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Why do a lot of women not like acknowledging the practical aspects of dating? By this I mean that women appear to be put off by me simply discussing:
Of course I'm not discussing these topic with women I'm trying to actually date, I'm not that autistic. But if you're trying to actually find a partner to settle down and have kids with, how do you not take all of these into account? Not only does it reek of impracticality, but on an even deeper level, it appears that any attempt to practically model the dating world at all produces a negative female reaction.
(Maybe it's because some of these women don't ever intend on having kids and therefore don't ever have to be realistic about dating.)
#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!"
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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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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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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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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You seem to be insinuating that men don't bear costs and have reliable ways of ensuring commitment.
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Imagine you are a woman, what are your primary concerns?
1)Your partner should love you, even when you face problems he should not abandon you. 2)Your partner should have admirable qualities and should be respectable. (A very simple test, if a woman being told that she is just like her partner would make her feel proud and happy then her partner is respectable) 3) Her partner should not have many bad traits or deal breakers
Asthetic qualities are part of 2.
Good. Now men pursuing women are going to lie and game the system so that they fulfill these criteria, her concern is going to be spot them. This cannot be done on pure reason alone, this needs intuition. It's paramount that the man is not just hiding his negative qualities at the start of the relationship and would show them later.
Let's say a man starts talking about dating market, this clearly indicates that he is likely to be part of manosphere and right wing. This fails 3 and 1. To the best of her knowledge such men are likely to hate women and are likely to be mercenary. The movement has a very bad reputation.
This completely poisons the well and no romantic feelings are going to emerge because she is worried and couldn't trust the man.
The most important thing is that the man demonstrates that he is trustworthy and has admirable qualities, after that is done then further into the relationship he can talk about dating market.
TLDR: Unless you show yourself to be trustworthy you are going to be judged based on the reputation of your group.
Of course, there is no rule that if people are honest about themselves women would date them. Some people may just be completely undateable.
Romance isn't a means to an end for women, it's an end goal as of itself. You can't logically convince them to do it or accept subpar romance. In the past there was incredible social pressure so some women had to accept it but now there is not.
2 and 3 are not based on some mathematical formula, they are dependent on culture, what is subpar varries.
This is incorrect because what is respectable in women and what is respectable in men are different. In particular, giving a woman too many compliments for her personality without complimenting her looks sends the implied message that she is ugly, in a way which wouldn't for a man.
"You are such a nice guy"
“You’d be a great stepdad someday.”
Where the hell did I see it, was it on here or some other hellsite, someone posted about a woman saying "you'd make a great dad" and being highly insulted by this, that she was dumping him in the friendzone and not seeing him as the rugged manly stallion prime hunk of masculinity that he was?
Meanwhile most women were commenting "but that's a compliment, she thinks you're husband material!" but seemingly "husband material" is also judged "rejecting my smouldering sexiness" aka "not giving me the ride".
"you'd make a great dad" is generally a straight up compliment.
If I recall my genderslop properly, the case you're referring to is one in which the girlfriend said "I wouldn't consider you for a hookup, but yes for a relationship", so the implication was a bit more explicit.
I can see that if you just want casual sex, that's indeed a put-down. But you can't then argue that women are being sluts for sleeping with guys but not wanting to settle down and get married and have kids, if what you want from this girl is just sex and not marriage and kids.
You have to take the context into account, this guy was already her boyfriend, so the implication is that he's a "settle for guy", rather than "a guy that's attractive enough to have sex without commitment with".
It might be that it genuinely wasn't what she was thinking, but it's nonetheless a very emasculating comment.
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From an older married woman, perhaps. From someone you're interested in, it's a shoot-down.
If it's unprompted (that is, not in the context of active pursuit), IME it's not.
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Wasn't me, but I'll play along.
You're not in traffic; you are traffic.
Stepdad material != Husband material != Dad material != Baby's daddy material. The first would be a backhanded compliment from a woman, perhaps a direct insult. The last would be a backhanded insult from a woman, perhaps a direct compliment.
The middle two are more dependent on the woman uttering the statement. For example, a young virgin saying you're husband-material is a compliment. A seasoned carousel rider saying so is a not-so-subtle sneak diss.
How is husband material an insult and baby's daddy material isn't?
Taken uncharitably, "Husband material" implies someone to settle for. "Oh, you're a very sensible decision. The no-dressing salad option at this steakhouse." Conversely, "baby daddy material" implies excellent genetics and/or sex appeal, even if he's a cad.
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Baby Daddy material means that the man is so attractive that you're willing to fuck the long-term negative consequences in favor of fucking him. Husband material means that you'll fuck him only because of the long-term positive consequences that follow.
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It depends, I suppose. Some men would be good stepdads and some you wouldn't leave in charge of a goldfish, be they the biological dad or not.
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Remember, the seduction line is not "you'd make a great dad", it's "I want your babies".
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That’s fair, and pretty obvious. What someone chooses to say on a first date reveals what they think is high-status and interesting about themselves. If that for you is discussion of the dating market in analytical terms, that’s pretty sad and does say something about where your head is at. As I recall, I don’t know that any first date of mine has had much analysis of anything — I’m introspective but that’s not really first date material. I guess I would sometimes be philosophical, but in an upbeat way, about how I like to think about the world and consider the way the world could be improved and how people could treat each other better. That’s the right level of abstraction on my interests for early dating. But the best relationship I’ve ever had started with me in full public speaking about ideas mode, I chalk this up to a rare alignment of the stars. (Astrology on a first date is also a red flag.)
But I don’t think OP was trying to discuss it on dates, as he said, but with friends. But it’s not really light friendship material either. You have to really know someone and they have to either be a high decoupler as someone else said, or you have to have a really good reason to bring it up. Same-gender friendships are more constructive for it than opposite-gender ones.
I kind of started rambling on but now I think about it, basically the relevant ideas are. SMV has a very bad reputation so people don't engage with it.
If they are fine with it people may not want to compromise on romance because it is not an instrumental goal, if someone wants to eat a sweet apple you can't logically convince them to a eat a unripe apple just because it is still an apple.
You could in the past with lot of social pressure but now women can be happy even without a man.
Even if SMV is true for a lot of people, it doesn't matter for a subset of people because of the reason listed above.
Why waste time and feel bad thinking about SMV when you know your standards are not going to change, that is just going to make you sad.
I kind of get what you’re saying, but your wording is a bit freeform so I’m having trouble following you.
I think what you’re saying is, “women don’t engage with this framing because it has a bad reputation and will pollute you with it, even if you engage with it, it couldn’t affect your behavior much because you’re already doing what you can to be attractive and your standards aren’t a matter of choice so it doesn’t give you any new information, and the view talks about people’s relative status and that’s painful to talk about.”
Yeah, if that’s what you mean, that’s a solid explanation. I think the truth is that people generally understand the things about SMV on an intuitive level, and discussing it explicitly just feels too painful or too impersonal or too abstract in a way people don’t really ever apply to the things that worry or concern themselves the most.
In private, with trusted friends, of course people discuss harsh things about attractiveness and dating sometimes. But discussing gender issues in mixed-sex company is like discussing feces at the dinner table.
That is an absolutely hilarious metaphor, kudos
I'd disagree. If you understand what gives SMV you can optimize for that instead. If you refuse to acknowledge the existence of SMV altogether -- which is what a lot of women seem to do IME -- good luck optimizing for anything as a guy.
I'd disagree. If you have an accurate view on what kind of partner you can realistically get, you'd make a more optimal partner choice.
I mean this is the classic loop.
Dating Coaches/'ANDREW TATE'/whatever gives advice that's actually broadly actionable but couched in sexism whilst the Longhouse gives either nothing or actively counterproductive advice like 'be yourself' or 'wait and the right one will come'. Whilst the former isn't perfect, it's still far more likely to work than the latter but women don't like the vibe of the former thus complain. Endless loop of content hot takes.
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Having thought about it, I think there is a big issue you didn't mention, which is that the manosphere is low status.
Here's a thought experiment: Suppose that the man works in the entertainment industry. He's a studio executive or an actor. This is a red flag that the man is likely to cheat or abandon the woman. Hollywood is known for infidelity and divorce. And yet being in the entertainment industry won't scare off women they way it would if the man is part of the manosphere.
This is a large part. Men complaining about the dating market is low status. Men noting it's low status for men to complain about dating is low status. Men coordinating with other men to complain about the dating market and discuss solutions is low status.
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Because you're saying "yes, men do only want tits'n'ass".
EDIT: Also, you are strongly signalling "as soon as you turn 30-40, I'm dumping your wrinkly ass for a hot 20 year old, and forget that you are the mother of my children. I can have better kids with Baddie, anyway!" Your SMV has declined, it only makes sense to offload a depreciated asset and invest in a rising stock!
No. Men obviously want T&A. But it ain’t the only thing. I wouldn’t have probably been interested in my wife if she was an uggo but I didn’t marry her just because she looked (and still does) great in a tank top. That is, if people are honest there are non romantic truths about attraction that matters but it doesn’t mean the romantic things don’t matter either.
Regardless if it’s the only thing or not, the male penchant for T&A is the necessary residual complement to female hypergamy for heterosexual relationships to form.
To paraphrase one comedian’s bit (I couldn’t recall the comedian’s name or find a video after a brief search):
Women complain that men only want T&A, but what do women want?
Someone taller than them, stronger than them, richer than them, smarter than them, funnier than them, braver than them.
So if I get with a girl, it’d be someone who’s shorter than me, weaker than me, poorer than me, dumber than me, more boring than me, more cowardly than me. What’s left for me? Has to be the T&A, right?
That guy could get with a girl taller etc. than him, but he won't. Because his poor little fee-fees would be hurt that she's taller, better, etc.
It's long been a trope that men won't marry smart women, so pretend to be dumber than you are. Not too much dumber, just enough that you can gaze adoringly at him and murmur "Wow, Clemence, you are so smart!" so his little ego will puff up and he feels you truly get him and understand him.
To be fair, women flirt by being ditzy, and many don't realize they're doing it. Acting dumber than you are is attractive to men less because they want stupid women and more for the same reason lots of other flirty behaviors are.
Is it that they want less intelligent women per se, or is it that at some level they anticipate that if the woman believes herself to be the smarter one, it will cause problems in any relationship?
Men don’t want less intelligent women, they just mistake acting dumb for flirting because it often is.
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In the current year, neither. Both the expressed and revealed preference of men who are not pumping-and-dumping is for the highest-IQ woman they can get (other things being equal, which they rarely are).
Historically, men were supposed to (and presumably did) want a woman who wouldn't talk back to them in public. Pretending to be dumb on a date, particularly if the man knows you are not really dumb, is signalling that you are that kind of woman.
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In the Good Old Bad Old Days of traditional marriages, women were meant to manage their husbands. Not so much formal training, more along the lines of "men like X, they don't like Y, if you want Z you must do this and not do that". Men, bless 'em, can be trained to think they're the Big Cheese Head of the Household while the 'little woman' is running him and it. Just be slightly ditzy, as you say, and the other things. Remember that book The Rules from thirty years back? or the kind of advice handbooks often mocked by modern women about meeting Hubby at the door in makeup and pearls holding his slippers?
Now, traditional man-management comes in here; whereas the advice is:
The realistic view of domestic life and marriage is that Master is not always fair, truthful, and handling things with integrity. So to make sure money is put by for the bills, or that he doesn't ruin it all with his drinking, you have to manipulate him. It's all for his own good, after all! Make him think it's his idea in the first place and he'll docilely follow along.
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That’s just the classic cope and shaming tactic to try and salvage women’s Wonderfulness and #BossBabe status. It’s definitely not that women want a daddy they can choose; it’s that men are just too shitty and insecure to handle taller, “better,” etc. women.
Men are fairly agnostic to female height, in contrast to the colossal female preference for tall men. I don’t doubt there’s some segment of men who prefer shorter women so that he’s taller than her (when she’s in heels, that is, as that’s how women see height). However, there’s also a large segment of men who prefers taller-than-average women because he likes long legs on chicks or because he doesn’t want to doom a potential short son.
And ultimately, all else equal, men will look to expend less time and social capital on taller women, as men know with greater probability taller-than-him-when-she’s-in-heels women will reject and perhaps gloatingly dab upon them.
It’s telling that men don’t leave well-poisoning quips in their online dating bios like “don’t bother if you’re over [height],” whereas it’s pretty common for women to disclaim “don’t bother if you’re under 6’0” or shorter than me in heels.”
And why don't women want guys "shorter than me in heels"? Because guys shorter than them tend to be insecure about it. We can both go in circles about "men are whiny/no, women are whiny".
Short guys don't, in general, want women very much taller than them and tall women have a tough job finding men tall enough to date them.
I'm well aware that online women have basically infinite stamina when it comes to blaming men for women's preferences in their forever war to defend women's Wonderfulness. I'm also well aware that the evidence overwhelmingly supports the "Women Want a Daddy They Can Look up to" hypothesis over the "Men are Just Shitty and Insecure" hypothesis.
A consistent finding in the academic literature is that women care much more about male height than men care about female height. As one paper summarizes in its title: "Women want taller men more than men want shorter women."
"Women want taller men more than men want shorter women" is actually underselling it. This paper with the same first author uses North American speed-dating results (so revealed preferences through "yes/no" for willingness to match). There's a clear directionality in women preferring tall men and men taller than themselves. To the extent men care about women's height, it's a mild preference for average height women over very short or very tall women—and possibly for tall women over short women.
The fitted curves in Figure 4b illustrate this pretty simply and cleanly. Average height women (165 cm, or 5’5”) performed the best in men's evaluations, receiving about 48% "yes"s. The tallest women, binned to 175 and 177.5 cm (5’9 and 5’10 or taller, respectively), are penalized all the way down to... a "yes" rate of 45%. The shortest women, binned to 152.5 and 155 cm (5’0” or shorter and 5’1”, respectively), also received a "yes" rate of about 45% or so. On the other hand, it's Mendoza Line vs. MVP-caliber for men, where the yes rate is 20% for men 165cm (5’5”) or shorter, rising to about 32% by 180cm (5’11”), to about 37% by the 192.5 cm (6’4”) or greater bin—a monotonic increase throughout. For men, taller is always better, shorter always worse throughout the bins shown. Across all height spectrums women got more "yes"s than men.
Figure 5 is an amusing complement to Figure 4b. This time it shows evaluations based on male-female-pairing height differentials.
