Good piece. My take away is much of the feminist views of sexual attraction being culturally conditioned is just projection. What's true for woman isn't necessarily true for men. So if you are a female scholar, and you are reflective and in touch with your own sexuality, you can easily believe attraction is just social conditioning. As a straight man it's really hard to believe that, as our experience is so different.
Yes! I have long thought that the reason female feminist intellectuals concluded that sexuality was fluid and socially constructed was because that was true…for them.
All of feminism is projection. Feminism's central claim of 'patriarchy' is men conspiring to benefit all men at women's expense. This is how men would be if they were women.
Women naturally conspire, whereas men naturally compete openly.
China started having standardized tests for government officials in the Sui dynasty in 605 (not 1605, 605), and it expanded during the Tang dynasty and stayed around through the Song, Yuan, and Ming dynasties to the Qing. Even now the Chinese have the gaokao. China was a lot more centralized, being basically a civilized empire for the past two thousand years, and the best path to success was to be a government official. So for a long time the best provider was likely to be a guy who was good at school. That affects culture, and I wouldn't be surprised if it actually affected sexual selection genes as well, since a successful man could have multiple concubines and have more kids that way. But it is definitely in the culture.
If you read the famous Ming dynasty novel *Romance of the Three Kingdoms* about the struggle over the collapse of the Han dynasty you will see a few big battles and macho warriors, and lots of generals cutting off the supply lines of other generals, ministers pretending to defect to the other side so they can trick the enemy commander into doing something stupid, generals pretending to be drunk so enemy emissaries will steal a letter on their desk that contains a (false) thank-you for defecting to the top general on the emissary's side, and in general lost of people playing 'I know you know I know' at various levels. The 'hero' of the novel switches sides several times, and the 'villain' runs away even more and winds up in charge of the biggest kingdom. Nobody wants to go to war without their top strategist, and there's one bit where the other generals of one kingdom mock another one for reading too many books...and he turns out to win the day.
Oh, and someone spares his brother from execution because he's good at poetry.
So I'm sure if they find the ten polymorphisms that cause women to be attracted to nerds, they'll be more common in women of East Asian descent. But the culture plays a role too. I'm curious how many generations in the country the nerds' East Asian girlfriends are.
Best, maybe, but best does not matter because only few of the best exist. OTOH there were a lot of traders and landlords being pretty much good enough providers and had multiple concubines.
My comments are interesting enough you're ordering giant Chinese novels? OK... ;)
Seriously: it's a tome, and a tough read. It's full of Chinese names that sound the same because they have a tonal language and so there's extra info you're missing. There isn't much physical description, because that's not how they told stories back then. I would recommend either reading a plot summary or drawing out the relationships between the characters. There are a huge number of minor characters that show up once and are in there for verisimilitude.
For starters, I would follow Liu Bei, Guan Yu, Zhang Fei, Cao Cao, Dong Zhuo, Yuan Shao, Yuan Shu (yes, they're half-brothers--the family name goes in front), and eventually Zhao Yun, Zhou Yu, Zhuge Liang, and Sima Yi.
Well, I’m retired to my mountain retreat, so I find myself returning to my youthful habit of voracious reading. It sounds like it will keep me going for a while, and I’m almost done with the Aubrey/Maturin novels, so I need a new series to tackle.
"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."
Really. Not many women here rushing to embrace this view, huh?
In reality, men's looks is very important to women. If you are a really great looking male, you don't need anything else, same as with gorgeous women.
However, women are more calculating, and more flexible. They are willing to trade off some preferences against others, so, in some very extreme cases, they will go for an old guy who is rich and famous and used to be good looking, but they will also go for an illiterate criminal or a poor young model if they are insanely hot, or a dork with a solid salary and a really beautiful house. Their preferences are no more socially constructed than men's; however, women are much bigger conformists so there is a fair amount of herd mentality and "I want what she is having" when it comes to their preferences regarding men as well.
Jack Donovan the way of men writes brilliantly on this. Female approval is usually a consequence of male approval. If all men like Zuckerberg, then all women will like Zuckerberg as well.
"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."
I think you're wrong here. If this was a natural preference you'd expect to see it among 2nd generation east Asian women raised in the West. But you don't - at least nowhere near the same degree. If anything the ick factor normie east Asian western girls have for autists is more than white normies. What's happening is simply that east Asian women are blind to western autistic traits, because of cultural differences and how relatively autistic their home cultures are. They're not repelled by autistic western guys, because they're relatively unable to detect the social maladaptiveness that western girls can.
Agree. The second gen Asian girls I know are married to long haired, tattooed stay at home dads. It's the first Gens that are married to blonde high earning guys who wear khakis.
Point taken, though I'll say my experience is that, all else equal, NE Asian-American women still tend to excuse a little more white male nerdiness/dorkiness, on average, than white women of equivalent education/class/looks. Full-blown autism is another matter though. I never dated an Asian girl but a disproportionate share of my dorky Pacific NW friends did, one even married one, and those girls were all born here. I'm sure YMMV though, I can imagine a lot of local variation on this question.
