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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!"
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.
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?
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