Using the curve that was fit, men most preferred women who were about 5 cm shorter than them, giving a "yes" response about 47% of the time to such women. For women 15 cm or more taller than them, this drops to a whopping... 44% or so. Ugh, stupid men and their insecurities punishing women 15 cm taller than them by a whole 3%. Men need to feel big next to a woman to feel secure so they gave “yes” responses to women 15 cm shorter than them at a skyhigh rate of… 46%. This only declines further to 44% for women 25 cm shorter than them, matching the figure for women 15 cm taller than them or more.
In contrast, women most preferred men who were about 25 cm (10 in) taller than them, at a "yes" rate of about 34%. For men at their height, this drops down to about 24%. For men 15 cm shorter than them or more, this drops further to about 13%. The increase is linear from the -15 cm bin to 15 cm before—while the increase continues—diminishing returns start to kick in. Similar story with Figure 5 as to Figure 4b. Women care a lot more about male height than vice versa. If anything men reward rather than penalize much taller women, and penalize rather than reward much shorter women.
Interestingly, the highest point estimate attained was that of men giving a 59% or so yes rate to women 15 cm taller than them. While it could be a statistical artifact, perhaps there is indeed a population of short kings out there looking for some snu-snu or hoping that a potential son doesn't suffer the same fate. On the flip side, Male "yes"s for women start declining after 5 cm on the curve, 7.5 cm if using point estimates, again suggesting a slight aversion to women they tower over.
Thus, the evidence is peskily inconsistent with the hypothesis that women's revealed preferences for tall/taller men is due to shorter men being Shitty and Insecure, as men's own revealed preferences don't even express such a mirrored preference for short/shorter women. However, it's peskily consistent with the hypothesis of women wanting a daddy they can look up to, someone who makes them feel like powerless children.
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You can find a lot more men willing to date taller women than women willing to date shorter men. Just like how being fat tends to impact a woman's attractiveness much more than a man's. Both sexes can be shallow, but because they are different they are shallow in different ways.
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Yeah, it definitely seems like women are a lot more hung up on height than men. And I agree that when men do go for shorter women, it's more of a response to anticipated female preference an independent preference.
The same is true for other things, such as career accomplishment. At some level, a lot of men know that if the woman can't look up to him, there's a big risk that she will lose interest.
Ultimately, we are dealing with two hypotheses: The "fragile male ego" hypothesis (men have a strong need to feel superior to their female partners); and the "anticipated female hypergamy" hypothesis (men are reluctant to enter relationships where the woman will feel superior).
Here are a couple of thought experiments:
Suppose there's a short guy (let's say 5'7") at a bar or a night club who's looking to have a good time. A tall girl (let's say she's 5'9") approaches him and expresses sincere interest in going back to his place to have some fun together. Is he going to turn her down due to her height? Of course not.
Of course one could argue that this is just a quick fling, and for quick flings men care more about sexual release than their need to feel superior to the woman. So let's change the thought experiment a bit:
Suppose there's a short guy (let's say 5'7") at a bar or a night club who's looking to have a good time. He has a choice been approaching a tall girl (5'9") or seeking out someone shorter than him. What will he do? In that case, there's a very good chance that he won't bother approaching the tall girl and will instead go for someone short.
Ok, so why does the man's attitude change from "totally DTF" to "next!" depending on whether or not he's the one doing the approaching?
The obvious and simple explanation is the "anticipated hypergamy" hypothesis is in fact correct. And I'm pretty confident that most men would be open to dating a woman who is taller than them; more accomplished than them; etc. provided the man believes that the woman is sincerely into him and she is otherwise desirable.
To an extent I agree, but I think part of this is that (1) in online dating, men are in a much weaker bargaining position than women so they are reluctant to openly and categorically rule out prospects; and (2) men are aware at some level that due to female in-group bias, a woman will be turned off by any firm qualification rules, even if she meets the qualifications. So for example, if a man belongs to Race X, and he sees a woman's dating profile which says "No men from Race Y! Race X preferred," the man is going to be happy about it. He will think he has a leg up with with this woman. By contrast, if a woman belongs to Race X, and she sees a man's dating profile which says "No women from Race Y! Race X preferred," chances are that if she interacts with the guy at all, it will only be to tell him what a racist jerk he is.
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LOL, no. Because if she's better than him at some traditionally masculine quality, she'll despise him for it.
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I have seen many girls who put "I'm 5'11'', please be taller" in the bio, not a single one who'd put "I'm 5'11'', short kings come here". The dearth of short guys pairing up with taller girls, on face, appears to be entirely by choice of said girls. On the flipside, in spaces where men don't feel like they have to posture for women's (or men's) respect or approval, many state (honestly, I must assume) their desire for tall mommies.
Where do you find guys who say they don't want taller girls?
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KT Tatara's the earliest form I (... and Grok/Claude...) can find.
That said, I'll give this the same criticism I do as aiislove's perspective: there are other values, some orthogonal and some contradictory; there is value for the mere presence of a second view even where it is not as strong as yours.
I mean, I don't know that this disagrees with the point -- in this framing, "the value of T&A" is a value that is orthogonal to "shorter, weaker, poorer, dumber, more boring," etc.
That said, while the joke is funny and it makes its point, I agree with you that reality doesn't say that T&A is the only thing men care about. "Poorer, weaker, dumber, more boring, more cowardly," isn't "not at all rich, not at all smart, not at all funny, not at all brave." In raw material terms, a woman in a two-income home, even if she takes home less pay, still contributes significantly to the household income.
Women are generally hypergamous, but not wildly so -- "peasant girl marries the prince" is a fantasy trope, but when actual princes marry, they marry members of the nobility, often just a step or two down from themselves. Or in modern times just a hot actress, I guess the joke lands a bit there, Meghan Markle got a damn good deal regardless of how she feels. I guess Kate Middleton wasn't noble either. She is beautiful, but in a refined way no one would hesitate praising in her presence, so I'll give half points on that one. This generation of princes can't be separated from their father's own desire for the commoner over the lady. Perhaps the takeaway here is that men don't care about their partner's status to a greater degree than women do care about theirs.
I don't feel any attraction to status, strength, wealth, but I do for intelligence and humor. I look for alignment on the ability to think about things intellectually and discuss them and a sense of humor that's compatible with mine. If anything, I kind of feel like I don't have the burden of hypergamy: if I meet someone at all attractive and they're kind and smart and funny, even if less so than me, I don't feel like I'm 'dating down' to fall for them. Their presence gets to be a place where I can be the best version of myself.
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Aren't you overreacting a bit?
I think it's a pretty accurate summary of what the average woman hears when a man tries to talk about SMV with her, and probably why OP's female friends don't want to talk about the subject with him.
I'd add a signal for "you're too unattractive for me to be interested in dating" to the list too.
Ok, so then the question is, why is this what the average woman hears when it's not actually what is being said?
I think part of it is that when men discuss these issues, it suggests that they are part of an online subculture which is perceived as being hostile to women. At a minimum, that online subculture doesn't follow the normal rules that (1) you should never say anything unflattering about women as a group; (2) women's needs, desires, feelings, and well-being should be prioritized over those of men; etc.
One thing that's interesting about women is that unlike men, they have strong in-group bias. Here's an example of what I mean:
Suppose a man is Race X and he sees an online dating profile of a woman. And that profile says "NO men from Race Y! I prefer men of Race X" Most men in that situation would think to themselves "Great, I already have a leg up with this woman." By contrast, if a woman of Race X sees a dating profile of a man who says "No women from Race Y! I prefer women of Race X," she is going to be offended on behalf of her sisters from Race Y. She will think the man is a creepy fetishist. If she messages the guy, it will probably be just to tell him how much of a jerk he is.
The reality is that most men have certain sexual/romantic preferences and ideas when it comes to women. But generally speaking these cannot be discussed openly with women the man is interested in.
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The same reason why when a woman says "it's not you, it's me, I'm just not ready right now", what a dating-savvy man hears is "it's absolutely you".
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Because people say things they don't mean and mean things they don't say all the time. One of the best ways to ruin your life as a woman is the believe a man that says "I'll stay with you for the rest of my life and use all my resources to raise our children together" and doesn't mean it. Since the average man doesn't go around talking about how a woman's SMV will drop as she gets older and has more children, a cautious woman has little to lose by treating the subject as a signal against long-term commitment, and may avoid a very bad outcome by doing so.
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It's still unhinged.
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Women don't like it because they don't want a transactional relationship.
So this right here feels very illuminating. I said one thing and you appear to have heard something completely different. Why is that? Perhaps the answer lies somewhere here.
You did say that, in a population statistics kind of way.
If I was a woman, I would need some serious bonafides from a dude who knew what "SMV" stood for before I would grace him with a conversation. Are you writing a book? Are you a sociologist? Show me your substack and reddit accounts this instant, citizen.
It's like my enormous knowledge of various Wehrmacht bits of gear and my PZ-4-D/Stug 3/Tiger models: They encourage some questions, and it's fair to ask them; I need to show you my Sherman and T-34-85 and my precious idiot son, the KV-2 before you can exit the wehraboo danger zone.
You interest me strangely, tell me more about the idiot child!
Imagine a heavy tank chassis, with armor blessed by the hand of Stalin himself, so strong you needed to put the open end any self propelled direct fire gun the Nazi's had (at the time, don't bring up the panther or the later stugs) right up against it if you wanted to MAYBE get through. It is fast enough on the advance, given its weight. It has excellent clearance and doesn't sink in any mud because it's so chonky.
On top of this Chassis, put a fat boy humorously square turret, and inside this turret place a 152mm gun. Anything it hits even kinda close to is immediately rendered into its constituent molecules.
Unfortunately, this bitch is so fat that the best its engine can manage is a brisk jog, it's various sprockets exist in a state of infinite agony, screaming as the shortest but widest conscript they could jam through the hatches shifts it by putting both feet on the lever and leg pressing it into gear, all while being visible from the next country over on account of being as big as a house.
Even with all that, it's so tough that on at least one occasion it gets its tracks blown off and just sits there, getting shot at for a couple days until it finally runs out of ammunition.
It's the dumbest tank that ever actually put in good work in a real war, and lives on in fond memory.
You left out the part where they designed it with this massive steel-chunk of a turret containing a giant gun, and then neglected to procure an electric motor for rotating said turret. Some poor communist conscript fuck has to winch the thing around with a hand crank! And the turret's size and armament makes its balance worse, so if the tank is on a slope that hand crank is not only rotating the turret, but now lifting a giant off-center load uphill! Sometimes they turn out to be
physically unable to work the turret aroundcapitalist wreckers, but hey, the armor means they usually get plenty of time to work the problem.Also, the 152mm gun is fairly low-velocity with non-fantastic performance against armor, but it turns out this doesn't matter if the HE shells are so powerful that the blast alone is sufficient to rip a German tank's turret clean off.
It's a thing of beauty!
Responding to filtered comment. The tank sounds cool though.
Fixed!
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And yet a single immobilized kv was able to stall the 6th panzer division for days. All such brilliant martial lunacy
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You left out that part that KV-2 wasn't designed to kill tanks at all, it was a quick mash up designed to blow fortifications of Mannerheim line.
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So in the great tradition of Russian "who cares if it's shit, it's a brick and will outlast your grandchildren's grandchildren" engineering? 🤣
No, it's so heavy that it will grenade its own power train, it's just big and stupid and cool.
I have to admit, it does sound so stupid it loops around to being great.
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I mentioned your description of the KV-2 to my Dad the WW2 enthusiast and he suggested you look up the French Char B1 bis at the Battle of Stonne, which took 140 hits defending a chokepoint and destroyed 13 Panzers and 2 anti-tank guns.
The Char B1 is another favorite; it looks like a fish that halfway decided to become a land dwelling asshole and then said 'Fuck it, I only ever need to move at a walking pace anyway.'
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It feels like urquan and omw_68 represent my own position on the matter pretty well in this subthread. Perhaps it'd be good to consolidate the discussion there.
edit: but actually, what you're saying is what I'm signaling merely by bringing up such a topic, yes? as in there are healthy ways to engage with Wehrmacht gear and Nazi-adjacent ways to engage with it, and it's fair for someone to be suspicious based simply on this information
Yup. It's the 'If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's probably a duck.' heuristic.
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StuGs and other assault guns haven’t endured as a design concept but they were a fascinating design for their time and setting. I would love to have seen what a competent postwar army might have done with them. My model building whiffed mins goes to an IDF variant of a iii/g or some such
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I did not hear something completely different. (Western)Women don’t want a transactional relationship, and so they don’t like discussions and framing that imply a relationship to be transactional.
This is exactly what I mean. In what ways were a relationship implied to be transactional?
Maybe relevant as a discussion in this other subthread.
But also, even if this were resolved in favor of "it's possible to discuss this without having a transactional attitude towards human relationships," the interesting question is why did you read that implication into the topic in the first place? Is it mere "guilt by association" with the redpilled dudes who also talk about these topics?
"Market value"
If we taboo the word “market value” and just call it “desirability in matchmaking”, would that satisfy you? The second sounds rather like something Jane Austen would propound upon.
Yes, if he talks with his women friends about romantic matches and references Emma, they will probably be more interested and experience less ick.
And why the ick? It's not obvious that your "desirability in matchmaking" would correlate with the "desirability in matchmaking" of the partners you are able to attract, whereas if you use the term SMV it's immediately obvious how the two might correlated.
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A lot of women would discuss some of these if put using different terms.
Also, it doesn't just produce a negative female reaction. It produces a negative reaction in a lot of humans because you are signalling a lot of things by discussing these:
You are probably also opening wounds and triggering insecurity about where they would stand in "SMV" or whatever. A lot of people find the Darwinian nature of early dating bad.
I think as humans a lot of us have an ideal of (unrealistic) somewhat unconditional care and of being loved for things we influence, for our deeds and words. Entire religions are founded on this. A big part of later-stage dating and relationships is about trust, kindness, reciprocity and related things.
The manosphere gets some regrettable aspects of dating and early relationship formation right but there is actual evidence that being a decent person is pretty important for actually having quality long-term relationships. If you are signalling early that you instrumentalise and commoditise people that is a pretty negative signal and will rightfully put people off. Not everyone would be of course, package this stuff in the right language and I'm sure you could discuss it with some women.
I honestly get put off when people enthusiastically talk about having a zero-sum mindset about these things even if I think they have a point. It's just a signal that this person is probably not very kind. And why would you want to talk about this enthusiastically and with a partner? It's honestly inherently quite an awkward topic.
Good points. How exactly is one to discuss the dating market in the abstract without "commoditising", "instrumentalising", or "dehumanising" anyone?