More broadly, the phenomenon you describe is another part of the "passport bro" effect, and not just in NE Asia. Richard highlighted the value of earnings, but he missed that cultural barriers serve to increase the difficulty of sensing social awkwardness. And perhaps, even if a woman learns intellectually that her foreign husband is kind of a dork, she might not feel it as viscerally as if he were of her own culture.
It's a decent theory that a culture's "autisticness" is relevant to the size of this effect, but I don't know how well it checks out in reality. Colombia is a huge destination for passport bros, a dorkosaurus I grew up with married a beautiful Colombian girl, and it's hard to argue their culture is especially autistic in any regard.
Yh you're actually spot on. My point about east Asian culture being more autistic is moot, because the cultures are different enough that this would manifest with different social cues. The sole reason is probs cultural difference obscuring social awkwardness combined with east Asia being the most culturally different from the West. I think your point about even the east Asian girls who intellectually detect the autism, not viscerally feeling it, may even be the most important part. Since even with the cultural barrier, a non stupid woman could still work it eventually, and not feeling it is essential to it not killing the attraction.
It’s also could be the language barrier covers up social awkwardness. In Columbia, my guess just having access to money gets you a lot further, than the USA. In Mexico, if you can afford to go on a date, you will have a girlfriend. In the USA, you can make 80k and be sexless.
On the first point, I thought I said that: "cultural barriers serve to increase the difficulty of sensing social awkwardness."
But valid point on Colombia's poverty. It's much poorer than Mexico, even. I guess the reason it's a big draw for passport bros is that it's pretty close, and there are a lot of girls there that are fairly white (my dorky friend's beautiful wife seems to be near-100% Euro ancestry), yet it's a low-mid Latin American country economically.
Look at the weird fattened-women culture of Mali, dudes pushing their wives around in carts.
Chinese foot binding.
These later two suggest a status element: can afford food, does not do peasant work.
But mostly fashion. Theda Bara seemed rhyming with the esotericism fashion of the day, Blavatsky and all, looked like a fortune teller crossed with an emo vampire and it was simply cool back then.
On women's attraction. Basically men perform masculinity for each other, not for women. A George Clooney type suave gentleman pulls more women than any Conan any day. The Conan stuff is partially a gay crush, partially all the ex bullied boys wishing they were like that and then no one would have dared to bully them. The Conan vibe is entirely performed for other men "don't dare to try to push me around!" Okay of coz Conan also pulls more women than the avg guy, but that is because *anything* is better than boring. I know a femboy who does well with women because *anything* is better than boring. There is a niche market for everything except being boringly average and not standing out in any way.
100% to all this. It's very weird to me to posit that attraction to women is less variable than men, when the ideal of male beauty has been essentially unchanged and cross cultural for thousands of years. Michaelangelo and Greek gods all look exactly like Calvin Klein undie models today. And the ultra musclely gym bros are trying to impress each other/themselves, women don't even like guys that big. Meanwhile, the trends for attractive women have changed a lot just in my short lifetime. 20 years ago everyone was worried about their butt looking too big and now they're all injecting stuff into their butts to make them bigger.
I think it is a mistake to look only at naked beauty ideals, there are many other things that add up to attractiveness (this article is explicitly about status). However you have a point. If one would take the most attractive men today like Clooney and stick them into an Elizabethan court, they would be doing okay after some learning and a new wardrobe. There is an ideal of the polite and yet courageous aristocratic gentleman that is virtually unchanged.
The Mali thing is just bizarre. In most cases, "beautiful" women from different cultures are actually pretty hot, if you put them in a TARDIS and bring them to Earth, United States, year 2024. Not true with the Mali large women.
Foot binding is a bit weird as well, but it makes sense, as it's an exaggeration of a normal difference between men and women.
I think it has not been so in traditional cultures, but global pop culture and social media spread Western ideals of beauty around. Perhaps even earlier, colonialism and all that.
I mean, as a parallel, look at how politicians wear suits everywhere from China to Africa. That used to be a London fashion...
I would add long hair, shaven legs, and lighter skin. these are the last vestiges of female beauty standards in the developed world which are desired by men but are not signals of good health. (health defined as longevity and ability to make healthy babies).
Most health-unaligned beauty ideals like high heels, long painted nails, or low muscle mass are not actually more attractive to men, it's just that other women think it is pretty.
overall, male attraction to women is wayy more homogenous than female attraction to men, and can be compressed without much loss to appearing healthy & young and appearing female rather than male.
It's an interesting point, and tracks with what Richard says about social upheaval. And we definitely are in one of those times.
I do think Conan (or more precisely anyone who looks like Ahnold in the original movie or Momoa in the new one) would draw more women than, say, the lead D&D designer.
I don't disagree with a lot of what you wrote. However, you are overemphasizing cultural influence rather than material influences. Poor people seeking to move up in the world by attaching themselves to those with wealth have ALWAYS been a thing, for both sexes. It's just that there were and still today are comparatively far fewer independently wealthy women, so it's much more common to see young women doing this.
