Female Sexuality is Socially Constructed

Culture, politics, and values help decide which men are attractive

In June, it was reported that former Patriots coach Bill Belichick, 72, was dating a 23-year-old cheerleader. As part of the “age gap” discourse, I saw some women claim that there was no way she really cares about her new boyfriend and therefore must be using him for money or fame. I obviously have no idea what’s in Jordan Hudson’s heart, but I think that to say she can’t actually be attracted to Belichick reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of female sexuality. At the same time, when one woman says she doesn’t know how another woman can be attracted to a 72-year-old man, I don’t think she’s lying. Rather, what’s going on here is that female sexual preferences are to a large extent socially constructed and something that is disqualifying for one woman won’t necessarily be for another.

Men are of course attracted to women primarily based on looks. What makes women like men? Physical attractiveness as objectively measured is far from irrelevant. But what attracts women is primarily personality, status, and the ability to be a good provider. Thinking about our deep evolutionary history and even more recent times, the leader of a tribe or community might be fat or ugly, or he may have grown old, but he can still produce offspring who come into the world with leadership traits and social advantages.

Sometimes you’ll hear that a man likes a woman “only for her looks” or a woman likes a man “only for his money.” The implication is that the only “true” basis for romantic interest is a person’s cognitive traits, whether intelligence or aspects of their personality. Yet this is like saying someone enjoys a type of food only for its temperature or texture. These things are central to the essence of what makes food taste good. How a woman’s personality is experienced is filtered through what she looks like, and the same is true of men, though with status, money, and power having a much larger role. Hence this popular meme, although one shouldn’t take it too literally in its implication that looks are all that matter.

Because women care more about status, their preferences are more socially constructed than those of males. Our society will make you famous and wealthy if you’re a skilled football coach. If Belichick lived in a society that didn’t care about sports, he wouldn’t be able to get a 23-year-old girlfriend at his age. Within the same society, women will have different preferences depending on the subculture they belong to, with major differences based on class, politics, and values. A political science major at Columbia who wants to work for a progressive nonprofit wouldn’t find Belichick attractive, but might be seduced by her professor who is a well-respected scholar. If a young woman is a truly committed feminist and hostile to human nature, age gaps are so “gross” that it might not matter how successful and accomplished an older man is.

Of course, a young fit billionaire who is 25 is more attractive to women than one who is 80, as advanced age is associated with undesirable traits like weakness and lack of physical energy and stamina. But enough status, money, and power can overcome practically any more superficial shortcoming a man has, at least when it comes to attracting some subset of desirable women.

I’m not saying that there aren’t women who consciously use men. Some would be willing to marry a decrepit 80-year-old billionaire without feeling any real affection for him just to wait for him to die. But, I think in most areas of life, conscious manipulation is much less common than people convincing themselves of what they need to believe for the sake of their own interests. Most politicians probably don’t exactly lie when they adjust their positions in politically convenient directions, but rather end up convincing themselves that whatever their donors or voters happen to believe is actually true. See the brilliant work of Robert Trivers on this point. He argues that humans have evolved to spot manipulation, which means that nature had to make us better liars, and the best way to not get caught lying is to believe what you are saying yourself. A politician who genuinely adopts the views of his followers is more likely to succeed than one who has to pretend to agree with them on what they care about. Likewise, a woman who wants to snag a rich husband will be more effective in her pursuit if she can make herself appear loyal to him, which is easier to do if she feels genuine affection.

Romantic attraction isn’t the same as views regarding what policy is likely to make society better off. There’s a coherence to the statement that “A politician convinced himself to think that free trade impoverishes Americans out of self-interest.” But it doesn’t make nearly as much sense to say “Jordan Hudson convinced herself to be attracted to Bill Belichick out of self-interest” because attraction is itself subjective. So if you “trick” yourself into liking someone, then you actually do.

Donald Trump could certainly sleep with young MAGAs if he wanted to, but probably not women who identify with the cultural left, who find him genuinely disgusting. Yet political views aren’t nearly as important for determining whether a man finds Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez attractive. And no matter how left-wing a young man might be, he’s probably not going to want to date Elena Kagan. Between two similarly attractive women, of course, politics or values can be a tiebreaker.

Aside from obvious political differences, here are some other examples of female sexuality being socially constructed.