Well with my most recent partner, once we got to know each other pretty well, we naturally talked about our personal history with the local dating scene and how that informed our perspectives on dating. We discussed the various causal factors that might've led each of us to have such very different experiences despite nominally participating in the exact same arena. I mean, it's really fascinating stuff, is it not? Wouldn't you want to know about your partner's past lived experiences and what sort of future lived experiences they are expecting themselves to have? And yes, she was somewhere on the spectrum too.
But maybe I should've made this clearer -- I'm talking about talking about this with platonic friends, not women I'm trying to actively hit on. Platonic male friends, at least the bunch I have, have no problem whatsoever talking about what they've needed to do to get to where they are as an attractive mate, or about female fertility and how that informs their family planning and mate selection strategies. Not in those specific terms, but definitely about those specific topics.
I think you have to either be talking to a pretty high decoupler or approach this stuff in a sensitive and safe way. One reliable, evidence-backed thing is that women score about 0.5 SD or similar higher on neuroticism (OCEAN trait) than men - meaning the average woman has a bit of a more sensitive trigger for threats. Someone talking about this stuff can both trigger insecurities (bad for higher neuroticism) and also, as mentioned, make you look like someone who generally has a bit of zero-sum mindset.
Also female dating is and has never been grounded in cultivation of resources and positive traits. I find a lot of women get this wrong and are surprised in a kind of female nice-guy-ism, like I read about a female doctor that expected to be a hot commodity but was then surprised most men cared about looks, agreeableness, etc. over her career and that all her hard work didn't make her good prospect. So it might be hard for women to empathise with what this means to be a man (a common trope for men is that non-parental love is always conditional). As a man this stuff sounds like acknowledgment of a tough (shared) reality, as a woman you might sound like someone who sees things as being an eternal competition and who can't care/love unconditionally which looks bad even for a platonic friend.
In my experience the most professionally qualified females either had overbearing bossbitch energy which is kinda self-explanatory, or the other side of the spectrum where I ran into a bunch of women who'd just never really dated until mid-late twenties at all due to focusing on their professional/academic pathway. And you've never seen a slower-moving, awkwarder scrum than dating apps with a woman who treats it as a HR exercise and is disposed to bolt back into the KDrama bunker at the slightest vibe anything is even slightly off. Also generally incapable of giving the right signals to guys due to their lack of experience so their 'flirty withdrawal' attempts just read as 'fuck off and die'.
I'm not even saying this purely out of experience of dating these woman. My now-wife's friends and siblings trend alarmingly in that direction, and I've seen this common social thread from multiple angles now consequentially.
It looks to me like both men and women would benefit from more opportunities to spend time together when they are still in their teens. Maybe the Japanese have the right idea with their all-but-mandatory leniently supervised after-school clubs.
True but to a certain degree a lot of this was family pressure on girls (largely of Asian extraction but not all) who'd had an all-consuming thrust towards academic/professional achievement till mid twenties. Then got hit with the 'where grandkids' from their parents who'd been incredibly antipathic towards any dating in the meantime. My personal filters/location probably meant I ran into more of this type than most people would, but it was pretty striking how many long-term single women there are who kinda fit into this mold. Also there's likely a plethora of men in the same boat, undeniably.
I'm not saying they had to slut it up in college.
A lot of "how to fix your dating" advice for men is basically "you didn't have enough low-stakes interactions with women, here's how to speed-level your game". Socializing in mixed groups without constant adult supervision, but without salacious activities either, should fix it.
This would seem to imply that the era before mixed gender schooling was common produced a lot of socially maladjusted men and women. It doesn't seem to me that the Victorian era had that reputation.
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After a certain age you also get adverse selection (on both sexes). Can concur with the bossbitch thing. Some women try hard to cultivate disagreeability which while maybe adaptive in their careers make her a pretty bad partner (especially if paired with being neurotic, which women are on average more than men). For men this kind of works (though only to a point, I'm not fully aligned with the manosphere people here) but for women it's generally quite off-putting.
Also as a higher earner myself I always felt like having a high earning partner raises expectations rather than providing any security. Some people would call me insecure for thinking this but I've not yet met a woman who contradicts this idea (I'm sure they are out there but most women want to be provided for).
I have heard this anecdotally and from statistics, but I’ve seen cases where it works out.
Like myself! My partner is likely to outearn me over our lifetimes. Neither of us have an issue with that so far, I cook better than she does.
I also know of such an anecdotal story. She did express a wish at some point that he would make more money eventually, so it's not like she didn't feel this at all. But she seems to have made peace with that by the time they got married.
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I honestly think the bossbitch thing is more productive than some of the paralysis-by-analysis cases I saw. The bossbitches were capable of getting laid/manifesting a short-term relationship but tended to go awry in the medium term. The inexperienced ones were perfectly good women but just stuck in this weird quagmire where nothing happens for years on end.
I do agree with your last point where unless you find a woman who's running the trifecta of high earning + spending conscious + loyal as hell you're more likely to end up compelled to a new level of lifestyle creep by adding a second high earner than you are to end up actually getting ahead.
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She’s not entirely wrong.
If she has a good career, savings and possessions while not being exceedingly ugly, unpleasant or old, all this makes her a good marriage prospect within her upper-middle-class social circle (we can assume), because her male peers do prioritize such attributes within the context of modern assortative mating.
But I stress: these attributes make her an attractive wife – not a great girlfriend, situationship partner, fling or sex partner, but wife.
Do they make her a good wife? Doctors often have to move and she might care more about her patients than you. I can see this with other girlboss office jobs though. (Full disclosure: I am a guy dating one. I do love her but the job comes with a lot of negatives for relationships and well, the money angle isn't compelling for me for various reasons. A lot of my GFs female colleagues are single, none of the male ones are).
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I think this is also part of it, men do seem to think they can date around because they have a longer shelf life than women, so they can put off "okay, now I've sown my wild oats, time to settle down" later than women (hence the guys talking about women hitting the wall and they won't even consider marrying someone 30 years old because too old for kids, even if they're in their 30s-40s themselves).
So guys who go "yeah she'd make a good wife but right now I just want a hot girl to bang" won't date her. And if she does lower her standards to date around, then she gets the "ugh, she can't hook an alpha so now she's willing to settle for a beta provider, no thanks" treatment later on.
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They think this because it's what woman want in a man, so they assume the same in reverse. It's a blunt example of how woman and men think differently in various areas.
That is likely the ultimate explanation, but also, it's not individual women individually making this particular error. I'd wager that many (possibly most?) women are easily intelligent and thoughtful enough to figure out how wrongheaded such thinking is, but for the environment in which they were raised. Which is the same environment in which boys are raised, of course, which is basically exclusively filled with messaging about how any man who ever judges a woman by her looks and not only by her accomplishments is a subhuman misogynist, to such an extent that even a significant proportion of boys, despite their innate biology, have managed to live it. Girls, seeing this, reasonably believe that they're growing up into women representing the vanguard that destroys the Old World Order where women were judged by their looks more than their accomplishments. And thus they suffer.
The same thing happens with boys, too, believing that qualities like being aggressive, toxically masculine, accomplished, or rich will not be as important a factor as how kind or emotionally available or Good Person they are. And thus they suffer.
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That's the big part there. You didn't start off with "Hello, we just met, now I want to discuss how you can maximise your SMV by making yourself more attractive and do you have a record of your menstrual cycles so I can be assured of your peak fertility for child bearing? Also kindly remember that each year that passes, I am going to mark you down like a depreciated asset in a ledger. Wait, where are you going? sigh Women, so unreasonable!"
Well yeah, did I imply that this is a topic I talk to random strangers about?
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I found a lot of my really meta dating-app conversations tended to be of the sort where I'd get halfway through a first date, realize I had no real interest in ever seeing the woman ever again and then just start asking questions. Also a few cases where the woman was a massive oversharer of their dating-app escapades which killed anything I had for them, but I was happy to talk about the game as a player at the time.
On that note, I'd say look maximizing generally pretty overrated for women so long as they're not obese. Even fours could get pretty solid dates so long as they could see their feet, and most of the chatter I got was more of the 'Girl dithering/trying to reach for the absolute hottest guy instead of dating just a notch or two up and probably finding a solid consistent boyfriend'. Hell, in my year or so of concerted dating app effort I went from a 35 BMI to like a 22, dressed/presented better and got better at dating as a whole which meant I feel like I saw life as a male 2/10 all the way to a 7/10 which was pretty illuminating.
Wow. Care to elaborate on the differences in life at the different tiers?
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Your platonic male friends are likely similar to you in worldview and personality. I think the average person, male or female, would find anyone saying things like “mate selection strategy” off putting. I don’t know what words you use when talking about these subjects to women, but even if you’re being careful, you’re probably giving off an overly analytical, clinical, impersonal vibe that most people don’t like to see applied to human relationships.
Haha like I said, "not in those specific terms," but
That right there is a discussion about "mate selection strategy," mate ;)
But that's fair. And so the autist in me asks, why? What is wrong with applying abstract reasoning to human relationships?
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In my experience women are quite willing to discuss such topics, especially reproduction-related.
(I don't live in the USA though, might be cultural difference.)
More specifically: (3) is just an absolutely normal topic for discussing, just be more tactful -- age doesn't have mercy on anyone; (2) SMV and "marked" are too subjective. Even on the most primitive level, some people like blonds, some like black hair. People are repelled by claiming that attraction is universal, it's not.; (1) women LOVE discussing looks, like giving advice and disparaging people with suboptimal looks. They even like receiving advice on looks, but with a caveat, it's better too avoid saying bluntly "do like that beauty does", women become jealous (and rightfully), so be more tactful.
Overall, really, try to pay less attention to females' look, looks gonna wane, but personal qualities won't.
I would disagree specifically with the characterization of #2. You can still speak of a "used car market" even if used cars come in all sorts of varieties. No two used cars are the same, and the same scratch on a car will be okay for one person and not okay for another. Doesn't mean used car buyers or sellers are any less immune from the inherent implications of scarcity.
How would men appreciate it if women started discussing frankly "Look, you'll be 35 in two years. That's way too old if I'm thinking of having kids with good prospects. You better set your sights lower, some 40+ woman done with childbearing will probably take you if you smarten up, get rid of those awful clothes, and hit the gym" 😂
Gentlemen! You want to maximise your SMV for long-term commitment? Go out there between age 20-24 and sell yourself as eager to be a dad before your genetic stock plummets! 🤣
If it were true (which it is generally not), it would be rather refreshing to men who are constantly having to try to figure out the truth behind the lies they get all the time. Having two things he knows are significant and he can do something about (awful clothes and out of shape) would probably leave him overjoyed.
But he can't turn back the clock, and being told (as a man) that your best years are behind you once you hit 30 would probably be hurtful as well. 'You're too old now, you're 29 and never got married, all you can hope for is that some cougar will take pity on you and make you her toy-boy' - well that's just a straight-talking assessment of your SMV, not a rejection of you as a whole person?
Yes, but he's a man -- that part isn't actually true.
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Of course women have no problem rubbing it in men's face that they peak earlier and thus get to spend their youth in the privileged position over men. Then they get conceited and believe that privilege is the natural order and are thus horrified by men's later peak suddenly reversing that and exposing them to the exact same treatment they dished out when they were younger.
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I'd say it's a rejection of your life goals for sure, if you happen to be a 29-yr-old single man who is specifically planning to find a wife and form a family (so presumably a religious or at least traditionalist man). Other than that, I imagine a lot of 29-yr-old single men would at least be OK with becoming toy boys.
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Depends if the women in question are reading Aria Shrecker? (They should be, she's great)
My view is that (1) don't cohabit - free milk and the cow rule (2) if he's not willing to entertain the idea of marriage after a couple of years, move on. If women are on the biological clock, beauty and fertility have a shelf life, and you do want marriage and children, don't waste time on a guy who is not ready to settle down but thinks he has until he's forty to decide if he does want a missus.
I think if women were a lot pickier than they are, there would be more marriage and children. That might be tough on the guys who think "hey, I'm only thirty, I'm in my prime, I want to play the field and not get tied down, men are naturally promiscuous that's just evo-psych" but they can't have that and complain that women are promiscuous and flighty if they're sleeping with men and not marrying them. If you want that traditional wife (or husband), you have to abide by traditional rules.
It's a coordination problem. While an individual woman can decide that she wants to e.g. get married before having sex, the guy she wants probably won't be willing to go with that, and so will find another girlfriend. If she's super hot she might be able to drive a harder bargain, but it would still probably entail going for a less eligible guy than she would otherwise be able to get (in which case 'pickiness' would work against her goals).
That's why (relative) sexual conservatism really only works within religious subcultures. In those groups, everyone is on the same page about what is expected.
Aria has a planned post called 'Dump early, dump often' which I expect would be her way around this conundrum.
Then the current dating market is not women's fault, it's men's fault for demanding sex without commitment, punishing women who would commit, and picking women who won't commit. If you set up conditions like that, why then be surprised you get women who chase after the chad who won't commit because at least he's hot? Ugly Aethelred wants sex but not marriage (yet), Handsome Leofric wants sex but not marriage (yet), so why shouldn't Eadgifu pick Leofric because at least he's better SMV?
That description assumes that all men are equally commitment-phobic, which is obviously not true. The men with more options are less likely to commit, holding the attractiveness of the woman constant. Previously norms and a lack of optionality restricted men and women in such a way that they were incentivised to couple up young or be left behind. Now that those restrictions are gone, we see women who are pathologically picky and men who want to sow their wild oats and that's why everyone hates the apps.
Of course, blaming 'men' or 'women' collectively is futile. Nobody had a meeting and decided this stuff. It's an emergent property of various technologies (the pill, smartphones) and various trends (urbanisation, liberalism, secularisation) interacting and acting on individuals who follow incentives and norms that they themselves didn't set.
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In 2023, approximately 9.8% of infants in the United States were admitted to a NICU. Let's assume I have the average risk profile (I don't), then a 14% increase brings that up to 11.2%. In other words, from my perspective it's an imperceptible increase in risk for me to have kids after 45. In contrast, an average woman at 35 is already at about 2/3 her peak fertility, and by 40 is below 10%. Apples and oranges my friend.
The preferred terminology is "whisky and milk"
Although "apples and oranges" actually works - apples are climacteric and so can continue to ripen after picking, whereas oranges and other citrus fruits are not and need to be picked fully ripe and eaten quickly. But this is not obvious because (unlike, say, bananas) intentionally ripening apples in your fruit bowl is not a big part of how you eat them.
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I honestly think the modern problems with late fertility have a lot to do with being on artificial birth control for years. You tell your body, from around age 16, "no babies!" and every month it asks "baby?" and every month you say "no!" and that goes on for ten or fifteen years.