But for those wealthy women that do exist, there are plenty of broke dudes trying to get with them and willing to overlook age and appearance just like broke chicks will, and that has always been the case going back hundreds of years. Many famous historical examples abound, but also it's a well known phenomenon for even modestly financially comfortable single middle aged women in their 50s and 60s to get swarmed by broke guys in their early 20s looking for a sugar mama when they go on dating apps, nowadays. Whoring isn't limited by gender.
Anyway I'm not really sure why it matters whether "attraction" is really there or not...almost certainly it is not in either case, though it's a heck of a lot easier to fake as a woman. As a guy you probably need a Viagra prescription.
The real difference here is whether the older person cares or wants to swallow their pride in exchange for the sex and romance. ln general, an old man is much more willing to put aside any personal affront to his pride about being "used" in order to land the hottie. Old women often don't even have a sex drive, so no motivation for them to do this. And if you have movies and media telling you it's normal, it makes it all the easier to tell yourself "no, he/she really wants me". In other words, I think the lying to oneself comes into play far more on the older person's side than it does on the younger person's. Why would the younger person even care or need to lie to themselves? They know they're getting access to money and networking/social opportunities they have zero access to otherwise. And obviously the football guy doesn't care either. Though I'm sure he has zero expectation that the cheerleader would stay with him if he lost all his money.
Poor and less resourced people kiss up to fake nice feelings for higher status people who control their access to resources ALL THE TIME. Like that is part of everyday life for most people, in the form of laughing at your boss's jokes and acting like you think he's a genius. I don't think it's the lower down person who has to lie to themselves, it's much more likely the higher up person convincing themselves that "all my staff loves me and looks up to me".
And you are *definitely* underestimating how mercenary and transactional hoes are. Any successful service provider knows how to deliver customer service...poor mistress or girlfriend is no different, they are very well aware they're providing a service that involves being pleasant and romantic and sweet.
I have many times seen a woman have a change in her material circumstances...either go from poor to rich or the other way around, and it fundamentally reorients her romantic longings and desires as well. Financially secure women aren't generally desperately longing to be in a relationship, while poor women usually are, and the poor women don't realize it's their material insecurity motivating those feelings. (Also make no mistake that poor is exactly what a cheerleader is...they make fast food wages).
I have not seen such "flips" purely by subculture but by material security. To the extent more conservative women may go more for money and resources and de emphasize other traits, I think that's more likely a reflection that they have less expectation of any other, easier way to secure those things.
In my view this is all more like Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. If you're poor you're concerned first and foremost with securing access to resources, and if offering your romantic and sexual attention is the way to secure them, that's what's most important. Once secure, you have the freedom to move up to higher order desires that aren't mission critical, and become much choosier because you can afford to be. People with power and resources get what they want, and people without take what they can get.
My professional background includes evolutionary psychology, so the substantive points in this post were already familiar to me. What I found surprising (and rather delightful) is that Richard has co-opted the term "socially constructed" in the service of his evolutionary arguments about gender and sexual preferences. More typically, arguments from social constructivism are used by leftists who seek to deny claims about gender and sexuality from evolutionary psychology (and personality psychology, too--see https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/cui-bono/201909/are-all-personality-descriptions-social-constructions). If I were still teaching at the university, this post would be required reading for my students.
One other thought: being a professor is now a very bad way for an intellectual guy to find a partner (for a heterosexual man anyway). You wonder what new niche those guys are going to go into.
It took me a second to understand this comment, but when it finally clicked for me, I couldn't agree more.
I would say that rise of "power dynamics" discourse has greatly hampered men who excel as provisioners and as masters of their technical craft. Women naturally look up to the high-status men in their local social circles. But since we as a society has decided that status gaps are problematic and exploitative, it means that men have a harder time directly leveraging their status at work into mating success. This causes an imbalance in what traits are rewarded in the sexual marketplace. It's easy for society to say "He's 30, she's 20, that's taboo" versus saying "He's a 9, she's a 5, that's taboo." So increasingly mating competition among men is reduced to "illegible" status gaps that aren't susceptible to purity spirals--like social skills and looks.
Like it's one thing for a man to say "I'm a doctor". It's another thing to be a nurse at a large hospital and to watch the head doctor in your unit navigate high-pressure situations, give direct orders, be gossiped about by your coworkers, etc. The later situation is much more amenable to raw attraction than seeing someone's profession on their dating app profile.
I've thought that for a while, actually. You wind up rewarding attractive or manipulative men over technically competent or financially successful men.
I suspect this has negative second-order effects, but I doubt anyone cares.
I think about this with respect to the chatter about the decline of the university/academia, and the different profile of academics and research today vs yesteryear.
I'm not sure if the Dead Bedrooms exists on Reddit these days, but there's a whole of lot of sexually frustrated men who more than likely have wives who married them for stability instead of attraction. Of course when men are jerks or don't help out with the home and kids enough, women will also withhold sex because of that too.
