was cheating on her for like a year before it went public; I'd assume he would have been happy "getting the best of both worlds" indefinitely if he'd managed to keep getting away with it.
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And frequently, the first wife tolerates the situation while not happy with it provider (1) the husband doesn’t publicly embarrass her with the infidelity and (2) doesn’t divert too many resources to the mistress.
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You seem to be insinuating that men don't bear costs and have reliable ways of ensuring commitment.
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Ummm... no? That's like, seriously a lot of assumptions. A neckbeard who doesn't think at all about how to make himself look more attractive to girls by getting in shape and dressing better, and finally gets with a woman in her 40's who runs into fertility issues is simply not going to be a father or even a husband at all.
Or maybe you're purposefully hyperbolizing "obsessed." Okay, but I'm not talking about being obsessed with superficial things. I'm talking about merely talking about these things.
I don't see how optimizing for the long-term does not involve solving for the short-term. If you cannot even get dates, how are any of your long-term goals ever going to come to fruition?
And it would seem there's an obvious reason men evolved to have such a penile preference.
The problem is that the short-term transactional frame and the long-term bonding frame speak to mutually exclusive sets of personalities and worldviews. You can have qualifying thresholds and dealbreakers in relationships, but I don't think it's even possible for one human being to relate to another human being from a sincerely transactional and a sincerely emotional/ affiliation framework at the same time. Imagine a dog owner telling you he's considering replacing his dog with one that shed 5% less and was 10% better at playing Catch.
Obviously there are women happy to trade sexual access for resources or protection in a strictly transactional way, and I'd imagine they would be very interested in discussing SMV with you. But again, that's not most women who want to form families, because families inherently work around affiliation rather than transaction.
Nothing wrong with it at all, but man, even snails have penile preferences. You can enjoy yours without women being obligated to listen to some elaborate Adam Smith rationalization of why they're objectively true and correct.
You're again saying that "even discussing the impact these things has on society" means "you are incapable of thinking in terms of affiliation and emotion in your personal relationships." This simply isn't true; would you say that a feminist, who believes that male abuse has a serious impact on dating outcomes for women, is incapable of forming a happy bond with a man?
There are, of course, many, many men who believe that this kind of concern, especially if it's 'elevated' or 'obsessive', makes a woman likely to perceive even normal and non-abusive (even if crappy) relationship troubles as abuse. I think things are more mixed, and it depends on whether an individual woman has examples of men in her life (father, brother, uncles, teachers, friends, etc) who demonstrate good character.
The best partners are those who acknowledge the bad parts of human nature, even their own capacity for it, and then choose, knowingly and according to their character, to pursue the good. Not talking about or acknowledging truths about reality is not a demonstration of good character. "Having the wool over your eyes" does not an empowered partner make, for men or for women.
But if you're making a claim that "negative schemas about the opposite sex predict poor relationship outcomes" then I'll heartily agree. I'm simply not certain that an acknowledgement of the realities of dating constitute that, and I believe you're uncharitably imputing a mindset to people that's not necessarily there. There are men who do have the mindset you're talking about -- and some of them are indeed in the room with us right now -- but simply discussing the issues of dating does not constitute acceptance of the harshest offered framing in the space where they are discussed. As the adage goes, "consent is not the absence of a no but the presence of an enthusiastic yes," even if you seem to disagree.
For my part, I have said no, and I will continue to say no, and to attribute to the women around me the insights they generate on what could be done to better society for women and men, as I did in that post. I will even continue to quote you, when you post something valuable -- which you are very much capable of.
There's a difference between "women have a set of ages in which they're fertile and in which they can have a child and it's important we talk about this and it's justifiable that someone might want to marry a woman who is capable of having children" and "obviously people's sexual attractiveness has an impact on their dating life and outcomes," on the one hand, and "women are only valuable as T&A cum repositories and baby-making machines," on the other. If you don't see a distinction, well, your interpretation of reality is simply wrong, and I can't say anything else to help you.
Some things about reality are harsh. And those harsh things impact real people, and deserve being discussed. I don't talk about people I've dated in a "short-term transactional" way, because they're people and I've had real connections with them, but it's also very clear to me that, in every case, subconscious cues about my and their status, attractiveness, and compatibility were made by the both of us before either of us even spoke. Sexual attractiveness, a sense of ease, the way someone carries themselves, the way their eyes sparkle, how they dress... all of these form a huge amount of initial attraction, which isn't a replacement, much less a substitute, for the pair bonding and affiliation that can, and by all rights ought to, form once these drives motivate two people who are compatible with each other to form a loving relationship. You're describing sexual attraction and emotional affiliation as almost two incompatible views of the world -- that's simply bullshit, and it stinks to the highest heaven.
I don't know that people are saying that they're "objectively true or correct," although evolution did select for things by prioritizing fitness markers, even physical ones, and in most species, including humans, the female sex does most of this.
Yes, it is not fun. It's certainly not fun to hear people describe how competitive dating really is, especially in a way that can hit insecurities around attractiveness, age, personality, etc. It's not fun for me, of course, when you describe discussion topics I enjoy as predictive of poor relationship outcomes and therefore best to be avoided. But from your point of view, you're just being honest about your feelings. Turns out, so are men. Maybe we all ought to be more honest.
I'm not saying that it's good for people to comment on a specific person's 'sexual market value' when talking with other people. That's just rude -- although certainly quite a few women do it often, when the men aren't around. But a discussion, in theory, of the impact that these things has on society is a proper discussion, in the proper channels and among the proper crowd. Random female friends probably aren't the proper crowd.
But gestures broadly this here is literally designed to be the proper channel where the proper crowd gathers, and yet you seem just as annoyed that it's being discussed here. I would rather we have female voices present, and I certainly would rather than this community as whole speaks with more charity towards women, but the social system, which you seem to support, in which frank discussions of the realities of romance are verboten and icky simply means that social issues go unaddressed, and only the most disagreeable end up speaking out. If the empress has no clothes, I would rather the kindhearted and charitable addressed it rather than leaving the truth-telling to the harsh and cruel.
Yes, #allmen like T&A. Yes, #allmen think about how the dating is a marketplace. We don't have the luxury of turning our brains off and pretending that love falls from the sky as in cishet girl lore, even as a starting point. Our starting point is zero, and our baseline is one hell of nothing. We, too, are lied to by the cultural scripts that surround dating and intimacy, and we, too, turn to alternatives once they fail.
In many species, males have to compete in competitions or mate displays where things are, indeed, a numbers game in a matching marketplace. I believe anyone who looks clear-eyed at the world in which we live would acknowledge that human beings, far from being separate from the animal kingdom, too participate in competitions of mate selection and fitness-demonstration. Evolution did not stop at the neck.
If your view is that even acknowledging these things as elements of human nature, even as elements that should not and must not define our choices, counts as "obsession" or is a sign to you that someone is of poor relational character, then I don't know what to tell you -- except to say that if a concern about partner fitness and clear-eyed discussion of the harsh truths of human partnership are negative to you, you might want to start with the woman in the mirror.
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