Then around early 30s, you go "now baby!" but your body is "aha, no fool me, no baby!"
Because Irish women of previous generations were having kids up to their 40s no bother, where do you think the large families of yore came from?
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"Would?"
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Well, except for "some 40+ woman done with childbearing will probably take you", men do in fact listen to and take all that other advice you mention!
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"Women age like milk, men age like wine" means that eventually you get cheese and vinegar.
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Oh, yeah, of course. there are many traits that are universally disliked, like having debts.
but the market is very diverse, far from being a "commodity market"
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'Giving bad advice on purpose and disparaging men with suboptimal looks' is a more accurate overall description.
again, not in my experience, at all. possibly because of cultural difference? generally where I live women care very little about men's looks. a big Maitreya style belly is considered rather cute.
but of course women are ready to give bad advice to other women
That's generally the case everywhere, so it's not surprising. (It's also true however that men's looks rise in priority if their provider ability loses priority due to rising female economic independence.) My point is that disparaging men's looks is largely considered socially acceptable but doing the same to women is not, except for extreme cases (like when an otherwise ugly woman is revealed to be a thought criminal or heretic, racist etc).
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I can assure you that a large number of men say the same, even intelligent and reasonable ones.
As a personal example: while I was still in India, I was seriously contemplating minor plastic surgery. I wasn't depressed, I wasn't in a rush; I'd deferred it over a year because my parents had thrown a fit, and they wanted me to try and lose weight and get fitter the old fashioned way (which I did). I'd seen a surgeon. I had a tentative date.
I broached the topic to my closest friend group back home. All men. Handsome men. Smart men. Good with the ladies, even if some of them are clearly in a different league. When I'm with them, I'm acutely aware that I'm not the most handsome man in the group, not even the tallest (there's a real big mf in there). I insist that this is not cause for malignant envy or jealousy, I love those guys. They've been nothing but good to me, and vice versa. They've often told me that they're slightly jealous of me, because of the things I'm good at, or just happen to have a natural talent in. Some of us are taller, some of us are richer, some of us are less depressed. But we're all smart, funny motherfuckers, if I say so myself.
Yet, when I broached the topic, and told them that I'd made up my mind to go ahead? They were surprised, somewhat dismayed, and begged me to reconsider. I was ready for this. I had pre-empted their concerns. I told them:
Their initial reaction was not subtle male intrasexual competition. Nor was their followup response:
They told me I should go to the gym, that I should diet better and get new clothes and groom myself well. I pointed out, quite accurately, that those were not mutually exclusive options, and that I was actually pursuing all of them. This isn't a group of hotter girls telling their slightly chubby friend that the no-makeup "natural" look suits her, or jealous hoes telling their hotter friend that a bob-cut would be a great idea. We don't do this. We are sane, well-adjusted men. We try to lift each other up, instead of pulling each other down like pubic crabs might do to your dating potential.
Their reaction wasn't a lie, not even a subconscious attempt to keep me down. Unlike the feminine example above, going to the gym and getting a good haircut is still good advice. It just ignores the other options on the table.
At this point, they were slightly tongue-tied. They were too honest to tell me that looks didn't matter. They were too honest to tell me that I was misrepresenting myself. They just genuinely wanted what was best for me, and were worried that I was jumping the gun. They sighed, and we moved on. I am happy with that outcome, though I was much less happy about being called back to work on minimal notice, which meant I had to defer the procedure into the indefinite future.
My point is that these are good men, intelligent and introspective men. They know how to read the room. Yet, they are often blind to their own blessings, and quick to discount them. I don't blame them, some of that impulse comes from genuine kindness, from an urge to not let people they care about feel even worse about themselves than they already do.
I try to be kind too, but I am much less willing to trade it off for honesty. This extends to self-assessment and critique: I am painfully honest about my own strengths or weaknesses. I never tell someone complaining about being short that height doesn't matter. I don't tell people who worry that they're not smart enough that intelligence doesn't matter, that it's all hard work. I don't tell my buddies who ask me how I make people laugh so easily that it's a skill that's trivial to pick up, or that much of it isn't innate. I think this makes me a good ethnographer, and I'm self-aware enough to know that some reading this might consider this puffery and self-aggrandizement. Fuck you. I know better, I hedge no more than I need to.
I read papers. I review the old OkCupid blogs. I have a good idea of what works. I am also aware of my own neuroses, that this impulse arises because I grew up with a far more handsome younger brother and best friend (he's part of this friend group). I used to feel much worse about my looks, I would seethe with jealousy. That pot boiled over, I'm mostly at peace with myself. It's incredibly ironic that my brother came out as gay, which makes his appeal to the ladies largely moot. This doesn't change the factual situation, my observations on the difference that 95th+ percentile attractiveness made were very real. The emotional valence might have blunted with time and growing into my own skin, but the truth doesn't change because of it.
I've known plenty of intelligent men who think "SMV" is a tainted, sexist concept. I acknowledge that this is more likely to be a view held by women, but I am sensible enough not to go around talking about SMV with most women, not even most men.
I have found that the majority of women in my sociocultural milieu are reasonably aware of this, in India or otherwise. Then again, they're disproportionately doctors, and you'd expect them to know better. This is probably the biggest delta between sexes, but mostly because men genuinely do age better and hold their attractiveness longer on average. I'm probably more attractive as a partner now than I'd have been 5 years back, and it's going to be a while till I'll truly peak. And that peak? It leads to a plateau and gentle decline.
Finally, it's important to disentangle socially approved canned lines from revealed preferences. Women are much more likely to obsess over makeup, hair dyes, cosmetic procedures. At a deep level, people tend to understand much more strongly than they let on, be it in public or to themselves. I understand the discomfort, I just power through it.
My point, assuming there is a point, is that I think it's unfair to single out women as being unique here. This topic is incredibly uncomfortable for most people. It's socially taboo.
I wish it wasn't, which is why I'm talking about it. The taboo prevents actions that genuinely help, even if, to a degree, this is a Red Queen Race. Teaching everyone to run the same percentage faster doesn't change who wins the race, you just burn more calories on the way. On the other hand, being sensible about your dating prospects or reproductive potential does bring non-rivalrous benefits to yourself and others.
Oh well. If my willingness to be clear-eyed about these things gives me alpha, then I'm not that fussed about other people being idiots, even if my innate honesty and inability to sit by when people are being wrong (on the internet or IRL) often makes me speak up. That's what I'm doing right now.
If a friend came to me and said "I want surgery to change X part about me" my concern would not be based in this notion that looks don't matter, or that one is necessarily wrong to have issues with self-esteem, or that I am somehow blind to my own charms and blessings.
My concern would be that for someone who gets up in the morning and doesn't like who they see in the mirror, that surgery will not fix what ails them.
Are you being honest with yourself that you could just get one surgery, and then you would be happy? That it would remedy what gnaws at you?
I may be somewhat biased as I have seen a relatively large number of people who obviously could not stop at just one. Maybe I have been blessed with whatever set of nature/nurture impulses to have arrived at the point where I wake up and like who peers back at me in the bathroom. I am perhaps lucky to fit into the right social/demographic niche such that I am not bombarded with messages telling me I must find myself inferior to my better peers all day. Yet I cannot convince myself that I am wrong to have this base skepticism that (outside certain specific instances) surgically altering oneself will lead to greater happiness.
That is a valid concern, and one that I would have if a friend of mine told me something similar.
But I am careful not to let it become a fully general counterargument. Surgery for cosmetic purposes is not as qualitatively different from working out or getting a nice haircut as it seems (and the latter does involve cutting off parts of yourself). You can break your back at the gym. A bad diet can give you brittle bones. Once you have broken it down into risk versus benefit, then there is little else to add that isn't moralizing.
Even more important is that self-image and self-regard are not the only pertinent metrics. If I end up depressed again, I'd rather be fit and depressed. If I'm suicidal, I'd rather be hot and getting laid while feeling suicidal. As I've insisted, I am neither depressed or suicidal right now (and you better believe I'm grateful for that).
Similarly, being taller has benefits even if you don't appreciate them. Being rich improves your life, even if the hedonic treadmill mostly beats compound interest as the most powerful force in the current universe. I'd rather cry in a limo than on a bus, and I've cried on a bus.
I believe so. I think I'm unusually good at introspection and understanding what makes me tick. Am I 100% confident of that? I'd be a poor Bayesian if I was that blase about things. I do not claim to be perfect, but I am confident enough that I don't worry about it. I've done that worrying in the past, and it wasn't particularly productive.
If the surgery goes well, I might opt for more. I am unlikely to, unless it ends up botched and I urgently need revision. As you can see, I have waited a long time, and haven't rushed into things. That counts for a lot.
I am also aware that the surgery is not a panacea for all that ails me. I have reasonable expectations. I am pursuing all available avenues for self-improvement, while the relief from severe depression gives me the will and energy to do so.
At the end of the day, this is a personal decision. I am most accountable to myself, and I've stamped that decision only after a lot of internal debate. I discussed my intentions with friends and family well before I decided to bite the bullet. I've even written about it here. I'm not sitting and crying while looking at myself in the mirror, God knows I've never felt that awful about my looks. I just want to be more handsome than I already am, and can afford the surgery while being willing to accept the risks.
I would disagree that there is little qualitative difference; I'm not inclined to psycho-analyze otherwise I might wonder at the glibness of comparing surgery to a haircut. But I would also disagree that moralizing is unimportant, or is irrational, or actively harmful.
This rationale will persist after your first surgery. You could still be depressed and incrementally hotter, should you get just one more. Think how many more chicks you'll score with that extra edge. Who knows how your life will be transformed tipping yourself from the 84th to the 85th percentile in looks?
What would you say is the important benefit of moralizing?
Because I think there are moral truths; whether you see them as absolute or society-contextual doesn't matter overmuch. And sometimes people need to be reminded of them. It may be rational in some situation to do X and there is no argument against it except that it is wrong.
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You say that, but the time my dad, a very qualified surgeon, tried to give me a haircut? He cut off a good chunk of my earlobe. Good thing that he's a great surgeon, he managed to get it back on without too much scarring. I'd rather not trust him with future plastic surgery.
If you're inclined to moralize more than I am, be my guest. It's a free country, or at least a free forum.
I am a reasonably rational agent, even when depressed. I am pretty good at making expected value calculations, so if I do get the surgery (which is far from certain, even if I intend to), I think I can make those decisions as I go. My plastic surgeon, on finding out I was a psych resident, tried to pimp me by asking me if I was confident that I didn't have body dysmorphic disorder ( @Throwaway05 might find this funny). And I was able to argue, with the facts on my side, that that's not the case. He wasn't being serious, but I had a serious answer. I stand by it. You can do a lot of things if you're not an idiot about it, and I've been accused of many things in my life, but rarely have I been called stupid.
In other words, if I genuinely think a slope is slippery and leads to bad places, I'm going to go take a hike to somewhere safer. For now, I think my shoes have got the grip
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I had a plastic surgeon come up in one of the podcasts I listen to. I remember him saying that there was a category of people, I don't remember the whole set of criteria, but I remember that it was young-ish men, that he simply would refuse to operate on, specifically for this reason. He had too many experiences of people in that category (again, I don't remember all of the qualifiers) exhibit this exact phenomenon, and they'd keep coming back for something else, then something else, then something else, and it just wasn't healthy for them.
I would have thought that it would be women who are more likely to have this problem, which is why it stuck out in my memory that he called out men.
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I feel it is a matter of pride. People are supposed to be proud of how they look, even if they acknowledge that they don't look the best they should still feel some attachment to their face.
Going through a plastic surgery is "humiliating", it shows an willingness to sacrifice parts of yourself for validation from others.
"What kind of man is so desperate for love that he lengthens his leg and does plastic surgery with it's risks just so he would be loved."
This is why people don't mind plastic surgery for those who have been disfigured through accidents, it's not dishonorable for them.
A very very extreme example, similar to this would be like kissing a penis to become beautiful.
Maybe such things exist in human society to prevent a red queen race or to prevent enslavement from stronger people.
Broadly speaking, doing things which can cause race to bottom are supposed to feel humiliating.
This is the origin of terms like, "simp" and "pick me" people do not want race to bottom and would make fun of people who seem to engage in it.
I am just explaining the reasons for what I precieve are people's natural instincts, this is not an endorsement of those instincts.
I think that is remarkably unlikely. You don't see a concerned propaganda effort to stop men going to the gym, which is, at least in part, a Red Queen's Race too. Sure, more muscle mass is good for your health, all else being equal, but if you're a gym-freak, you're comparing yourself to other gym-freaks. I concede that there's a point if we consider people using dangerously high doses of anabolic steroids or other PEDs, but then again, the people who do them to that degree are actively making themselves uglier. Women don't demand six packs, and they mostly tend to shy away from roided out monstrosities. Decreasing marginal returns kick in surprisingly quick, and you can end up with outright negative returns, all while reducing your lifespan.
I am glad you clarified this, because the instincts you mentioned make me want to bash my head against a wall. Mostly from a transhumanist perspective, I take that seriously.
Just to clarify it's complete arm chair philosophising I don't have anything to cite.
It's not fully rational, i think the origin of this feeling from an evolutionary sense was to prevent a race to the bottom but evolution is very dumb and doesn't intellectually understand what a red queen race is. So people get a vague sense of intuition about what things are and are not race to bottom and hence dishonorable.
As a society trading time for health and looks is accepted. Trading slight chance of bad health for looks is not accepted.
Using steroids so they harm your health is also not accepted.
Doing things in general just for signalling is disliked everywhere. Such as reading books just to get girls.
Trading time in general for things is very accepted.
Plastic surgery falls in both signalling and a race to the bottom.
Edit: Actually fashion gets a pass so race to the bottom is the better hypothesis. Plastic surgery doesn't count as signalling.
I don't have any advice about these things one way or other, though if someone came to me and asked me about plastic surgery, i would recommend them not to do it because I have a bias for recommending against something when I am not sure.
Still in truth I am completely neutral to the issue and have no opinion.
Now if it was something which could extend your biological life, you can bet I would fully support it. I am very much in transhumanist camp for living forever, even if you live as a brain in a jar. Don't believe in substrate independence so don't support living in a computer.
Hmm. I think you're still underestimating how dumb evolution is. It is remarkably bad at preventing Red Queen races. In fact, I'd be so bold to say that most of what evolution had done is a Red Queen race. The textbook examples come from biology!
Peacocks and their inconvenient, oversized, flamboyant tails. Immune systems and the pathogens that try to get around them. Predators getting faster to catch their prey, and the prey getting quicker so as to not get eaten.