How much sex would Bill Belachick continue to get from his young lover once she secured the bag with a ring?
You make a lot of assertions but you don't really have much in the way of evidence besides "vibes". Your evidence for women being attracted to mediocre guys in the 70s is sitcom tropes; hardly bullet proof evidence. You don't get into much detail about women getting into rational relationships to men who they aren't super attracted to; I don't mean gold diggers, I mean like women in the 50s who have a lot of social and economic pressure to marry anyone.
From my anecdotal experience, there are a lot of women who are attracted to older men because they're older, not just because they're wealthier. I don't think this is purely socially constructed, I think there are biological roots. If you look at other primates, often newly pubescent females will be very much attracted to the older males who are closer to their peak of physical power. They aren't interested in other newly pubescent males remotely, and probably won't be until those males age many more years.
Among male humans, physical and social power almost never peak a the same time. A man's peak physical power is in his early to mid 20s. No human societies are led by men that young.
It's interesting that in a lot of science fiction and fantasy, there's a trope of men fighting for leadership of the tribe or group. (We saw that in Black Panther and in Dune, but it's all over the place in that sort of literature.) Notably, while it's kind of dramatic, literally nobody does it that way.
It a classic trope also that the most powerful person is also the political leader. Dumbledore was the most powerful good guy and also their leader; Voldemort was the most powerful bad guy and their leader. Superman is the most powerful DC superhero and leads the justice league. In Naruto, the most powerful ninjas lead their villages. Etc.
Dumbledore and Voldemort exist (not really, but you know what I mean) in a magical world in which power is unrelated to youth and strength. Superman is a fictional alien. In our society, the average private in the army could beat up the President.
So far as I know, fiction aside, there is no human society, from Hunter-gatherer tribe to Great Empire to a Republic in which top leaders are routinely chosen in single combat.
Last I checked (at least in the western world) women marry men who earn more than them while men marry women who are more educated. Even in my conservative home country of Bangladesh, women are motivated to pursue higher education simply to attract a high earning man. Given relatively rare the passport bro phenomenon it should suggest that men also prioritise status at least of the women they would want to marry.
i think the passport bro phenomenon is rare because it requires the bro to travel to a different country, getting to know someone who may not even be a basic level english speaker, and enduring the stigma from their colleagues, family and friends.
Stigmas can be surprisingly short-lived if the individual incentive is strong enough (and there isn't a compelling moral argument undergirding the stigma). Think about how quickly online dating went from weird to the default way to date.
Idk. Governments and religions haven't been able to ban alcohol, drugs, illegal migration etc. Doesn't seem like society had to try that hard to get rid of this phenomenon.
Do the men marry women who are more educated *than them*? I had the sense they went for equality for long-term mating, but they generally didn't want a woman with *more* education.
An alternative explanation, which fits evolutionary theory far better, is that those men are valuing hereditary intelligence directly. This would predict that income is less important to which IQ-signaling field women pursue to raise their status, and I think that's indeed what we see. A classical musician and duplicate bridge champion is a great wife for a man who values hereditary intelligence.
Didn't listen to their discussion, but I agree with Richard. It's mostly social conformity. If passport bros become *really* popular, then I suspect adverse selection will start to become a serious concern for those on the margin. But right now: it probably represents a straightforward dating improvement for a non-trivial fraction of men.
That last bullet point about male homosexuality, sissy-ism, and pedophilia, is sure thrown in quickly and moved on from, LOL. I appreciate that you even acknowledge it - it speaks well to your intellectual honesty, versus most analyses of this type which simply posit men are attracted to fertility traits (nice breasts and the right hip-to-bust ratio) and move on.
I can't fault you for not having more to say about it, as I also have no idea what the hell happened there (in Ancient Greece/Rome), or has happened in more recent instances where that phenomenon has bloomed. Nonetheless, it's important if you're going to do this type of analysis, as it definitely occurs, and it should be acknowledged rather than memory-holed (as happens with scholars who usually like and want to avoid demonizing the culture they're studying - as some contemporary Arabists do in denying the prevalence of these preferences in the recent Middle East, to the point that some pretend to be befuddled why Lawrence of Arabia begins The Pillars of Wisdom enthusiastically discussing the prevalence and tolerance for homosexual relations with younger men in the Arabian cultures he interacted with...).
> I can't fault you for not having more to say about it, as I also have no idea what the hell happened there (in Ancient Greece/Rome), or has happened in more recent instances where that phenomenon has bloomed.
It emerges in environments where men don't have access to women. Ancient Greek society was notable even in its own time for how cloistered the women were.
This. Men are also not pretty for nearly as large a portion of our lives as women are. Even pretty boys who don't deliberately ugly themselves up with tattoos lose their prettiness to age and noticeably coarsen in features by their twenties. Hence why gay men put so much effort into beauty regiments, and also hence the prevelance of the phenomenon of homosexual transexuality, which for a long time was the only for of transexuality at all.