• The “bad boy” archetype is more attractive in a society where criminals are coddled to a certain degree, and therefore can have a kind of romantic oppositional status to society. Where criminals are ruthlessly eliminated and anti-social behavior is truly stigmatized, this is less likely to be the case.

• Male autistic traits are more attractive to East Asian women. This is probably a natural preference, and why so many tech guys and online racists have Asian wives.

• Being a mediocre guy is more attractive when society has a kind of cultural uniformity, less so when it is more diverse or unstable and women start looking for men who stand out. During the Baby Boom years, it was a lot more common for a man who didn’t seem to have anything special about him to marry an attractive and smart women and get three or four kids out of her. This is where the 1980s and 1990s sitcom stereotype of the kind of dim and bumbling husband with the beautiful and smart wife came from, as this was a common type of couple until the last few decades. The decline in pairing up across practically all developed societies can be seen as resulting from women finding fewer men attractive.

• The ability to be a provider is much more important when a woman is living in poverty, for obvious reasons. This explains the Passport Bro phenomenon. People might see third world women as “using” men in cases like this, but the affection they feel for the first world men they meet is likely no less genuine than that of any other relationship. This is another explanation of the decline in pairing up over the decades, as women’s earning potential rises.

• Women like men in touch with their feelings when we are in the midst of “therapy culture.” I’ve noticed that on The Bachelor, a woman starts to feel closer to a man when he “opens up.” This always involves some kind of trauma like a divorce or death of a parent or something and how it is related to a personal insecurity. Then the man cries and he is reassured that he is great just as he is. I’ve always wanted to go back into the archives and see when this started.

• Looks for men matter more in a society that ideologically subscribes to gender equality, and the look of males preferred is more female-like or neotenic. Because men and women are supposed to be the same and we all know that men care about youth and beauty, women are expected to have similar standards. In the 1950s, a guy could look “too pretty” and would be considered a sissy or weirdo, but today it’s generally understood that the better looking a man is the better he’s expected to do with the opposite sex. There was a time when a hairy chest was considered attractive, but that’s usually not the case anymore.

Male preferences are socially constructed to a certain extent too, although not nearly as much.

• When statutory rape is treated as a big deal, men become less attracted to underage girls. Back in the 1990s, Howard Stern types would openly discuss how attractive certain girls younger than 18 were. Today, it’s taboo to even admit you like girls of that age, even though there’s no evolutionary reason not to, and I think men adjust their preferences.

• Men want more masculine looking women in a society with loose sexual mores. See here for how the looks of successful actresses changed between the 1940s and 2008.

• More intellectual cultures and subcultures will find it gauche for a man to place too much emphasis on protruding secondary sexual characteristics. Giant breast implants are probably more useful for attracting a rapper than a top business executive, though they may help with either one. In the business world, they’re more likely to draw in a wealthy air condition salesman than a tech executive. Google CEO Eric Schmidt had an affair with Marcy Simon when she was in her late 40s, which is historically rare for a man that famous and wealthy but I think unsurprising for the CEO of Google.

• Straight men may or may not be attracted to ladyboy types or extremely effeminate men depending on the cultural context, that is, how much homosexuality is taboo and the degree to which it is considered a binary trait. See the Ancient Greeks and Romans and their relationships between men and young boys.

But these cultural differences are relatively marginal compared to variation among women, both cross culturally and within a culture. Female sexuality is much more fluid and dependent on the context. The upshot of all of this is that when we’re choosing what types of institutions to build and the kind of society we want, we’re actually doing a good bit to shape female preferences. Being soft on crime has to be discussed not only in the context of how safe it makes the streets, but also what it means to have a country where women will swoon over a psychopath being able to take on society and win, or at least go down defiantly. Greater gender equality in earnings probably means fewer couples pair up and form families. This isn’t because less egalitarian societies are simply coercing women to pair up with men they’re not attracted to, which might happen to a certain extent, but also because more equal outcomes change the nature of what they are attracted to in the first place. Most if not all of the shifts we have seen in female preferences over time have been unthinking byproducts of other ideas and interests. One may argue that these considerations should be taken into account when trying to influence culture and governance, though I’m unsure if any movement is wise enough to competently incorporate them into its views of political economy.