James Taranto summarizes research from Notre Dame’s Elizabeth McClintock:
In one ingenious study, published in 2011 in the journal Biodemography and Social Biology, McClintock explored sex differences in “revealed sexual preferences.” That is, she wanted to know if, as evolutionary psychology suggests, men and women diverge in their sexual or romantic goals. Just asking them doesn’t necessarily yield reliable answers because people may mistake what they think they should want for their actual desires. (That’s known as social acceptability bias.)
Even studying actual behavior is not entirely straightforward, because, as a sage once observed, “You can’t always get what you want.” That is, since each sex needs the other to realize its sexual and romantic goals, actual behavior reflects not only one’s own preferences but also the constraints imposed by the other sex’s. Few men date supermodels, but that doesn’t mean supermodels are undesirable. Rather, because they are desirable and in short supply, they have the luxury of being superselective.
Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Adolescent Health, a massive and detailed database covering 27,000 teens and young adults, she found that physical attractiveness (as rated by the person conducting the survey interview) does indeed correlate with sexual behavior–and in opposite ways for the opposite sexes:
The better-looking a man is, the more lifetime sexual partners he reports; the better-looking a woman, the fewer. Good-looking men are more likely to have had sex soon after meeting a partner; good-looking women, less likely. Good-looking women are likelier to describe their relationships as “committed”; good-looking men, less likely.
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I was reading Roosh’s forum thread on this article and most there dispute the conclusion that the best looking girls have lesser sexual partners. I’m not a member there so I didn’t comment, but I completely disagree with them. Though it could be that I’m from a conservative, rural area while they’re all hanging out at da club… women do tend to be cultural conformists.
The girls with the most sexual partners will be the girls who’ve learned since they were in middle school that to get (best) boys attention they have to use forthright sexuality to make up what they’re lacking(in compared to other girls) in natural beauty.
In general I thought the article basically confirmed manosphere wisdom that due to hypergamy in a deregulated smp, what you have is the female 4-7 deploying sex to get the attention of the male 7+. The female 8+ don’t need that strategy because they can string along because they are much hotter than the 4-7 women. This study basically confirmed that. What the manosphere lore would expect would be that the most sex is happening between the highest rank men and the middle rank women – - which is what the study found. That’s hypergamy in action in a deregulated sex market. We’ve always said that the winners in sexual terms were the male alphas and the average to slightly above average women, while the female peers of the former and the male peers of the latter are the ones who are harmed by the laissez faire market for sex. However I don’t understand why some people around the net see this as meaningful beyond that confirmation – - it’s not like these two disaffected groups are going to get together with each other. That would be virtually impossible because the guys are just not attractive to those highrranking girls and never will be en masse.
What the study does confirm, which is news of sorts in the manosphere, is that male good looks (granted, a flexibly defined thing in itself) is very highly correlated with sexual success. The ugly alpha is an outlier natural or a rare hardworking student of game.
An interesting example of a writer forcing facts to fit his Procrustean bed.
The example of the three women is of 3 women preferring 3 different physical and cultural types. Support for the women like different types theory if ever I saw any. Nowhere is there any indication of status. The educated women likes the educated look – where does she discuss status? In one instance, a professional woman likes a blue collar type, clearly arguing against status being the major factor. (Oh, because when she was younger, she knew a dominant blue collar type. When I was younger, I idolized firemen and policemen. I don’t as an adult. What seems to us magnificent as children often seems to us trivial as adults. What shallow psychology to try and find significance in the fact that she grew up around a dominant blue collar man. Not only does it deny biology and elevate the role of the environment in shaping adult tastes – doesn’t that contradict HBD? – but it does so in a simplistic manner, as if our minds were blank slates that merely retain the first imprint it receives, and as if what we admire doesn’t change with our age)
Yet so blind is Taranto to the plain meaning of his own evidence, so committed to his narrative, that he somehow twists this into being an example of women liking status! Quite remarkable, yet sadly fairly typical of the way writers across all fields these days see only what they have already decided is there.
I am an educated man and I prefer artistic and bohemian girls with an intellectual look – bimbos do nothing for me. Tall blond model types do nothing for me. I have a preference for a certain TYPE. Just like that educated woman who likes nerdy intellectual types.
What the study does confirm, which is news of sorts in the manosphere, is that male good looks (granted, a flexibly defined thing in itself) is very highly correlated with sexual success.
Of course, but to me at least this has always been obvious.
Well, the PUA/Game blogs are dogmatic about the unimportance of good looks for men. It’s understandable when PUA gurus want to sell books or just simply their blogs’ message to legions of sub-average, short, unattractive, bald, or ageing lesser betas.
If you meet a man who brags about a high partner count, he is likely bisexual…
tehee, wanna join me and roosh on the downlow????