"Among the Greeks it was called Paederastia, the love of boys, not Andrerastia, the love of men. Among the Romans the act was called Paedicare because the object of it was a boy. There was a particular name for those who had past the short period beyond which no man hoped to be an object of desire to his own sex. They were called exoleti. No male therefore who was passed this short period of life could expect to find in this way any reciprocity of affection; he must be as odious to the boy from the beginning as in a short time the boy would be to him. The objects of this kind of sensuality would therefore come only in the place of common prostitutes; they could never even to a person of this depraved taste answer the purposes of a virtuous woman."
I can affirm the above bullet points as being valuable. I would like to add one meta-bullet point in favor of social constructionism:
In pickup, this was called a Reality Warping Field. In short, it's not just that we have predefined ways of fitting our attraction into different narratives ie. asian women and white racists, old men and young women, rich men and poor women etc., but you can create a mini-narrative about yourself that a woman will buy into if they are attracted to you.
I will give two specific examples from a few years ago when I was in a fraternity at a party school.
We had an indian named Hassan (parents very recently moved to US, all of his family was in India. I believe a higher social class). Hassan majored in business. He was the biggest partier ever, and had what you could call the gift of gab - He could talk to anyone and everyone no matter who, and have a good time with them, it was quite something. Anyway, part of Hassan's game was he would have this partygoer-fuckboy personality, but a soft inside. Maybe this fits into RH's 'badboy' bullet point, but I'm not sure.
Women would literally fall over themselves for this guy - in their mind they got to know the Real Hassan, the soft, self-conscious, almost weak man who just wanted to find love (this was nonsense btw). This was his own script that he came up with that worked for him. He's now happily married to a beautiful woman, and I believe he has a successful career in sales.
For me, the angle that I had was similar - I was a really big partier, lost my scholarship because I chased girls instead of grades, but I had a more complicated inside - not the nice-guy inner personality like Hassan, but I was into musical theatre and acting. I loved performing and working at our theatre school, and I had nerdy interests too. This I think made me somewhat disarming compared to some other parts of our social circle that were a bit macho. I had a long and quality dating life off of this framing.
TL;DR - you have the freedom to take parts of your personality and fit them into a total package - you don't have to fall into the bullet points RH laid out to have a good dating life, but you do have to have some aspect to you that is appealing; a part of you that you want to share with other people who get close to you, as a reward for sticking with you. I'm romantic at heart so it sounds emotionally motivated for me to say, but the results speak for themselves. The point of my Ritalin-fueled rant is to say that a lot of love, and how people view you is socially constructed, but you have a very important role to play in that constructive process. Not saying you can make everyone fall in love with you, but there are powerful things you can do on the margin to make yourself more likeable.
Someone who is fun, interesting, funny, and fun to be around is it's own resource that women value very, very highly and that men often dramatically underestimate as a factor, for some bizarre reason. Being popular and well liked and bringing a social circle of friends is also a coveted resource. It sounds to me like what you're describing is mostly just having good social skills...guys like that rarely want for dates.
I spend a lot of time on women's forums where they bitch and moan about their boyfriends and husbands, and I can tell you that their main complaints have nothing to do with money or looks. #1 is not helping enough with kids or around the house, though that one is way more common for women with kids, obviously. But close behind, almost equal to #1 is simply the man being grumpy and boring and a downer who isn't fun or pleasant to be around. Being grumpy and unpleasant is a massive proportion of female complaints. #3 is not putting any effort into sex and just expecting them to put out without putting any effort to get them off or be sexy.
Looks and money are rarely if ever mentioned at all. Though admittedly, I am talking about guys they're already in relationships with, so presumably whatever their minimal standards were on those measures were already cleared.
>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
This begs the question, why do these women sort into different subcultures like that in the first place? The obvious answer here is innate personality traits, which in turn determine women's sexual preferences. It's not that the subculture had conditioned the political science major into preferring men who value scholarship and moral rectitude, but rather that she herself has sorted herself into a group where preference for men who value scholarship and moral rectitude is common! There might have been social factors that drove her to make such a decision, but the fact that these factors worked on her and not on others should make us ascribe more weight to the innate personality aspect.
>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.
I don't know where you get this from. Pretty sure women in criminal societies have a preference for criminal men, otherwise there wouldn't be so many criminals in the first place. Keep in mind that usually in such societies, cops are the worst and most violent criminals of all. I imagine in such a society the "bad boy" archetype might be transmuted so that it makes women attracted to cops, rather than criminals.
>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.
I also have no idea where you got that from. This is contradicted by the large numbers of foreign men who marry East Asian women. Walk through Tokyo and you'll see many foreign male native female couples, but almost never the other way around. Also, have you ever watched a K-drama or some romance anime? The male protagonists are all sensitive heartthrobs acutely attuned to the emotional needs of their love interests, hardly the image of emotionless Asian autism. Conditions in Siberia might've selected for autism back in the distant evolutionary past, but autism is clearly not the first preference of Asian women.
> Pretty sure women in criminal societies have a preference for criminal men, otherwise there wouldn't be so many criminals in the first place.
