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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?
I said somewhere upthread that people do have vague ideas about looks parity, but on reflection, no, it definitely hasn't been my experience that this is sufficiently granular to make it weird or unusual when a very attractive person marries someone who looks average. If you're holding constant the social scene (like undergrads in related majors at a specific college, or young professionals in related industries in a single urban area), I'd actually expect zero surprise at literally any coupling across any range of appearance percentile scores. The idea that people would match up by appearance like Ken and Barbie dolls feels like a very middle-school view of the world.
I do think that a huge proportion of perceived physical appearance is downstream of social class (nutrition, stress levels, body and facial ideals, medical procedures, health/wellness/exercise access, clothing/hair/grooming norms, social self-presentation), and people do have a strong tendency to date within their same social class and local subcommunity, so that might be a confounding factor.
That's not my experience at all. In fact, when a very attractive person ends up with someone who is mediocre, I (and most people I know) notice it and start speculating that there must be some hidden factor, such as wealth or social status. Moreover, I am pretty sure that there is a lot of scientific researching confirming that most people place a great deal of emphasis on physical attractiveness in choosing mates.
I don't know you, but I strongly suspect this is one of those situations where a person claims personal experiences which are wildly at odds with reality for purposes of bolstering their position in a debate. For example, if I were to post on Reddit that in my experience women don't like to work on cars, it's pretty much guaranteed that someone will come along claiming to be a woman who loves working on cars and all her female friends love working on cars.
But anyway, if you won't accept that most people are more or less obsessed with SMV (which basically means looks) in choosing mates, then so be it. There's really no way to have any productive discussion. Cheers.
If I were trying to lie to support a position, surely I wouldn't have independently pointed out my own comment about appearance parity earlier in this thread, would I? I closed my eyes and did a thought experiment running through circles of single and dating people I know now or have known in the past, trying to figure out if, as you say, it would feel weird or remarkable for the best-looking ones not to hook up with the other best looking ones, absent other factors. Then I did the same for married couples I know, trying to de-age them and figure out if they would similarly have have been notably close looks-matches in their presumed social circles during dating.
And what I found was exactly what I said: once people are pairing up within a common class and cultural scene, my experiences just don't validate a SMV-style careful, granular dating hierarchy from the hottest to the least hot.
I was surprised, too, because, as I said, I also have a vague sense of homophily or type similarity in couplings, which should contradict this. However, I was also finding that a huge amount of the similarity seemed to be imposed at the level of the social scene itself, so there simply isn't as wide a diversity in appearance among people who already share the common class background, common geographic locale, common set of career or academic interests, etc., that would cause them to meet in the first place. For instance, most people of a certain social class in entertainment, media, finance or law who live in Hollywood, CA, are highly likely to share similar exercise routines and body/grooming expectations, plastic surgery backgrounds, shop for clothing at similar stores, etc., and thus look pretty similar to each other. Most extroverted young-professional types in the partying scene of a Northeastern metro, ditto. Most back-office coders in NYC or engineering majors at a Midwestern state university, ditto. You don't really see DC lobbyist/nonprofit folks who look like they could be shopping at a Dollar General in rural Missouri. So when I think about married professionals I know, there is a vague similarity in range of looks (although nothing like so granular as "all 8s with 8s" or even "hot person with mid person would be shocking"), but also I can't find any instances of other similar local professionals who diverge from that range of looks by being dramatically hotter or less hot than their peers.
Thus, as I said, I'd question whether some of any more dramatic looks-matching you're imagining may be flowing from the tendency for people to socialize with others of the same class, community and professional backgrounds. Once that's in place, it's just a somewhat tighter band, within which people seem to couple fairly freely. I'm unsure how we'd adjudicate that: anecdata? Group photos? The social science in this area is going to be shitty online surveys, which would not be helpful. Do you have many examples of real-life shocked discourse about real-life mid/hot couplings, by people who actually know the couples in question (not just teen boys on 4chan and bots on Twitter)?