Yeah I never bought that — I have seen too much evidence to the contrary from early in life. I will say that there are some good looking guys who nevertheless seem to do less well with women than they should, but by and large being better looking generally correlates with better results with women.
“Well, the PUA/Game blogs are dogmatic about the unimportance of good looks for men.”
Not unimportance. Lesser importance. Looks are less critical to a man’s success with women than they are to women’s success with men. This latest study does not refute this.
I had a friend when I was in my 20s who was the manager of a strip club. One of the things he told me was that the women at the club who made the most money were not the ones he had any trouble with. They could just bat their eyes and sweet talk the clients and separate them from huge amounts of money. Meanwhile, the girls he was busting for breaking club rules (and often the law), the ones who’d allow clients to do things they shouldn’t, never seemed to have anything to show for their efforts.
Seems like life is muich like a strip club.
Good looking women tend to be smarter, higher class, and more self disciplined. They use their looks wisely and are selective about who they jump into bed with. There are some exceptions, like Anna Nicole Smith, but the good looks don’t last long on those girls.
The vast majority of men in PUA workshops would be better off spending their money on prostitutes.
Movie stars seem to get around a bit, but the three best looking women I know all married their high school boyfriends and are still with them.
Basically, if a good looking man is confident and keeps a reasonably strong frame, and avoids egregious beta-errors, he will still more often than not do better than an ugly guy with solid game. For a chick, anticipating to kiss a good looking guy who isn’t saying dumb beta shit is a pleasure in its own right.
In my own expereince when I was a young single guy: I was (if you take my word for it) tall and good looking, but clueless about game. In the late 80s and early 90s, the word Game didn’t even exist; we had John Huges movies and pop songs that told us that you wanna be a mopey nice guy, But I digress. — In situations when my raw confidence was through the roof, I woudl be AMOG’ing against uglier guys who, in retrospect, had solid game, and more often than not as long as I avoided (again, as I see it in retrospect) egregious beta errors, I’d get the girl.
“Just asking them doesn’t necessarily yield reliable answers because people may mistake what they think they should want for their actual desires. (That’s known as social acceptability bias.)”
…
“The better-looking a man is, the more lifetime sexual partners he reports; the better-looking a woman, the fewer. ”
So we know that people will lie to be socially acceptable and then we accept that self-reports as a better way of determining preferences. That’s, uh, interesting.
The simple fact is that the only people who understand human sexuality are men who are good observers with a cynical view of women and they’re limited to understanding only what they see.
Women lie to each other and themselves. Men who aren’t good observers are the ones who get deceived by women for various obvious evolutionary reasons.
Here’s another take on the study data. The men are mostly telling the truth (relative to each other – so good looking guys and ugly guys are both lying in the same direction to around the same degree). The women could be lying in lots of different ways that would differ by how good looking she is. Good looking women downplay their partner counts to seem more desirable while ugly women do the opposite for exactly the same reason.
Great find. This gets to the root of what’s wrong with the entire ‘game’ universe:
The female half of the low-commitment dating ecosystem is of lower quality.
Not only are low-commitment women less virtuous (we already knew that) but science finds them to be uglier.
The easiest woman I’ve encountered was a woman with no front teeth who came up to my car in traffic in the middle of the day and offered to give me a BJ for $10.
Dilemma: Should you take her up on her offer and then go bragging on manorsphere about your massive game, leaving out a detail or two.
Good-looking men and plain women make up the low-commitment ecosystem.
Beta men and good looking women make up the high-commitment ecosystem.
Game blogs should teach players how to be beta.
From the article: “According to McClintock, prior research in this area has ignored two important factors:
“First, people with higher status are, on average, rated more physically attractive–perhaps because they are less likely to be overweight and more likely to afford braces and nice clothes and trips to the dermatologist, etc.,” she says.”
Lara’s comment: “Good looking women tend to be smarter, higher class, and more self disciplined.”
Ambition makes you look pretty pretty, Gucci Little Piggy.
I’m not saying pickup gurus are right about everything but no respected game blogger argues men’s looks are unimportant. Some commenters here are arguing against strawmen.
Beta men and good looking women make up the high-commitment ecosystem.
Eh, no. The worse looking men are not getting into committed relationships and marriages with women who are significantly better looking than them. It happens on occasion, but not often, and is not the norm. The best looking women simply do not have to give up sex to get the attention of the best looking men who are interested in committed relationships — and, because there is an imbalance there, some of them have to wait, or complain about there not being enough good men (of their peer attraction level), but most do eventually pair off with other men who are roughly their peers in attraction. Female 7-10s are not widely pairing off in committed relationships with the male 4-7s whose peers are engaging in casual sex with the male 7-10s. It rarely happens, but that’s not what the stats there are describing.