I don't see it being applicable to humans. At best, you can make a case for cultural evolution, which operates on much tighter timescales. The problem with that approach is that I can still point to countries like South Korea or China, where plastic surgery is far more common, almost expected even. The latter country has 1.3 billion people, so if this is a popularity contest, it's the West that's being weird about things.
Fair enough. If someone else wants to live forever too, I'm content to live and let live. I hope you find a comfy jar.
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Being physically fit has value beyond just being higher on the relative scale of attractiveness. Facial shape doesn't appear to have it.
Ahem:
Anyway, the point isn't whether a given procedure or intervention brings only relative or absolute good to the person or wider society, it's that there's selective ignorance and cultural blindspots around some parts of it, including advice that would improve things in a non-rivalrous manner. Especially fertility oriented topics.
I could muster a defense of plastic surgery from the perspective of wider society, but my heart isn't in it, and I'm busy frantically working on a competitive submission. As a terrible existence proof: I'm sure the old grannies I meet while they're delirious would love to meet a handsome young psychiatrist. Right now, if they go that far, I have to question their reality orientation against my better judgement.
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In the (UK establishment lib) circles I move in, I see a mild concerted attempt to ensure that gymbro culture does not rise in status. As several fitness commentators have pointed out, there is a default message that you don't always see in a fish-in-water kind of way in "blue" culture (including the British traditional elite - even the parts of it that are not left-wing) that endurance events are higher-status than strength, although I don't know if it is the result of a concerned propaganda effort or if it is spontaneous and bottom-up.
To put it more bluntly, I actually believe that lifting heavy is for niggaz of all races, but I have no idea how I came to this opinion and I have no rational basis for holding it.
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I think plastic surgery is really just for the hideous and malformed, or those suffering from accidents and the procedure is a return to baseline. If your personality and swagger can't overcome minor imperfections then I doubt any procedure will improve your outcomes. As if anyone you want to marry won't see photos of you from more than three years ago. The point of attractiveness is signal your awesome genes. You getting getting plastic surgery is admitting you seriously doubt you have awesome genes. Why would anyone who understands genetics choose to reproduce with someone who thinks their genes are trash? Isn't there a Chinese movie where both the parents have cosmetic plastic surgery and have really ugly kids?
What you think doesn't really match with what many people believe though. Over half of South Korean women in their twenties have had plastic surgery. I don't think it worsened their chances through signalling what they thought of their own genes.
(Although... The country's future is already irrevocably doomed due to how few children these women have, so plastic surgery doesn't seem to help with passing on these genes)
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Well, the South Korean reproductive rate would appear to validate your thesis.
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It would be very funny for me to turn around and complain that I am hideous and malformed, but I'm not that committed to the bit.
Look dude, to be honest, your disapproval doesn't matter to me. That is not meant as an insult, it's a fact. I'm not asking anyone else to get plastic surgery, if you don't like it, don't get it done.
I have a pretty solid personality, even if I wish I was more extroverted. I am not just my genes, and you're talking to a man who is perfectly happy to make minor changes to the genome of his children if the gene engineering tools are available. I don't want them to have myopia or ADHD, and if there's 200 SNPs that predispose me to have the facial features I do, I won't miss them. My brother, after all, shares most of the same genes, and he's far more handsome. Shame that he's gay and that I have to hold up the bloodline for now.
Gene engineering makes this moot, or will make it moot. Most of my genes aren't trash. Most of me isn't trash. You don't see someone taking out a garbage bag and declare that this proves the house should be condemned. Plus, if you have uggo kids, well, the world has room for ugly people. They can get plastic surgery too.
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Ozympic?
I have only been on oral semaglutide for maybe 4 months in the past 1 year, counting from when I started it after antidepressant related weight gain. I stopped mostly because I started going to the gym somewhat seriously, and I wanted to make bigger muscles more strongly than I wanted to lose weight. I've got 6 months supply staring at me, but my weight is at a reasonable level, even if not ideal.
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Can confirm. The lone married friend amoung my group has tried to give me dating advice in the past, not realizing that the things that worked for him certainly aren't going to work for me. Or even offered to play wingman, not realizing that he'd be a horrible wingman.
It basically boils down to typical-minded fallacy. Alot of people - everyone, really - don't initially grasp that other people don't think/work/experience things like they do. It's not nessecarily a bad thing, or coming from a bad place, but it's something to keep in mind.
Yeah my best friend got together with his girlfriend in high school from her essentially initiating the relationship and has essentially never had to try and date anybody. I love the guy, but she was a serious late bloomer and I don't think he'd be able to get into a relationship with her today if they hadn't met at 15 and were meeting for the first time in their late twenties. I'm now married, but in my single period any sort of commentary from him was useless at best since he frankly had no relevant experience.
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Men talking about dating in a strategic manner or discussing it as a market-based supply/demand-driven matching process ruins women’s Disneyian notion of courtship and romance as a FUN, magical process that Just Happens. Courtship and romance are things that Just Happen to women like acts of God while they passively exist, so there’s no feedback cycle to disabuse them of such a notion aside from the possible exception of men talking about it.
On top of the fun and magic aspect, women are quite sensitive about 1) signaling and protecting their own personal Wonderfulness and 2) signaling and protecting the Wonderfulness of women as a whole. Men discussing dating in a practical manner may say things that are perceived to be unflattering to women’s Wonderfulness.
Kind of like how, in talking with a four-year-old about how presents get under the Christmas tree, explaining supply chain logistics and household finances takes the fun and magic out of it. The child will actually feel better about and be more satisfied with some platitudes involving elves, Santa Claus, reindeer, and chimneys. At least children aren’t as sensitive about their personal wonderfulness or the wonderfulness of children as a whole, so such discussions are easier to navigate.
Men discussing and/or practicing looksmaxxing is toxic, problematic, and misogynistic as it implies that women are shallow and primarily value appearance. In contrast, if women spend a lot of their effort and energy on makeup and clothing it’s because they’re victims of a misogynistic culture that Socializes them into thinking they’re only valued for their appearance.
Additionally, women want naturals, not someone who looksmaxxed their way to trick some poor woman into dating an imposter. See, for example, how much the thought of men getting limb-lengthening surgery (or even just wearing lifts) triggers ick and seethe in women. Or the thought of men strategically exploiting social media to inspire female mate-choice copying (which totally doesn’t exist by the way, since everyone knows women are strong and independent thinkers and could never fall for such a thing).
Relatedly, women hate the thought of men grinding approaches to gain EXP, or grinding approaches/shotgunning messages to play the numbers game. Surely each woman is infinitely unique in her Wonderfulness and women cannot be treated like hack-and-slashing monsters for item drops in a video game.
Many women get butthurt that a large part of women’s bargaining power with men for long-term relationships and marriage is the prospect of children. Women are clearly so Wonderful that men should want a lifelong commitment with them even without such a prospect. He’s TA if he wants biochildren when he can just adopt or enjoy the privilege of being with her without children in the picture (ugh, stupid men and mUh lEgAcY). Women also don’t like reminders that having their FUN and FREEDOM when they’re young before settling down after they’ve Had Their Fun can have opportunity costs—or that their desirability in general goes down with age, such as illustrated by the infamous OKCupid graph or the Bruch-Newman paper.
This is very true, and it’s not even primarily because of the genetics. It’s because men who get hot later in life are to the man bitter about it. They mourn the imagined youth (including plenty of casual relationships in high school and at college) they missed - in the end, even if they find a pretty wife who they like, they are more likely to cheat, and they will always be bitter they didn’t date around and enjoy attention from women in their youth. There are women who get hot in their late twenties or early thirties who are similar, but it’s less universal - they are more likely to just be happy they ‘made it’.
If you are going to marry an attractive man it’s always best to find someone who had a girlfriend (or several) in high school, because he does not have the same regrets as the late bloomer. Sure, there are lifelong lotharios who will never be faithful, too, but you can weed those out in other ways.
Do you have evidence to back this up or are you mainly going by your general observations and common sense? I'm not necessarily saying you are wrong, but here's what my general observations and common sense say:
Based on your description, one could divide men into 4 categories: (1) the high school loser who gets hot later in life; (2) the high school loser who remains undesirable; (3) the high school hottie who fades in desirability (we all know people like this); and (4) the high school hottie who remains desirable.
In my view, guys in groups (2) and (3) who marry are less likely to sleep around on their wives. Because I think that to a large extent men cheating on their wives is a crime of opportunity. If a guy is attractive, and women start throwing themselves at him, there's a good chance he will give in to temptation even if he's already in a relationship. It seems that in your view, guys in group (4) are less likely to stray than guys in group (1), but I'm skeptical. Because as I mentioned, male infidelity is -- to a large extent -- a crime of opportunity.
Simply put, my general observations and common sense tell me that when a guy who gets hot later in life cheats, it's mainly because he got hot later and life and not because of his past.
But if you have evidence or argument that guys in group (4) tend to be more faithful, I'd be interested to hear it.
I don’t know that men in group 4 tend to be more faithful. Rather men in group 4 tend to know what they want and the kind of man who has been a lothario since he was 15 is usually relatively easy identified. Women who marry men in group 4, Hillary Clinton types, usually know what they’re getting into. The same isn’t necessarily true if you marry a group 1.
Well, I think that's what you kind of implied before:
Edit: And by the way, I'm not necessarily saying you are wrong, just that I would be interested to hear the evidence/argument for this idea.
I've actually heard this kind of argument from before, but from the reverse perspective. i.e. "Don't marry a slut because she's developed an appetite for D so she'll cheat on you" versus "Don't marry a virgin because she'll feel like she missed out and so she'll cheat on you." You can certainly argue it either way.
I think the general rule is that once you have crossed a line it's psychologically easier to cross it again. So I am tempted to say that if the choice is between (1) guy who is recently hot; and (2) guy who was hot all along, you are better off with the first option in terms of fidelity. But I think that at the end of the day, it doesn't really matter, because the male urge for variety in sexual partners is just very strong. So that a very large percentage of married men who are desirable enough to have women pursuing them are going to stray.
Fair, I could have been clearer. I mean they are more likely to cheat if they are in a supposedly monogamous relationship. This is because the lifelong lotharios tend to be relatively obvious. They have reputations. They mostly know what they like. If they settle down, it is either with an earnest effort at monogamy after a long period of promiscuity, or it is with a woman who (on some level) knows what is going to happen. The man who becomes attractive later in life might settle down with the first pretty girl who looks at him twice, and only thereafter decide he wants to play the field, which is a failure mode the lifelong lotharios who settle down in their thirties or forties experience less often.
Well I think this basically boils down to "if you marry a man who is highly desirable, there's a pretty good chance he will cheat -- even if he doesn't have a promiscuous past." Which is probably true, but it's not the guy's past which is causing him to cheat or not, it's his current desirability.
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Yeah, it sounds to me like the things some of my rural relatives say, that we should vote for politicians who have already been in power for years "because they've already stolen enough", while the new guys are not rich yet, so they will start stealing more. There is no such thing as having stolen enough and stopping. As the saying goes "the appetite comes with eating". In relationships, I just don't see any guy saying "I had a lot of awesome sex 5 years ago, therefore I don't desire it now".
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While I suppose the hypothesis is possible, it's speculatory and merely a just-so story. Similarly, in recent years online women have tried to hamster wheel that the female preference for male height is only due to short men being bitter, that taller men have better personalities. It sounds like something I would have joked about quite a few years ago, but has increasingly gone mainstream. Life imitating art.
No cheating aspect when it comes to short vs. tall men, though, as to why tall men are preferable. Even in women's self-serving narratives to protect their Wonderfulness, short men having options is outside of their Overton windows.
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It makes sense when you think of the genetics. The guy who used surgery and lifts to look tall will still have short-person genes, which will hurt her legacy in the long term (or at least, be associated with things that hurt her legacy). The tall genes last forever. Same reason men would prefer a woman who's naturally beautiful over a woman who uses tons of makeup and cosmetic surgery to "fix" her looks.
I've noticed this cliche and also the mirror cliche in both sexes where men/women will tend to praise other men/women for looking good in ways that are the results of effort, not genetics. E.g. men will praise other men for successfully bulking up at the gym, whereas women will praise men for having a "great personality," and women will praise other women for doing such a bang-up job with their make-up, while men will praise women for having big, natural tits. I think there's a heavy influence of selfish interest in both sexes here, where if you can bootstrap your way into convincing the other sex (or at least bullying them at least long enough for you to escape the game) that [effort-based] rather than [genes-based] (everything is based on both, of course, and this is a matter of degree) things are greater contributors to one's attractiveness, then you individually have more control over your own destiny.
This is just politeness. It's rude to rub it in that you just have some fundamental flaws that cannot be improved. So people focus on the things you can change. Also praising makes sense in relation to stuff you did. You expended effort and achieved a positive result, that's laudable. You deserve no cookies for how your face looks or similar. "Anyone can achieve anything" is the western (or rather just American) myth. Nurture over nature, growth mindset etc. It sounds warm and cozy, a just world, up in the fluffy clouds. Talking about the dirty reality down here is just ugly and a vibe killer. Other cultures are much more matter-of-fact about these realities.
No one's talking about rubbing anything in here. The conversation is about praising others.
Why not? Someone having a prettier face due to luck of genetics makes things more pleasant for others around them, almost by definition. If such people receive praise that they value, that provides incentive for such people to show their faces more often than those who aren't genetically lucky, which makes the lives of those around them, including my own, better.
But even before we get into the logic of incentives, by default I'm going to praise people based on how I appraise them. Proving you can accomplish things with effort is one way of raising my appraisal of you, but also proving that you are genetically gifted in a way that makes my life more pleasant is another way. This is why, again, women praise men for things like being tall and assertive and men praise women for things like having big, natural tits. They don't care about how much effort these people put into accomplishing these things, they just care about the effect they have on themselves.
People praise each other for succeeding at hard stuff. Men also praise men for building a cool shed or doing cool skateboard tricks or whatever else.
Among each other or to the man? Towards him, it's a signal he should keep up the way he is treating her, not to get too lazy comfortable, thinking that his physical appearance will carry him all the way.
It's effort and taste, again. Praise is feedback to keep up up the good work. Positive reinforcement. There's not much to reinforce about how good you are at being tall again today.
In their face? Not the best strategy unless you're already having sex. Or among the boys? Don't women also fawn about a guy in non-personality ways when among trusted female friends?
I'm not sure what the point of your comment here is, because all your points seem entirely orthogonal to the phenomenon I talked about. So I'll just directly answer the direct questions that were in your comment.