You don't have to engage with it, but I'd just point out that OP was on why some people might find SMV frameworks uninteresting or false to the realities of human family formation. So this statement of yours is a bit like saying it's impossible to productively discuss atheism with anyone who hasn't first accepted Jesus Christ.
I disagree with your analogy. A better analogy would be to say it's impossible to discuss atheism with someone who insists that they personally met Jesus Christ and witnessed miracles being performed.
Well, it appears that the SMV side is the one making a strong positive claim for the social universality of a complex, negative-entropy and psychologically implausible coordination phenomenon, so I'd think the burden of extraordinary evidence for an extraordinary claim should fall on their side.
Again, if you have lots of examples of IRL people expressing shock when an IRL acquaintances marries someone otherwise fully compatible who's a bit more or less attractive than them, that would be a start. But so far your evidence is seemingly "I am personally upset when a hot man marries a mid woman, regardless of what else they have in common."
I have no idea what you mean by "negative-entropy," but certainly no coordination is necessary such a thing as objective attractiveness to exist.
This is a wild misstatement of my position. For any lurkers who are reading this, here's what I actually said:
Since I think you are misrepresenting your personal experiences, I'm not surprised that you would misrepresent me like that. In any event, I do not engage with people who strawman me. This exchange is concluded. Feel free to have the last word -- I will not read or respond.
Accusing people of misrepresenting their own personal experiences while complaining that you think you are being misrepresented, followed by a huffy dismissal, is too antagonistic, and it seems you are only engaging to "win" an argument and score points.
More charity and courtesy, please.
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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.
First, thanks for such a thoughtful response! I do think we’re on exactly the same page through “dating = matching market,” and I need to think more about that lw page you linked. I also want to thank you for being the rare person who acknowledges that emotional pairbonding might be a legitimate goal of dating.
I’d push back on the idea that acknowledging dating as a matching market with preferences, means we can unproblematically import the standard apparatus of commodity market thinking, like supply/demand and pricing/ SMV. Indeed, the article you linked explicitly lists these as concepts that don’t necessarily apply in matching environments!
It’s no accident that people began talking more extensively about SMV with the rise of massive online porn portals and Tinder-style dating apps, because those are both seraglio-style contexts where every click or swipe prompts you to model the individuals on display as interchangeable commodities. If a person spends hours every night freely following their whims across thousands of naked women’s bodies, all freely available to the imagination in ways even the guy fucking them can’t access, I can easily see developing a kind of jaded connoisseur’s eye where small differences in preference coalesce into a defined scale of mostly visual consumption value. But that frame is also importantly different from a plain matching environment. And while I hear your point about the potential “analytical and practical utility” of this framework for lonely dudes struggling to enter the dating world, I’d argue that the shift from “I like big butts and I cannot lie” to “caring a great deal about SMV” is most harmful to exactly these lonely dudes.
Here are two key problems:
“Market value” implies price discovery: that is, the quantified “value” has exterior social (if not material) reality as an emergent pattern across individual buyers’ bids. So SMV inherently pulls sexual desire out of the private space of honesty between a guy and his erection and refers it instead to the social world of mimesis and status, what the Discord guys say and what your favorite influencer would think. This pushes SMVers to over-weight their relationship models around factors that have high social signaling potential (appearance, exercise stats, income) and neglect more important relational factors, like temperament and common values, etc. You said that lonely men get stuck in relationships with women who are unkind to them, but it seems to me that SMV thinking could keep a guy stuck in a match like this, because it suggests that a 4.5 man who marries a sexually faithful 8-hotness woman, however mean or value-misaligned, has scored himself an objectively great bargain that he’d be a fool to pass up.
Market value implies buyer-seller transactions, which means your eventual partner’s socially-determined SMV (NOT necessarily the pleasure you’d actually get from sex with them) implicitly marks the level of the social, and possibly the inherent, value you possess yourself. This places identity and ego between the individual and their authentic enjoyment of a sexual relationship.