You're talking past each other. You're picturing a high-crime society like much of Latin America or the US ghetto. Richard is talking about something like 18th-century England here, or maybe modern Singapore - very low crime rates secured by brutal punishments of criminals. And I don't think "bad boys" were popular in either.
>There was a time when a hairy chest was considered attractive, but that’s usually not the case anymore.
I think this is an example of a common fallacy - seeing dating as a market. It is not, because you want one customer, or if you are poly, four. It is not like selling a million products or getting a million votes. It does not matter much if 90% or 10% of women like hairy chests - if you can find the 10%. Moreover if it is 10% then it will be so that they will really like it a lot, so much that they are willing to counter social opinion for it - basically a fetish. And that is a good place to be in. This is why online beats offline - show that hairy chest to ten thousand women and there will be a catch.
There is a niche market for anything. I know a femboy who is doing well with women. He just sort of manages to find "half-lesbian" women, apparently that is a thing. The only thing that does not work is not standing out from the crowd in any way.
Sadly so many young men do not get it. There was an am I ugly post on reddit. First pic, metalhead guy, big messy hair, metal t-shirt. That can work. Add sunglasses, biker leathers and go to a metal concert and hit on women there. Next pic, normal clothes, combed hair, trying to fit in... no, that's absolutely the worst idea ever.
Good piece. My take away is much of the feminist views of sexual attraction being culturally conditioned is just projection. What's true for woman isn't necessarily true for men. So if you are a female scholar, and you are reflective and in touch with your own sexuality, you can easily believe attraction is just social conditioning. As a straight man it's really hard to believe that, as our experience is so different.
Yes! I have long thought that the reason female feminist intellectuals concluded that sexuality was fluid and socially constructed was because that was true…for them.
All of feminism is projection. Feminism's central claim of 'patriarchy' is men conspiring to benefit all men at women's expense. This is how men would be if they were women.
Women naturally conspire, whereas men naturally compete openly.
Women have built in skills to manipulate men. Men have'nt conspired as much as they didn't take into account what women want.
Nurture and nature interact.
China started having standardized tests for government officials in the Sui dynasty in 605 (not 1605, 605), and it expanded during the Tang dynasty and stayed around through the Song, Yuan, and Ming dynasties to the Qing. Even now the Chinese have the gaokao. China was a lot more centralized, being basically a civilized empire for the past two thousand years, and the best path to success was to be a government official. So for a long time the best provider was likely to be a guy who was good at school. That affects culture, and I wouldn't be surprised if it actually affected sexual selection genes as well, since a successful man could have multiple concubines and have more kids that way. But it is definitely in the culture.
If you read the famous Ming dynasty novel *Romance of the Three Kingdoms* about the struggle over the collapse of the Han dynasty you will see a few big battles and macho warriors, and lots of generals cutting off the supply lines of other generals, ministers pretending to defect to the other side so they can trick the enemy commander into doing something stupid, generals pretending to be drunk so enemy emissaries will steal a letter on their desk that contains a (false) thank-you for defecting to the top general on the emissary's side, and in general lost of people playing 'I know you know I know' at various levels. The 'hero' of the novel switches sides several times, and the 'villain' runs away even more and winds up in charge of the biggest kingdom. Nobody wants to go to war without their top strategist, and there's one bit where the other generals of one kingdom mock another one for reading too many books...and he turns out to win the day.
Oh, and someone spares his brother from execution because he's good at poetry.
So I'm sure if they find the ten polymorphisms that cause women to be attracted to nerds, they'll be more common in women of East Asian descent. But the culture plays a role too. I'm curious how many generations in the country the nerds' East Asian girlfriends are.
>So for a long time the best provider
Best, maybe, but best does not matter because only few of the best exist. OTOH there were a lot of traders and landlords being pretty much good enough providers and had multiple concubines.
I just ordered that book (er, three volumes). This will allow me to understand your comment with much greater depth.
My comments are interesting enough you're ordering giant Chinese novels? OK... ;)
Seriously: it's a tome, and a tough read. It's full of Chinese names that sound the same because they have a tonal language and so there's extra info you're missing. There isn't much physical description, because that's not how they told stories back then. I would recommend either reading a plot summary or drawing out the relationships between the characters. There are a huge number of minor characters that show up once and are in there for verisimilitude.
For starters, I would follow Liu Bei, Guan Yu, Zhang Fei, Cao Cao, Dong Zhuo, Yuan Shao, Yuan Shu (yes, they're half-brothers--the family name goes in front), and eventually Zhao Yun, Zhou Yu, Zhuge Liang, and Sima Yi.
This Youtube video gives a summary in 110 min:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SFKMJmnYUTc
If you get through it, it's like Game of Thrones if Game of Thrones had been finished and gone on to influence literature for the next five centuries.
Well, I’m retired to my mountain retreat, so I find myself returning to my youthful habit of voracious reading. It sounds like it will keep me going for a while, and I’m almost done with the Aubrey/Maturin novels, so I need a new series to tackle.
If I have trouble, I’ll check out the video.