It's probably not the best strategy, but it's absolutely a very common one, and for good reason. Men complimenting women for their great figure or other genetically-determined aspects of their physical appearance, such as their "big beautiful eyes" as part of flirting is pretty much cliche.
AND among the boys, not OR, though in all-male settings, they'll often feel more free to use crude language, such as using the phrase "tits."
I'm not a woman, so I lack any meaningful insight into this, but I'd guess that this is probably the case.
It's a big faux-pas to comment on women's tits in a mixed environment, creepy drunk uncle territory, it's like construction guys catcalling and whistling-territory. Eyes work because eyes are emotionally expressive, it's the window to the soul. You can similarly compliment her smile, but not her thick lush lips, unless you're already having sex or petting.
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This is just as common from the female side of the dating market. If you go places where women talk about dating the guy who dates too long without proposing who won't commit to marriage or kids and wasting her fertility and leaving her with little time to find a husband. I really don't think there's significantly more young men then women who want to marry youngish and have kids. In fact I'd guess that surveys would show that more young men would like to sow their oats compared to young women as in general young men prefer casual sex much more than young women. Regardless given in todays dating market many people don't want marriage or kids these are important compatibility issues that need to be figured out early. Also serious people are much easier to find off the apps. Regardless though this is a caricatured, women overall like children, it's not hard to find women who want commitment and kids.
Steven Shaw has a really good metaphor to explain why a late average marriage age reduces marriage (and therefore fertility) so much. He calls it the Vitality Curve.
Imagine a dancehall that has a dance on Friday night that all the town's young people go to. The dance starts at 8 and ends at 10, so everyone turns up on time, couple up and dance for a few hours, then they go home together as couples.
Now imagine the owner extends the times from 6 to midnight. Now, there are the same number of young people, but some will arrive earlier and some will arrive later. The potential couplings that would have happened don't happen, because Mr/Miss Right was there at the wrong time.
In the first case, the average age of first marriage is around 20, in the latter it's around 30. The problem is that two young people who may be suited to eachother don't marry because they meet at the wrong time. Maybe she wants to do another degree, maybe he'd rather focus on his career. Or yes, perhaps he wants to womanise and she wants to party. In either case, because the marriageable period is about 15 years long, there's no Schelling Point, and we get a coordination problem. The marriage-minded young men and women are finding it hard to meet eachother in the sea of 'I'm not looking for something serious' and 'I bet there's a better guy on the apps'.
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I mean, plenty of men also want a woman who is deeply in love with them, and will stay a loving and caring partner regardless of his health, abilities, or achievements. Men get incredibly disappointed when that is not the case. For example if the wife leaves because she "fell out of love", or a girl he was flirting with is suddenly no longer interested after he got in a fight and lost. Hell, a lot of the original redpillers seem to be men who experienced these things and became disillusioned about women as a result.
While I do think that the current romanticized idea of love as a magical, inexplicable thing that just happens to you and ties people together forever is part of what is wrong with current dating norms, I also don't think it is fair to blame this solely on women. Men want unconditional love just for being themselves too, and are more than capable of deluding themselves into believing they have it.
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While I can sympathize with the plight of men who want children more than they want romance, I object in the strongest possible terms to a dichotomy that writes off love as a Disneyan fantasy and otherwise irrelevant. It is in fact perfectly reasonable to want one's romantic partner in one's life primarily because one is deeply in love with them. Being deeply in love with someone is indeed fun and wonderful - for men and women alike. And if what you're looking for is such a relationship, rather than a transactional arrangement geared towards child-rearing, then it is perfectly reasonable to reject a partner who is offering the latter and uninterested in the former. This isn't a gendered thing - it's the same reason men are afraid of their wives turning out to be gold-diggers. They don't regard themselves as buying sex and kids for a fair price (in which scenario "wife" and "gold-digger" would be synonymous), they want to be married to someone who loves them.
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I would say that both men and women have a lot of parts of the "practical aspects of dating" that they'd prefer not to talk or even think about. Both sexes don't much like being held up to objective competitive standards, unless they're very confident of their position.
As to why you can't discuss looks productively with women, it's because attractiveness is core to female self image and requires immense kayfabe to avoid the crushing reality. To women, they have a social incentive to all claim all other women are beautiful, and to repeat it ad nauseum. They develop a literally insane view of female attractiveness and will be completely and totally unable to rationally discuss it under any circumstances. The male analogue is sexual success. You won't get guys to be any more honest about their sexual experience than you will get women to be honest about female sex appeal.
Men don't like being objectively and competitively ranked publicly by height, dick size, bank account, social media followers and number of sex partners. Women don't like being objectively and competitively ranked publicly by attractiveness, pleasantness, kindness and fertility.
To your larger question, all the stuff you're talking about is male-oriented models of the dating scene. These can be useful for men, but expecting women to be interested is a bit like expecting men to be into the framing model of intersectional feminism. If the model produces useful results for you in real life, who cares if women acknowledge it?
This has not been my experience with men. Male virgins will admit when asked that they've never been with a girl.
What are female-oriented models like?
Well, it's not about getting recognition from women. But if the topic of dating comes up ("So and so got back together with that guy again", "Ah heck, why doesn't she move on from him already?", "It's hard, dating in this town sucks"), this is exactly the sort of thing that might be relevant to the conversation.
This is one of those things where they don't want an explanation or solution, they want to complain. Anything you say about male dating strategies from a male perspective will be taken as gender defensiveness and things will spiral from there.
What you're actually complaining about is that you can't talk to women the same way you talk to men.
I think you've hit the nail on the head. And I suppose this would be because women are more inclined towards bonding than problem-solving.
Any number of reasons, many of which will affect all your other areas of conversation too. This subject is likely to breed conflict with your partner in a relationship and in my opinion should generally be avoided. There's no reason you need to be discussing the dirty details of how the sexes differ in pursuit of the other in a context that makes gender conflict almost unavoidable.
Talking about "SMV" or whatever is what the internet is for, not your date.
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I suspect that the opposite was meant. While it is expected of a man to have a slightly higher body count, slightly is very important.
Having had 20 girlfriends doesn't make a man more attractive, and men with 10+ body count often lie about it.
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I think it's hard to describe them because they are more about feels than rational analysis, but you could try taking a look at female-oriented forums for discussion of dating, for example there used to be a subreddit called "Female Dating Strategy" (commonly referred to as FDS). There is also a podcast called the "Whatever Podcast," where various women are interviewed (and challenged) regarding their views on dating, sex, relationships, etc.
My impression is that the way FDS approaches SMV is that (1) men are either "high value" or "low value,"; and (2) SMV doesn't really apply to women, they are all desirable. It's kind of the same thing with biological clocks.
Admittedly, this doesn't make much sense, but as I said, it's more about feels. To see this in action, try watching a few clips from the "Whatever" podcast. You can see unattractive women insisting that they are 10/10 in looks; that all women are 10/10; etc.
I think the key thing about female-oriented models is that they follow the social rule which forbids anything unflattering to women. So that when someone says women prefer female-oriented models, what it really means is that women are not interested in any way of thinking about dating, sex, and relationships which is unflattering to women as a group.
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Like it says in Proverbs:
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I think it should be pointed out that this is a relatively new development. Back when early marriage and Christian monogamy were the norm, women's lives were basically similar, regardless of their looks.
Eh, I think you'd find the same basic social patterns, just on a smaller scale. Same crab bucket, just a small one. The internet just means you can see the other four billion crabs.
As to the actual socio-sexual practices of early church christianity.....it was pretty far from what it became later, and wildly different over time. At one point, popes were having orgies with their half-sisters, at another monasteries held literal sex shows. I think you'll find that the actual state of mating at any given time was far more a product of secular trends than religious ones. These things move in cycles, religiosity and sexuality same as everything else.
I was referring to the social norms before the Sexual Revolution, not the era of the early Church.
The social norms have gone through many hundreds of "sexual revolutions" over the millenia. Give a country one good generation of relative peace and economic growth and the sexual mores go out the window. Then they fuck everything up and reinvent sexual morality from first principles and staple it onto the religion their grandparents stopped following.
All of this happened in ancient Greece and Sumeria, and no doubt much further back than all that. I'll lay dollars to donuts there's more monkey sex during times of peace and plenty.
Now that's interesting. Why the correlation between sexual mores and economic hardship?
My guess is that given a choice between an e-mail job in a climate controlled office and housewife, women take hte job. When given a choice between twelve-hour days hauling garbage and housewife, they take housewife. Times get hard, war, famine, economic collapse, and all feminism will wink out of existence until things improve.
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To some extent that's true - but on the flipside, there are also many many women (and men) who have an inaccurately low opinion of their own looks despite being attractive. Which is not necessarily a contradiction to what you're saying. The kayfabe is partly a reaction to the low self-esteem, whether that low self-esteem is accurate to reality or not.
Sure. There's also the effect that when everyone is beautiful, no one is. Leads to a disconnect between what everyone says and what everyone knows. And there's plenty to be insecure about in the space between our perceptions there.
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I think most women have a sane view of female attractiveness, despite being completely and totally unable to discuss it directly. 4s know that a man with a choice will pick the 7 every time. "Don't go out on the pull with a significantly hotter girlfriend" is standard female dating advice. "What does she see in him/he see in her?" type calling out of apparent SMV differences in relationships are common gossip, and require accurate SMV assessment to participate in.
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Having to go meta and strategizing means that you are having trouble in the natural way. I think a similar reaction can be elicited among cool guys when the uncool guys are theorizing about how to make friends and how friendship is about transactionally giving each other access to social circles and a friend should be had to the extent of their usefulness and their network and social status, and you have to strategically choose and drop friends to gain social influence etc.
It all sounds like being manipulative and using people as instruments. As a man I would personally find it creepy if some guy is obsessed with books like "How to make friends and influence people" and I spot him trying the techniques recommended in there on me (e.g. ask for small trivial favors first, etc).
The default, high status, correct vibe is not looking for strategies and metagame analysis, but just doing the object level stuff of being entertaining, ambitious, skilled, talented, and being someone other people want to tag along with for their journey.
People are more fine with discussing similar things in more clearly transactional contexts, like job search and hiring, but even there it can be very emotionally loaded and telling someone that they are not good enough for a certain tier of job can be hurtful, and often people just want to commiserate and hear "you were too good for that job anyway".
Being open about these things requires a deeper level of connection. I wouldn't say it's impossible to talk about with women, I would assume they touch on these subjects with their best female friends.
There is no natural way. The Chads strategize too; they're just naturally good at it.
Depends on how Chad the Chad is and what woman or women he is interested in getting with at the moment. Chad might strategize if it's a question of how to sleep with a gorgeous woman he feels is out of even his league. Chad might strategize if for whatever reason he has become particularly interested in a given woman, if he has started to think about her in more than just a hit-it-and-quit-it sexual way. But when it comes to just run-of-the-mill getting laid, I don't think Chad strategizes much. He just feels sexually confident, playful, and relaxed. This projects out effortlessly from him in his eyes, facial expressions, body language, vocal tone, and subjects of conversation when he is interacting with a woman. He experiences interacting with women as something fun, pleasurable, and playful rather than like an existentially fraught job interview. This too communicates itself to them. Normally I think the extent of his strategizing is to just come up with some "excuse" to start talking to a given woman or women, if an excuse is even necessary. Once the interaction starts, I don't think he's thinking much about what he's doing at all. This all applies whether he's a Chad who is Chad because he looks great or if he's a Chad who is just sexually confident without necessarily having great looks.
Maybe the difference is in the definition of the word "strategize." You seem to be using "strategy" to mean "thinking," whereas I (and presumably The_Nybbler too) think of "strategy" as "which move to make." For example, complimenting vs negging a girl would be two different strategies. Chad very naturally makes strategic moves. Non-Chad must learn these strategic moves until they too are naturals.
Yes. If you're still actively thinking, you haven't internalized strategy deeply enough yet.
My claim is a bit stronger: Not only is Chad making these strategic moves, he knows he's doing it. Compare throwing a baseball. Pretty much everyone when they're a kid or with their off hand, throws a baseball badly. Even pitcher-Chad does when he's starting out. The difference is pitcher-Chad figures out the right way really fast and without explicit instruction, whereas pitcher-Virgin is still throwing with his forearm after 10 years of failure.
Then when pitcher-Virgin experiments with different techniques, tries to get more live ABs with hitters, asks for tips and exercises to improve his pitching, tries to breakdown and emulate pitcher-Chad’s form and grips, and/or wonders if being shorter is a disadvantage when it comes to velo and delivery angles: pitcher-Virgin gets scorned and shamed by hitters and told to just be himself, to stop being such a tryhard and creepy strategizer, that height doesn’t matter for pitching (taller pitchers just have an easier time pitching because they aren’t toxic and insecure like shorter pitchers are), to just focus on respecting hitters and treating them as people, and one day the strike outs will Just Happen.
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Correct. I've heard my lothario friend lay out his exact method. He has it down to a precise series of steps and it is brutally effective. When he runs those steps, though, it appears effortlessly natural, and that's the trick.
Is your friend's name Dennis, by any chance?
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For sure. It takes a lot of effort to look effortless. But you should still look effortless.
But I'd also say that you can get results in a more natural and less strategic way as an ambitious, successful, decent looking man who moves in mixed gender circles, as long as your goal is just having a normal relationship with a normal woman, and not maximizing body count and seduction of party girl types. I know many couples where they more or less just formed in friend groups etc, hanging out, then stayed together. It takes some conscious effort to plan things out by the guy, but not necessarily this full analytical approach.
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As usual, it’s contingent on how well one understands the workplace rules.
Chad knows how to confidently put his best foot forward and read the room; Brad is a tryhard who deploys sleazy PUA tactics and attempts to exploit the meta.
The biggest approach machines I’ve known tended to be natural Chads who were quite self-aware and intentional about playing the numbers game, and cognizantly strategic during approaches too. It makes sense since Chads get more positive reinforcement in the form of converting approaches to lays. They’re also less affected by rejection, take women less seriously, and have strong abundance mentality (who cares what thot #67,869 thinks? NEXT!).
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I mean how to win friends and influence people is objectively awesome and I won't stand for this slander
The book? It's a bunch of aw-shucks name dropping, self-promotion, and advice about as actionable as "buy low sell high".
At the time it was released it was original, even churches didn’t provide that kind of folksy hustler energy. The entirety of popular culture and advice changed in response to it, it’s like saying The Beatles sound generic.
Whether it was novel at the time or not, it's still not useful.