Attractive/unattactive seems to be a pretty stark binary. I would say that are at least four different types of ways women can look:
1. Women who have classically beautiful faces (and who often dress conservatively).
2. Women who have hot bodies (and who often dress in a manner deliberately calculated to excite lust).
3. Women who are plain Janes in a dignified way. They weren’t blessed by fate with beauty, but they don’t go out of their way to be repulsive. The top tier of this group might be called “cute,” but never “beautiful” or “hot.”
4. Women who are physically repulsive (usually through self-inflicted wounds – extreme fatness, tattoos, piercings in odd places, early aging caused by drinking or drug use).
I think 1s likely act differently from 2s and 3s from 4s. Also, as Lara notes, famous beautiful women (actresses and models) seem not to fit the study. (Modern-day actresses are mostly 2s, but there were a many 1s in Golden Age Hollywood whose behavior was far from saintly.)
“Seems like life is much like a strip club”
The attractive girls in a strip club benefit by strictly enforced rules. The less attractive ones can only compete by offering to do more and if that’s not allowed then they lose out to the attractive girls. In the same way, having a society where there’s strong moral disapproval of sexual promiscuity and there are no economic benefits via the welfare state to being promiscuous and having children out of wedlock is of benefit to attractive women. It eliminates potential competition by making it harder for less attractive women to compete by being more promiscuous. Attractive girls in strip clubs are always the most vociferous in wanting strict rules so they are capable of understanding things at that level but do attractive girls understand how strict sexual standards benefit them at a societal level?
Novaseeker:
“In general I thought the article basically confirmed manosphere wisdom that due to hypergamy in a deregulated smp, what you have is the female 4-7 deploying sex to get the attention of the male 7+. The female 8+ don’t need that strategy because they can string along because they are much hotter than the 4-7 women. This study basically confirmed that. What the manosphere lore would expect would be that the most sex is happening between the highest rank men and the middle rank women – – which is what the study found. That’s hypergamy in action in a deregulated sex market.”
This is correct. The study verifies many core PUA/manosphere tropes. An unregulated sexual market is essentially an unregulated female sexual market, because women remain in most contexts the gatekeepers to sex. Unconstrained female sexuality is limitless hypergamy, where middling women have to use their sex to attract the attention of high value men, high value women can use their looks to attract commitment from high value men, and middling beta males mostly get left out in the cold until such time that the middling women have aged into a lower energy state hypergamy mode and are more willing to settle.
This is not to say that alpha males procreate more than beta males (GSS surveys have betas slightly outperforming alphas in the procreation sweepstakes, but take with a grain of salt), because contraceptives and abortion cut down on the number of sprogs modern alpha males would normally have in a primitive state of nature mating marketplace.
I would also point out that these studies do not capture the men who understand the contours of female sexual nature or who have facility with the art of seduction. What you are seeing in these studies are mediocrities who woo women the traditional ways: either by their looks/peer status or by their provisioning. Very few men are naturals, and fewer still are skilled with game aka learned charisma. So if you think a study like this will tell you whether or not game works, you would be wrong. For that kind of data, you have to skip the meta analyses and head for the small scale individual studies that examine components of the mating process, such as the opening gambit or the lure of male overconfidence. Those studies are piling up and the results are decidedly friendly to core game concepts.
PA:
“Basically, if a good looking man is confident and keeps a reasonably strong frame, and avoids egregious beta-errors, he will still more often than not do better than an ugly guy with solid game. ”
This happens, but the opposite happens just as often, if not more so (in my experience). I have witnessed many good-looking, but somewhat bland, uncharismatic men who knew how to adhere to basic social expectations and not commit egregious beta-errors, who nevertheless got cut off from girls by less physically attractive but far more charming men brimming with confidence, a devil-may-car attitude, and social fearlessness.
The correct comparison you want to make is between good-looking men who aren’t in the top 5% of looks (since online surveys show that only the top 5% get inordinate attention from women — there’s a big drop-off past the top 5%) but who are still better looking than average, and the middle bulk of average-looking men with game. This comparison is a more accurate reflection of reality because most men in the field are not ugly; they are just not Brad Pitt either. Neither are the good-looking men in the field sporting Johnny Depp’s top 5% looks. Now when you examine this match-up of top 20% looks vs average looks with game — the more realistic scenario one will encounter on any given night out — the average guys with game/charm/social proofing/contextual status more than hold their own. In fact, a powerful personality will, in most cases, DOMINATE a bland good-looking guy, and women will follow in suit.
Now of course none of this is to say that, all else equal, being good-looking isn’t better than being average-looking. But all else is rarely equal, and that is far more true for men than it is for women, because men’s sexual desirability hinges on multiples more criteria than does the sexual desirability of women.
because men’s sexual desirability hinges on multiples more criteria than does the sexual desirability of women.
And this is why we fail.
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