link | Submitted by HughRistik on Tue, 02/26/2008 - 23:28.
Erik said:
A general theme in such species is that the investment of the female in producing and rearing offspring is much greater, making the females largely choose the males and the males court the females, for which they need to impress the females, which they often do through their looks. Among humans, women invest more heavily in raising children, and courtship, with a minority of exceptions, mostly comprises of males seeking to impress women, but the general theme in human societies is that physical attractiveness (henceforth attractiveness) is more important for women. Why is this so?
In some cases, men do use their looks and clothing to attract women. In the seduction community, this practice was "invented" by the pickup artist Mystery (he didn't invent it of course; he just gave it a name and popularized it). Here is Mystery peacocking.
Even in such cases, "peacocking" doesn't make men attractive primarily because it makes them look beautiful or even stylish (Mystery looks ridiculous most of the time). It makes men attractive because of the personality traits and social status that it communicates.
Jonathan Gottschall(2, pdf) has come up with a revised solution to the problem by adding to a previous explanation by Symons, who argued that in humans “a female’s reproductive value can be assessed more accurately from her physical appearance than a male’s reproductive value can,” leading to a greater emphasis on attractiveness in women.
This is definitely true. A man can assess a woman's attractiveness at a glance (though his estimate may be adjusted later). A women's assessment of a man depends more heavily on his body language and vocal tonality, which cannot be evaluated so quickly.
Yet, the great majority of men will not refuse an opportunity for sex with women who are nowhere close to what they find optimally appealing. So why is a need for beauty causing anguish for a lot of women when most women do not have to be anywhere close to this ideal to attract men?
Another reason is that while typical heterosexual men will bang women below their standards, they will not usually have relationships with those women.
The general pattern of men courting women by impressing them holds true for humans but men have become less dependent on looks because of the way human intelligence has developed.
Of course, raw intelligence on its own often isn't attractive to women, at least when we are getting 2+ SDs from the mean. Perhaps this is because intelligence at that level is correlated with unattractive personality traits (e.g. introversion).
My impression is that masculine personality traits that relate to resource acquisition ability and social status contribute more to variance in male attractiveness than intelligence does. Masculine personality traits and social status also seem more important than physical looks.
So the source of anguish for women, notwithstanding the willingness of most men to have sex with women nowhere close to what they find optimally attractive, is inter-female mate competition given women’s high standards for men, whereby they will typically reject many if not most interested men and lament that just about all other women are after the men they want.
It is the disparity in male and female selectiveness that is the source of most pain in relationships for both men and women. This is nobody's fault, since neither men nor women are morally responsible for their evolved preferences, and people have the right to mate with those they find attractive, and to not mate with those they don't find attractive. However, it is important for people to understand the impact of the aggregate preferences of their sex. I think the pressures that men's preferences place on women are well understood, but the pressures of women's hypergamic preferences on men are less well understood publicly.
This has not always been the case; I think women's preferences have been more widely understood at previous times in history. Unfortunately, in the present, it has become fashionable to either deny or spread misinformation about women's preferences, particularly feminists. Some radical feminists actually do admit certain aspects of women's preferences, but just insist that they are created by "patriarchy;" I think this is backwards: it's more likely that women's preferences drive the structures that feminists call "patriarchy."
Though in the case of feminists, I've learned that they aren't deliberately lying; they just don't realize that their preferences are less typical of heterosexual women. Feminist women typically have no idea of what straight men are actually dealing with. I was catching up with a feminist friend of mine the other day, and she said that she found most of the men on Beauty and the Geek attractive. She didn't seem to realize that those guys are on the show for a reason, partly because virtually no heterosexual women will notice them sexually.
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Erik said:
In some cases, men do use their looks and clothing to attract women. In the seduction community, this practice was "invented" by the pickup artist Mystery (he didn't invent it of course; he just gave it a name and popularized it). Here is Mystery peacocking.
Even in such cases, "peacocking" doesn't make men attractive primarily because it makes them look beautiful or even stylish (Mystery looks ridiculous most of the time). It makes men attractive because of the personality traits and social status that it communicates.
This is definitely true. A man can assess a woman's attractiveness at a glance (though his estimate may be adjusted later). A women's assessment of a man depends more heavily on his body language and vocal tonality, which cannot be evaluated so quickly.
Another reason is that while typical heterosexual men will bang women below their standards, they will not usually have relationships with those women.
Of course, raw intelligence on its own often isn't attractive to women, at least when we are getting 2+ SDs from the mean. Perhaps this is because intelligence at that level is correlated with unattractive personality traits (e.g. introversion).
My impression is that masculine personality traits that relate to resource acquisition ability and social status contribute more to variance in male attractiveness than intelligence does. Masculine personality traits and social status also seem more important than physical looks.
It is the disparity in male and female selectiveness that is the source of most pain in relationships for both men and women. This is nobody's fault, since neither men nor women are morally responsible for their evolved preferences, and people have the right to mate with those they find attractive, and to not mate with those they don't find attractive. However, it is important for people to understand the impact of the aggregate preferences of their sex. I think the pressures that men's preferences place on women are well understood, but the pressures of women's hypergamic preferences on men are less well understood publicly.
This has not always been the case; I think women's preferences have been more widely understood at previous times in history. Unfortunately, in the present, it has become fashionable to either deny or spread misinformation about women's preferences, particularly feminists. Some radical feminists actually do admit certain aspects of women's preferences, but just insist that they are created by "patriarchy;" I think this is backwards: it's more likely that women's preferences drive the structures that feminists call "patriarchy."
Though in the case of feminists, I've learned that they aren't deliberately lying; they just don't realize that their preferences are less typical of heterosexual women. Feminist women typically have no idea of what straight men are actually dealing with. I was catching up with a feminist friend of mine the other day, and she said that she found most of the men on Beauty and the Geek attractive. She didn't seem to realize that those guys are on the show for a reason, partly because virtually no heterosexual women will notice them sexually.