To social autists or even people who just aren’t that smart it contains a lot of genuinely useful and true social advice, like that getting people do to things for you endears them to you more than doing things for them, and that small talk is very important in selling things and yourself.
If these sound stupidly obvious, real life is full of people who haven’t grasped them.
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Women like people who can create vibe (or at least make harmony with those who can). Autistic spergouts about market dynamics, utility, and looks ratings are the antithesis of vibe.
Hahaha I think you have hit on something here. The spergouts are themselves a vibe, but perhaps as someone else mentioned, they're the vibe of "instrumentalising", "dehumanising", and "commoditising".
There's actually a passage in the Old Testament about numbering people, in II Samuel 24:
...
...
Traditional theologians do a lot of mental gymnastics for this passage -- where is this even a sin? Is there some secret list of sins we haven't been told about? How does David, and much less the barely-even-religious Joab, even know about this? Why is David being coerced to sin here? You don't even get the coy Calvinist cop-out like you do with Pharaoh in Egypt, where Pharaoh totally hardened his own heart first, sweetie, so now it's cool for the Lord to do it. You just outright have the text saying David was moved against Israel to do something he knew was a sin, then he's not even punished for it -- it's the people who are punished! What on earth.
To the social Darwinist, none of this is confusing. Obviously the judgment of God is upon any civilisation who measures its people to treat them like Amazon employees.
Wait, did these guys get smote just for doing a census?
Yes, and not only that, for doing a census at the behest of God.
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The Lord knew that David was about to use the results to do some gerrymandering.
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They somehow fucking forgot what God told Moses in Exodus 30:11-12:
They basically were asking for it.
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It's fairly intuitive why; it creates incentives for the Israelites to lie on the census, for tax, war, or other reasons.
My understanding of the narrative was that God doesn't want the Israelites to think that it's their strength that gives them victory. There's a bunch of stories where this point is made explicitly; the entire conquest of Canaan is full of such incidents, but Gideon's army being whittled down to a fraction of its original size (and, depending on interpretation, actively selected for the worst soldiers available) is entirely about this. "The battle belongs to the Lord," and it doesn't matter how large an army Israel can muster, it's God who decides if they're going to win or lose.
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Alternatively, these also represent vibe, but for men.
Nah, that's not the correct discriminator here. Football is vibe for men. Analysing player stats is the ick.
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This touches on one of good ol' Spengler's most esoteric distinctions: the difference between truths ("Wahrheiten") and facts ("Tatsachen").
I think the answer to your question – the only real answer – is that knowing a bunch of truths about what makes human faces attractive, about genetic fitness, about fertility and about how an attractive man acts et cetera do not actually help you with the fact that you are unattractive. To quote Oppenheimer from the Nolan-movie: theory will only take you so far.
It's fun for us cerebral minds to figure out what makes the machine tick, and some of the best and most entertaining Youtube-videos I've seen are actually about lookstheory. But it has not helped me with women in the slightest; and since most people are practically rather than cerebrally inclined, they mostly believe that thinking a bunch about theory is the sign of the low-status weirdo.
Yes, ivory tower-type reasoning about female attraction isn't going to help your game very much. But "adjust your posture this way for a more dominant look" definitely helps, and likewise understanding that "women are attracted to dominance" is very useful as a guiding principle that points you in the right direction. And if anyone disagrees with points like these, then an interesting discussion can be had over why they think that way, and how else they would explain field-tested results.
But no, that doesn't answer my question at all.
This one is particularly useful because the dating advice in mainstream sources has been filtered to make feminists feel good about themselves and therefore men who get their dating advice from mainstream sources are told the opposite.
Just remember "women are attracted to dominance" is not the same thing as "women are attracted to bullying/pushiness". Confidence is not the same as arrogance.
This is a polite fiction like so many others. The line cuts right through that "Hello, Human Resources" meme. Dominance and pushiness may not be the exact same thing but there's a whole lot of overlap.
People being willing to overlook it when attractive people do things they shouldn't is pretty human. Doesn't mean that all the behavior they overlook is attractive.
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There were a whole lot of classes, back in the 90s-00s, about being Assertive Not Aggressive. Maybe men didn't get them, but for Women In Business it was part of "how to be a leader and a boss without coming across as a bitch".
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The people who need to hear women are attracted to dominance aren't the ones beating their girlfriends. Typically, they are very passive and milquetoast in their interactions with women, leading to their failures in dating.
Hypothetically, you might imagine one of them wildly overshooting, but in practice that's not an issue: "dominance" isn't close to their default state, and even minimal movements in that direction are very uncomfortable.
Yeah, but the people who need to hear it may not know the difference and over-correct by shooting all the way into "hey bitch, you're coming home with me and don't give me any lip about it" territory.
Unhappily, there are women stupid enough to end up with arrogant guys despite visible red flags (and then end up as the "today's divorce story" in the paper) and men who do let manipulative women control them, both instances often because they're desperate or feel they have no choices and time is going by and they're supposed to be in a couple at their age.
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"Women are attracted to dominance" is still a politically charged phrase that can mean a lot of different things to different people. Naming specific traits will probably get you further. "Women are attracted to fit men who know what they want from life, and are not afraid to take it" for example. Or "Being nervous around women is a turn-off for most of them".
For these kinds of discussions, phrasing associated with specific ideologies very quickly shut down any kind of critical thought. So you really want to stay neutral.
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“Archaeology is the search for fact, not truth. If it's truth you're interested in, Dr. Tyree's philosophy class is right down the hall.”
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There was an old post by Scott Alexander about lies that improve the outcome if everyone pretends they are true. His example was secular movements like UU failing to replicate the success of the churches sticking with the "old man in the sky" stuff.
What will happen to the society if everyone agrees that looks and youth are incredibly important and form a significant part of your SMV?
SMV is a zero-sum game. If your goal is finding the partner with the highest SMV, then it doesn't matter if the values are 1,2..100 or 95,95.05..100. Everyone will be constantly trying to optimize their SMV in a race of incredibly hot rats.
Imagine every single woman frantically looksmaxxing as soon as she hits puberty because she doesn't have time, she has to be at her hottest when she's 16 or 19 or whatever age you consider the best.
Instead, we all repeat one nice little lie: "somewhere in this world there's your other half waiting for you, one day you'll understand you're made for each other". We look down (at least performatively) on people that want to get "the best", because they openly reject the shared lie instead of saying, "we just didn't click, you know?" The lie lets millions of people settle down with a person that is good enough instead of constantly striving for the best achievable pairing.
This is very much not true. Just because something has zero-sum interactions within it does not mean the entirety of it is zero-sum. A lot of SMV is based on things like health and reproductive fitness, which are positive sum. As a simple counterexample, if we had a fancy pill that made everyone age at half speed after they hit 20, the SMV for almost everyone would go up. In relative terms on the dating market the relative positioning of everyone, and thus your ability to secure a mate, would stay the same. But the mate that you got would be a person that aged half as fast and would remain more healthy and attractive for you as a partner. Similarly, if a social trend went around convincing all women to chop their breasts off (and I don't mean the minority that currently does this, I mean if it became so widespread that literally all of them did it), then there would be zero-sum tradeoffs (women with naturally small breasts would gain positions on the hierarchy since they'd lose less than their peers) AND there would be huge negative sum results (all men would lose the ability to date women with breasts no matter how high their own SMV, and any children they have would be dependent on formula).
Doubling all the point values across the board makes people better off. Halving them makes people worse off. Meanwhile in a true zero-sum game like football or baseball, doubling or halving the point value of all scoring actions changes nothing, because the numbers are arbitrary and don't refer to anything except relative positions.
Your general argument still holds. Lying about SMV to other people in ways that negates their advantages over you can raise your position on the hierarchy. But this is still negative sum, in that they lose more than you gain, so it's a fundamentally selfish and anti-social thing.
Yeah, but if your view is SMV is the criterion for dating, you'll never settle because you'll be constantly haunted by "there could be someone even hotter out there I could get" and then you end up with no-one at all.
That's not how any market ever works. Nobody, except maybe people with a specific type of obsessive compulsive disorder, tries to buy something at a store but fails because they just keep going to new stores looking for better bargains and never actually purchases the thing. At some point you find one that's better than any other, you've found so far, reason that there's a very low chance there's a better one and if there was it would take too long to find, and you pick that one. SMV doesn't change this reasoning at all.
I believe you are sadly mistaken.
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It depends on how much friction there is going to new stores, how much stock there is, and how much you personally enjoy shopping.
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This is definitely not in the set of "lies that improve the outcome if everyone pretends they are true". It can mislead people into:
bombingat first sight, right?)I once saw this summarized most succinctly as "every woman I know who thinks there is such a thing as a "soulmate" is still single".
The converse of this doesn't have to be some sort of heartless "Sexual Market Value is a commodity and you should upgrade whenever you find a better deal" antithesis philosophy, though. Perhaps the best way to express the synthesis here is "soul mates aren't just found, they're made".
The phrase "sexual market value" does seem to reek of commodification and oversimplification, but ... we still talk about "the housing market" despite the word "the" being something of a misnomer, right? Even if two people have exactly the same budget for housing: One person can place more value on proximity to big city amenities and another on proximity to rural open space. One can place more value on square footage and separation and another on neighborhood density and walkability. One can place more value on modernist style and another on history. Etc. etc. We still try to quantify the point where supply meets demand with a single cash value, although doing this is a full time real estate appraiser job ... and once a place is sold, it's not likely to be resold just because the local relative price goes up a few percent to pay the agents' fees, is it? When people own a home they put a lot of effort into moving everything in, redecorating and repainting and landscaping and even renovating it to suit their tastes, setting down roots in the neighborhood and the city, etc. etc. People will notoriously hang on to a specific house that might have become suboptimal for them based on their original less-individual criteria, because of the "memories it now holds" or just "to keep it in the family".
Love is kind of like a much more extreme and two-sided version of that sort of attachment. Both people do have to bring something to the table from the start, and there are a lot of romantically valuable qualities that are nearly universal, and none of that should be ignored because it seems impersonal to do so. But exactly what sort of "something" is most valuable is still somewhat personal and subjective, such that even if you can say "he's a 6" and "he's an 8" in some sort of "averaged over all partners' preferences" sense, it shouldn't be surprising to see the "6" end up with an "8" and the "8" with a "6" and all four people thrilled by the results. And despite the common phrase "end up with", that's never the end, right? Even simply dating causes attachment to grow, helps people to get better attuned to teach other, and helps people find out who they're already attuned with in less obvious ways (sometimes you really don't "just click"), ideally reaching the point where even a "10-to-average-partners" can't compete with an "11-to-me" ... and marriage and kids aren't simply an epilogue to that process, they're an accelerant. In the end you do end up with a soul mate, not because you found the one Out There Waiting For You, but because both of you made yourselves and made each other that way.
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It's happening with the tweens, darling. And that's just skincare routines, I haven't even touching dieting, makeup, etc.
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Women don't like autists (arguably for good reason), but it's good to have an intelligent mate (higher income, higher chances of all sorts of success), but intelligence and autism often go together. What do? Set up a selection process where the rules are somewhat complex, and opaque. Anyone who can figure them out is probably intelligent. Anyone who wants to talk about them is probably an autist. BOOM!
Intelligence and autism are probably anticorrelated.
They are not, there is a slight positive correlation with autism. This is copy pasted from gemini, but you can fact check this trivially. It applies for many diseases, such as schizophrenia and ADHD.
The people with ADHD, whose ADHD is caused by the group of genes which are correlated with autism tend to have higher IQ. The people with schizophrenia, whose disease is caused by the group of genes which are correlated with bipolar disorder also have higher IQ.
The cases of ADHD and schizophrenia caused by other genes lead to a lower IQ. Because IQ increasing variant is rarer on average these diseases are anticorrelated with IQ but in reality there are two peaks.
Source for the claim about schizophrenia, https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/how-natural-tradeoff-and-failure The average autist, who isn't visibly dumb probably has higher IQ than average.
from https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9058071/
Cutting off the bottom 40% of the distribution and then finding that the remaining 60% is average-to-above-average is a thoroughly underwhelming statistical finding. Autists have pretty specific deficits in understanding people, and if that's not measured in IQ, so much the worse for IQ.
The word "visibly" is doing heavy lifting there. If you cut off those below 85 IQ in a normal population you would be removing 16% of the population while for autists you would be removing 38.2% of the population.
Autists also have 21.8% above 115 IQ while normal population has 16% in that range.
If you apply same filtering criteria to the normal population and autists, the autists would indeed have higher average IQ than normal population.
In normal professional life you are less likely to meet low functioning autists, so you would observe a positive correlation between IQ and autism.
On average IQ is slightly correlated with having better emotional intelligence too but of course that won't apply to autists.
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There is a reason why I use "spergery" and "sperg" rather than "autism" to talk about the social dysfunction which is common (but not universal) in high-functioning autism and the people who display it. "Autism" or "ASD" with the modern diagnostic criteria covers a very broad spectrum from "not actually disabling at all" to "about as functional as a pet rock", and moderate-to-severe autism can be disabling in different ways. "Having an ASD diagnosis" is definitely anticorrelated with IQ, because the most severe cases are more likely to be diagnosed.
My personal view is that there are two different aetiologies of autism, which I call "familial autism" and "fucked-head autism" - the second of which is caused by some kind of brain damage and typically comes along with multiple other disabilities and a very low IQ. This would make autism anticorrelated with intelligence because fucked-head autism exists. I don't know what sign the correlation between familial autism and IQ is, although anecdotally it is positive.
There is definitely a positive correlation between visible spergery and visible intelligence. My darkly cynical view on this is that neurotypical people recognise that the socially correct thing for smart people in normal social environments (and especially mainstream schools) is to act dumber than they are so they fit in with the top quarter of the local IQ distribution. So only spergs show a visible high IQ. There is also a selection effect, where 90 IQ moderately autistic people can't manage their own condition and end up removed from the public realm due to e.g. frequent meltdowns.
IIRC Aspergers and the like are uncorrelated. Smart people are generally functional.
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One key aspect of dating is illegibility. It starts with flirting, where (I have read that) a key goal is to maintain plausible deniability and avoid creating common knowledge. Is the other party really interested in you, or are they just friendly and generally flirty? There is a reason why "I think you are hot and I would like to have sex with you" is not the equilibrium pickup line.
Most people can't freely chose whom they are attracted to. However, I think that there is a larger dissonance between what the median woman is attracted to and what society thinks a good woman should be attracted to. Admitting "I am attracted to good-looking, rich, high-status men" marks you as a shallow gold-digger. So it is reasonable to enter a mode of cognitive dissonance where you don't notice that common trait and instead focus on how you like men for being funny or whatever.