"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."
Really. Not many women here rushing to embrace this view, huh?
In reality, men's looks is very important to women. If you are a really great looking male, you don't need anything else, same as with gorgeous women.
However, women are more calculating, and more flexible. They are willing to trade off some preferences against others, so, in some very extreme cases, they will go for an old guy who is rich and famous and used to be good looking, but they will also go for an illiterate criminal or a poor young model if they are insanely hot, or a dork with a solid salary and a really beautiful house. Their preferences are no more socially constructed than men's; however, women are much bigger conformists so there is a fair amount of herd mentality and "I want what she is having" when it comes to their preferences regarding men as well.
Jack Donovan the way of men writes brilliantly on this. Female approval is usually a consequence of male approval. If all men like Zuckerberg, then all women will like Zuckerberg as well.
"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."
I think you're wrong here. If this was a natural preference you'd expect to see it among 2nd generation east Asian women raised in the West. But you don't - at least nowhere near the same degree. If anything the ick factor normie east Asian western girls have for autists is more than white normies. What's happening is simply that east Asian women are blind to western autistic traits, because of cultural differences and how relatively autistic their home cultures are. They're not repelled by autistic western guys, because they're relatively unable to detect the social maladaptiveness that western girls can.
Isn't that Richard's point? It's cultural, not genetic, so we should expect a big difference between first and second generation immigrants.
Agree. The second gen Asian girls I know are married to long haired, tattooed stay at home dads. It's the first Gens that are married to blonde high earning guys who wear khakis.
Point taken, though I'll say my experience is that, all else equal, NE Asian-American women still tend to excuse a little more white male nerdiness/dorkiness, on average, than white women of equivalent education/class/looks. Full-blown autism is another matter though. I never dated an Asian girl but a disproportionate share of my dorky Pacific NW friends did, one even married one, and those girls were all born here. I'm sure YMMV though, I can imagine a lot of local variation on this question.
More broadly, the phenomenon you describe is another part of the "passport bro" effect, and not just in NE Asia. Richard highlighted the value of earnings, but he missed that cultural barriers serve to increase the difficulty of sensing social awkwardness. And perhaps, even if a woman learns intellectually that her foreign husband is kind of a dork, she might not feel it as viscerally as if he were of her own culture.
It's a decent theory that a culture's "autisticness" is relevant to the size of this effect, but I don't know how well it checks out in reality. Colombia is a huge destination for passport bros, a dorkosaurus I grew up with married a beautiful Colombian girl, and it's hard to argue their culture is especially autistic in any regard.
Yh you're actually spot on. My point about east Asian culture being more autistic is moot, because the cultures are different enough that this would manifest with different social cues. The sole reason is probs cultural difference obscuring social awkwardness combined with east Asia being the most culturally different from the West. I think your point about even the east Asian girls who intellectually detect the autism, not viscerally feeling it, may even be the most important part. Since even with the cultural barrier, a non stupid woman could still work it eventually, and not feeling it is essential to it not killing the attraction.
It’s also could be the language barrier covers up social awkwardness. In Columbia, my guess just having access to money gets you a lot further, than the USA. In Mexico, if you can afford to go on a date, you will have a girlfriend. In the USA, you can make 80k and be sexless.
On the first point, I thought I said that: "cultural barriers serve to increase the difficulty of sensing social awkwardness."
But valid point on Colombia's poverty. It's much poorer than Mexico, even. I guess the reason it's a big draw for passport bros is that it's pretty close, and there are a lot of girls there that are fairly white (my dorky friend's beautiful wife seems to be near-100% Euro ancestry), yet it's a low-mid Latin American country economically.
Male sexuality is the same, despite the purely speculative biological stuff redpillers are saying.
Aphrodite and Venus statutes did not have large breasts.
Hollywoods first sex symbol: https://prod-images.tcm.com/Master-Profile-Images/ThedaBara.jpg
Look at the weird fattened-women culture of Mali, dudes pushing their wives around in carts.
Chinese foot binding.
These later two suggest a status element: can afford food, does not do peasant work.
But mostly fashion. Theda Bara seemed rhyming with the esotericism fashion of the day, Blavatsky and all, looked like a fortune teller crossed with an emo vampire and it was simply cool back then.
On women's attraction. Basically men perform masculinity for each other, not for women. A George Clooney type suave gentleman pulls more women than any Conan any day. The Conan stuff is partially a gay crush, partially all the ex bullied boys wishing they were like that and then no one would have dared to bully them. The Conan vibe is entirely performed for other men "don't dare to try to push me around!" Okay of coz Conan also pulls more women than the avg guy, but that is because *anything* is better than boring. I know a femboy who does well with women because *anything* is better than boring. There is a niche market for everything except being boringly average and not standing out in any way.