Most painfully, it seems to mean that the lonely man who’s struggling to “find a woman who meets [his] boolean floor and whose boolean floor is met by him” will still try to raise himself in exclusively ego-aligned ways even over women’s express preferences, AND will absolutely refuse to consider testing the solidity of his own floor-- even if it’s demonstrably set less by what his dick would authentically feel during intimate congress with this person, and more by abstract SMV calculations to Twitter standards.
I’m recalling a gentleman who posted a while back, who despite being admittedly awkward with some personal problems, absolutely insisted that he could entertain no woman above a 25 BMI. When I saw the post, I though of a shy early-thirties STEM guy I know who is happily married to a funny, outgoing 90s-alt-lite type with roughly Octavia Spencer’s figure. I don’t think you could be sane and say this man got a bad match: I’m pretty straight, and even I can clearly see the contours of desire that should make it exciting to have a lifetime of sex with her (that vivacity, that confidence, those bountiful breasts and the things you could do with them, all that soft flesh). I think the only way you wouldn’t enjoy the idea is if there’s a little Andrew Tate on your shoulder constantly whispering “land whale, 3/10, now you’re a loser.”
But although that poster could have expanded his chance of a happy life of loving and being loved by opting in on matches like that, I realized that there was no way I could ever suggest it. There would have been a massive furious pileon here, as though I had told him to kill himself, presumably because authentically enjoying a mate whom the discourse rates low-SMV would make him also low-SMV, a low-value male, somebody who had lost the game. It would have been a kind of death-dealing to his internet-created sense of self-worth.
That seems pretty screwed up! I certainly don’t think guys should settle for limp-dick relationships with women they genuinely couldn't enjoy sexually, but I also don’t observe that SMV has all that much to do with enjoyable sex, period. Except perhaps in the mimetic-desire sense where the empty guy tries to want what he perceives alphas as wanting on the telly.
This was an excellent comment thread that expanded my perspective. This is exactly what I hope for when I visit the Motte. Thanks to both you and urquan.
But it seems like urquan is talking about all factors that goes into making a partner attractive:
which would make this person way higher than a 3/10 once you took into account her funny and outgoing nature, and all "that vivacity, that confidence, those bountiful breasts and the things you could do with them, all that soft flesh".
But what you're saying is that the very act of adopting this mental model will cause someone to overindex on market sentiment instead of continuing to listen to their own value judgments. Is that correct?
This is well-put, more elegantly expressed than I could have done! I think yes, this. Possibly with a side helping of "consumer thinking makes bad lovers and weak families" and "properly directed, serial oneitis could be good actually."
It's great that both you and @urquan seem to at least think it's plausible that nonvisual features could be relevant in a partner! As we introduce more complex qualitative features and opportunities for idiosyncratic preference (for instance, maybe an extroverted guy would actually prefer a quieter partner who calms things down?), though, doesn't that move things closer to the matching-market framework from that lesswrong post, where classic price discovery and supply/demand dynamics don't necessarily apply?
If current SMV frameworks do try to factor in relevant features like personality, vibe, moral character, cultural values, even niche erotic qualities like individual body features or particular bedroom skills/tastes, I'm kind of curious as to how that works on a single-axis scale that's meant for public discussion. How far do people in practice actually bother with all that complicated math, versus defaulting to the simpler "SMV means how good you look," as has been asserted by others here? It does seem like when I've seen SMV in the wild, it's getting used as a Freakonomics-style cynical hot take generator to justify focusing more on conventional appearance metrics of the Onlyfans variety (maybe "fertility" for women, where fertility seems to mean, well, teen-to-22 appearance, not actually "I want fourteen kids so I need a wife aged =(42-14*1.5)") and less on anything else except maybe wealth. Even in your initial post, you appeared to be also advocating for more focus along these lines- but was that a misread on my part?
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