As an intuition pump, suppose that society deeply frowned at being attracted to boobs, because they are only for feeding babies and anyhow we have formula milk now so they don't really matter. Men still have the same preferences, some prefer smaller tits, some larger ones, but few prefer flat-chested women. But admitting to that would mark them as some kind of perverts. So their brain protects them from themselves and becomes really good at not noticing how they like boobs, and will invent all sorts of other proxies or unrelated variables to explain whom they find hot. Then you come along and talk about SMV and how chest shape is really a major driver of attractiveness in women. Obviously the men would go "well, there are certainly a few degenerate men who have a boob fetish, but most men are good and don't care about boobs at all".
Where did you read this? This completely tracks, I would like to know more.
This is also in line with how jealous people will not admit that they are jealous of someone else, but will invent all sorts of excuses for why they dislike that other person. Is there a word for this proxy-variable phenomenon?
Not OP, but this off topic comment thread was interesting enough that I saved some of the best quotes (from the top reply) and was able to find it again now, a decade later.
You and everybody else still single, right? (...as well as those of us who are married but would like to give our kids useful advice and have grandkids someday, honestly) It feels like the Sexual Revolution burned all the oversimplified restrictive scripts that one might have read in some stuffy old Guide to Mannerly Courting, but then instead of the result being "we're all free! we can just do what feels right!" it turned out to be "you're still screwed if you don't follow the right script, but now everybody disagrees about what the right script should be and it's too contentious to talk about or write down".
I'm not even sure if the above interpretation of proper flirting hasn't also already been obsoleted by cultural changes! (I was already married ten years ago, thankfully, and it's even harder to analyze this stuff from a distance) After ten years of "you find a guy by just swiping right", do women still know or care about the old "you can find a guy by giving plausibly-deniable signals of invitation and escalation" techniques? Ten years after this cute comic prompted the "Schrödinger's Rapist" debate, are men still eager to try carefully interpreting possible plausibly-deniable signals? Granted, the remaining alternatives are awful, but it feels like they're all that's left.
Yeah, but if you try denying it to the wrong guy, this was called cock teasing (which now apparently is also a porn category, goddammit is everything nowadays porn?). You have to be careful with your signalling. This is why everyone, man or woman, wants the Simple Easy Rules For Direct Communication but we're not going to get them.
Yeah, that's what the Schrödinger's Rapist conversation was all about. Men who didn't understand that women inductively match "a stranger is trying to flirt with me" to frighteningly high odds of "and he might get really nasty or dangerous about it if I'm even a bit too gentle or too harsh (or both, because nasty men aren't all big on logic) about shutting it down", arguing with women who didn't understand that making the guys nice enough to listen about this problem more wary just ends up increasing the proportion of public flirtation coming from nasty men who would never have listened in the first place.
I admit I suddenly developed a lot more sympathy and respect for women with "resting bitch face" (and even for some non-superficial negative personality traits) when I realized how useful that probably is as a defense against accidentally signaling (or being mistakenly perceived as signaling) invitations they didn't want to offer. Even if the person making a pass isn't at all nasty, more explicit rejections are much more emotionally upsetting to give! In the moment it hurts more to be rejected than to reject someone, but (unless there was a reason for rejection more substantial than "I'm not very attracted to you") IMHO the pain of being rejected goes away faster.
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Rationalization?
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Unfortunately, I do not recall, exactly. If I had to guess, I would say somewhere LW-adjacent, possible a blog from the SSC blogroll?
I found this on LW, which is probably not where I had read the idea originally (because I don't read most of LW). The comments there link to SSC post about obscure communications in general and an SA lifejournal article (Ctrl-F borscht).
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Well, the stock manosphere answer is that women want you to be naturally attractive and are a bit put off by an unattractive man who's just managed to sneakily become attractive. A man who has worked tirelessly to perfect his sport, his craft, his dating game, is less attractive from the one who was just as good without having to try.
Beyond that it simply is socially gauche, so apart from the above it's also signaling that you're uncouth.
The signaling game aspect makes a lot of sense, but it's not like women don't signal heavily too. Is it not also in their best interests to understand dating market dynamics and thereby snag a high-quality man, instead of constantly complaining about how shitty dating is nowadays?
And is this topic really too gauche to even broach with platonic female friends?
Depends. It's more fun to let their limbic system take control and just enjoy the ride.
A lot of women are dating for entertainment and aren't necessarily trying to figure out how to land a good husband.
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This isn't unique to women, exactly- plastic surgery face and heavy makeup are not generally desired by men.
You would think. Personally I'm regularly horrified by the way most guys seem unbothered by clearly-fake women. Fake tits, fake face, fake hair.
If a woman isn't beautiful without makeup she's not beautiful, imo. But other people do have other opinions.
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I disagree with your assumption. The basic rule (for mainstream discussion) is that you aren't supposed to say anything that puts women as a group in a negative light. So for example:
OK:
Not OK:
+++
OK:
Not OK:
+++
OK:
Not OK:
++++
To be clear, I am talking about mainstream discussion, not about what can or can't be said in dark corners of the internet. On discussion forums such as this one, typical man-bashing is likely to get called out and also posters are less afraid of being labeled "misogynist."
I wonder if a book written in this style, a kind of "social rules for social autists" (maybe under a different name?) would sell well. Certainly, it would be an interesting archeological artifact a few hundred years from now.
It would need either a lot of commentary and explanation, or it would just be an anthology of know the workplace rules memes.
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It is indeed the general rule in the normie sphere. Women being petty is par for the course. Men being petty is unbecoming. And to openly state about petty women as a man that they are petty is in itself extremely petty.
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It's mostly the same reason they kneejerk hate Clavicular for trying to look good. The Problem is this is all deflecting from the actual reason you can't get a date: you're an incel because of toxic masculinity personality traits. Stop focusing on looks or any of this other shit. None of it matters. Women are not shallow. You can't get laid because you've internalized misogyny and even white supremacy. Women aren't passing you up because you're not hot like a celebrity or jacked. It's because of what's inside.
There is some truth to it, if you're being rejected it might be because you're a Chud, but they live in a fantasy world where men with the worst beliefs and personalities aren't also getting laid because they look hot.
Do women, on average, kneejerk hate Clavicular for trying to look good? I haven't observed that reaction.
If we consider "all women" to be "online progressive white women", yes. Putting aside the fact that his looksmaxxing tactics are "extreme" (aka what the top 10-30% of female celebrities/models would do without really making a fuss), still yes.
He's is trying to teach men they're not getting laid because they're ugly and would get laid if they looked good. He's not trying to teach men to reject toxic masculinity and misogyny, if anything he's telling them to lean into it.
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They feel a lot of things when they look at him. Sometimes it does express as resentment but it can't really be boiled down to any one thing.
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I can't take credit for the following idea, but I don't remember where I stole it from either.
Trying to talk to women about the actual mechanics of sexual/romantic relationships is like trying to talk to a restaurant critic about the intricacies of cooking a difficult dish. They can't. They know what they like, they have some idea of the different techniques that produce the food they review, but they aren't in the business of producing meals for others to eat. Women have this same relationship to romance. They're very interested in it, but they never actually produce it.
All they do is consume and judge.
They want quality final products. No counterfeits, no bait and switch. They don't care how its made. How hard could it be?
You can talk about the mechanics, and women will take an interest, but you still have to make the dish. Make the dish, and these problems go away.
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Yeah, another thing about that analogy:
Suppose there were a community of restauranteurs who strategized about ways to get 5-star reviews from critics. Perhaps they would suggest making critics wait 5 or 10 minutes before seating them or whatever. You can bet that critics would scoff and object if they heard about it. The critics would insist they can see right through those games and any restaurant which does stuff like that probably has lousy food.
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This hasn't been my experience. Romance has been somewhere between 40-60, 50-50, and 60-40 generated in every adult relationship I've ever been in. The only examples have been bad dates, but that's not really a relationship and I was the one not feeling it for someone who was reaching out with playful teasing and flirting just as much as I've been on the other end.
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Because these are only topics a high-decoupler woman would bother discussing (in a way that isn't just naked self-interest), and those are rare.
There's not much more going on than that.
But what is there to couple together in the first place?
edit: From the other replies, it appears the coupling refers to being able to relate to humans as meaningful individuals while also being able to model them as abstract entities.
"High-decoupler" is a term in rationalist circles and it means the person is able to talk about things in a neutral, abstract, emotionally distanced way, without taking it personally, and they can evaluate ideas and "what if" scenarios in a dispassionate way without working themselves up emotionally or taking offense at the assumptions behind the hypothetical, or taking it to mean that the person proposing the hypothetical is also fully believing in it.
Basically you decouple your abstract analysis of a topic from your emotional investment into it in your own life and your identity and self-image. It's more typical in somewhat autistic people, for whom implications and connotations are less obvious and they take things at face value and simply talk about the thing, without being aware of whether it's comfortable to others.
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Legibility mostly doesn't serve women that much on the dating scene. By keeping things vague they both increase their optionality by not getting rules lawyered into "actually by your own stated values I'm a catch so you should date me!" and select out from their dating pool men who can't navigate vague and ambiguous social dynamics. At least at the individual level there really isn't any compelling reason for women to be particularly candid. Going further I doubt many women themselves have really interrogated what actually attracts them to a partner. Sexually successful women mostly lay bait and filter. They are concerned with the quality of the bait, their appearance and social position, and their degrees of freedom to quickly and efficiently filter out undesirable suiters. Neither of these is particularly served by legibility.
Legibility in the dating market is something men crave, maybe on a biological level. Navigating the sexual marketplace is one of the most centrally selected evolutionary drives. So it makes sense that men would be frustrated with illegibility in the same way women would be frustrated by men who figure out their strategies and find ways to extract sex without responsibility.
Another factor to consider is that there isn't really any kind of coordination here. women aren't conspiring to keep things illegible. This is actually broadly helped by women not strongly introspecting in a way to surface hard rules. If they did then men could more easily read their communications and exploit them. Women are much better served by going off vibes that are maximally hard to decompile.
Amazing. A way of life that has literally no evidence of existing prior to the Industrial Revolution, must, in fact, be the ancestral environment we evolved in, because why else would we be acting that way now? Talk about people living in the "eternal present;" marriage has been about personal fulfilment for about the past 70 years or so, therefore it must always have been that way. Surely we should ask why, were this were the case, then why is it not working? Why is fertility collapsing, why are men and women just completely checking out, why are they increasingly neurotic? No, we cannot ask that, because it simply must be the case that men have to be chad for women, pay no attention to all recorded history showing marriage being controlled by family, with archeological evidence and oral traditions/myths (as well as extant hunter gatheres) indicating this is the same for pre-history.
Courtship isn't exactly a modern invention in the last 70 years. It happens in observed and studied hunter gathering tribes and we have records of it in every civilization. It happens in other closely related species and we have many of the sexual dimorphic characteristics, concealed ovulation and year-round female receptivity, classic to pair bonding species.
The actual makeup of the social roles certainly change but I think they broadly almost always fit the model I proposed above. Especially for men who in practically every society I've heard of are expected to prove themselves worthy through successfully demonstrating merit in some way. Which hunter gathering societies exactly do you observe male sexual success decouple from the ability to navigate the sexual market place? Of which being impressive to a girl's parents would certainly be an example. What do you even think status is? If what it took to get paired with a high status and attractive woman was very legible do you not think men would endeavor to game whatever the system was?
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I’d argue you’ve just answered your own question. But it’s not only that. Not prioritizing mating/coupling, not being willing to make personal/lifestyle compromises for that purpose, or assuming – based on the experience of their mothers and grandmothers – that marriage and children is something that just happens anyway, will have the same consequence.
That's fair. That's what I had assumed when I first started dating as well.
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Men are expected to construct romance. It's a labor of love, but labor nonetheless. And part of that construction is hiding the labor, making it seem effortless and even magical.
To share that breaks the illusion. This reveals character traits about the man: either he is socially incompetent enough to not understand his role, or he understands it but resents it enough that he's nevertheless going to throw it in women's face. Both of those possibilities are unattractive, for different but very good reasons.
A third possibility is that he's just a deep systemizer and is looking for another deep systemizer and wants to fly his freaky systemizer flag wildly to filter out nonsystemizers. This is more sympathetic, but women who reject him for it are doing him a favor: they're incompatible, and he doesn't want to date a nonsystemizer anyway, so everyone wins.
And it's easy not to discuss it: it's a shared understanding of reality similar to "the sky is blue." If I'm dating a woman, obviously she already knows that e.g. women in general strongly prefer height. Bringing it up isn't going to lead to enlightenment on anyone's part, and that makes it come off as more begging for sympathy or validation than an interesting topic of conversation, which is obviously unattractive in a man.
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Yes, it does seem like that would come across as crass in most contexts, like thinly veiled male locker room talk.
Many women have complicated feelings about being hot, attractive, or even beautiful, and are constantly policing each other about modesty. Traditionally, they should be attractive enough to attract a husband, but not so hot that men are constantly lusting after them. They should have kids while they can, but also at a respectable adult age. Most belief systems regulate these things quite heavily, and "SMV"maxers are defectors, scorned by other women.
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In my experience, women love talking about all three of those topics.
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From my experience, women are pretty happy talking about how men can improve their looks/fashion for dating. It's like a fun project. They probably don't like thinking about the same for women because it could bring out their own insecurities.
I think for the same reason. Acknowledging that there is a dating market may mean acknowledging that her selling price is lower than she'd like.
Kinda the same as the first too, although perhaps with an element of judgement that she has made poor choices by waiting.
I assume you're having these conversations with unmarried or childless women? My experience has been that women who are secure in their romantic situations are much more willing to speak frankly about this stuff. Me and my wife talk about the biological clocks of women we know quite a lot.
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I think you're like 99% of the way there to getting it. The goal, as you allude to, is very specifically not to "find a partner to settle down and have kids with." It's "find a partner to settle down and have kids with while fulfilling [other, more primary goal]." The more primary goals usually include things like "believing that oneself is so high status that she attracts the right mate without having to put in effort into finding the right mate." The best among us can find great mates without putting in effort specifically towards finding great mates, and so many of us who are not the best among us try to cargo cult our ways into finding a great mate.
The same kind of thing happens on the male side as well, just not with looks and youthfulness, but rather with male markers of status like wealth and power. It's just that the consequences for failing to adapt for males tends to be far harsher, and more consistent, and so more males have adapted (in the long run, whatever genetic cause of such behavior in males, if different from such in females, is far more likely to be adapted out through the generations, which we could be living through the result of, as well).
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