100% to all this. It's very weird to me to posit that attraction to women is less variable than men, when the ideal of male beauty has been essentially unchanged and cross cultural for thousands of years. Michaelangelo and Greek gods all look exactly like Calvin Klein undie models today. And the ultra musclely gym bros are trying to impress each other/themselves, women don't even like guys that big. Meanwhile, the trends for attractive women have changed a lot just in my short lifetime. 20 years ago everyone was worried about their butt looking too big and now they're all injecting stuff into their butts to make them bigger.
I think it is a mistake to look only at naked beauty ideals, there are many other things that add up to attractiveness (this article is explicitly about status). However you have a point. If one would take the most attractive men today like Clooney and stick them into an Elizabethan court, they would be doing okay after some learning and a new wardrobe. There is an ideal of the polite and yet courageous aristocratic gentleman that is virtually unchanged.
The Mali thing is just bizarre. In most cases, "beautiful" women from different cultures are actually pretty hot, if you put them in a TARDIS and bring them to Earth, United States, year 2024. Not true with the Mali large women.
Foot binding is a bit weird as well, but it makes sense, as it's an exaggeration of a normal difference between men and women.
I think it has not been so in traditional cultures, but global pop culture and social media spread Western ideals of beauty around. Perhaps even earlier, colonialism and all that.
I mean, as a parallel, look at how politicians wear suits everywhere from China to Africa. That used to be a London fashion...
Suits at least are better than Nehru jackets.
I would add long hair, shaven legs, and lighter skin. these are the last vestiges of female beauty standards in the developed world which are desired by men but are not signals of good health. (health defined as longevity and ability to make healthy babies).
Most health-unaligned beauty ideals like high heels, long painted nails, or low muscle mass are not actually more attractive to men, it's just that other women think it is pretty.
overall, male attraction to women is wayy more homogenous than female attraction to men, and can be compressed without much loss to appearing healthy & young and appearing female rather than male.
It's an interesting point, and tracks with what Richard says about social upheaval. And we definitely are in one of those times.
I do think Conan (or more precisely anyone who looks like Ahnold in the original movie or Momoa in the new one) would draw more women than, say, the lead D&D designer.
With D&D, I associate to something even below average, some mouthbreather. My example was Clooney.
Good point. I don't think we disagree all that much: both Clooney and pseudo-Conan are attractive (since Conan is fictional).
I don't disagree with a lot of what you wrote. However, you are overemphasizing cultural influence rather than material influences. Poor people seeking to move up in the world by attaching themselves to those with wealth have ALWAYS been a thing, for both sexes. It's just that there were and still today are comparatively far fewer independently wealthy women, so it's much more common to see young women doing this.
But for those wealthy women that do exist, there are plenty of broke dudes trying to get with them and willing to overlook age and appearance just like broke chicks will, and that has always been the case going back hundreds of years. Many famous historical examples abound, but also it's a well known phenomenon for even modestly financially comfortable single middle aged women in their 50s and 60s to get swarmed by broke guys in their early 20s looking for a sugar mama when they go on dating apps, nowadays. Whoring isn't limited by gender.
Anyway I'm not really sure why it matters whether "attraction" is really there or not...almost certainly it is not in either case, though it's a heck of a lot easier to fake as a woman. As a guy you probably need a Viagra prescription.
The real difference here is whether the older person cares or wants to swallow their pride in exchange for the sex and romance. ln general, an old man is much more willing to put aside any personal affront to his pride about being "used" in order to land the hottie. Old women often don't even have a sex drive, so no motivation for them to do this. And if you have movies and media telling you it's normal, it makes it all the easier to tell yourself "no, he/she really wants me". In other words, I think the lying to oneself comes into play far more on the older person's side than it does on the younger person's. Why would the younger person even care or need to lie to themselves? They know they're getting access to money and networking/social opportunities they have zero access to otherwise. And obviously the football guy doesn't care either. Though I'm sure he has zero expectation that the cheerleader would stay with him if he lost all his money.
Poor and less resourced people kiss up to fake nice feelings for higher status people who control their access to resources ALL THE TIME. Like that is part of everyday life for most people, in the form of laughing at your boss's jokes and acting like you think he's a genius. I don't think it's the lower down person who has to lie to themselves, it's much more likely the higher up person convincing themselves that "all my staff loves me and looks up to me".
And you are *definitely* underestimating how mercenary and transactional hoes are. Any successful service provider knows how to deliver customer service...poor mistress or girlfriend is no different, they are very well aware they're providing a service that involves being pleasant and romantic and sweet.
I have many times seen a woman have a change in her material circumstances...either go from poor to rich or the other way around, and it fundamentally reorients her romantic longings and desires as well. Financially secure women aren't generally desperately longing to be in a relationship, while poor women usually are, and the poor women don't realize it's their material insecurity motivating those feelings. (Also make no mistake that poor is exactly what a cheerleader is...they make fast food wages).
I have not seen such "flips" purely by subculture but by material security. To the extent more conservative women may go more for money and resources and de emphasize other traits, I think that's more likely a reflection that they have less expectation of any other, easier way to secure those things.
In my view this is all more like Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. If you're poor you're concerned first and foremost with securing access to resources, and if offering your romantic and sexual attention is the way to secure them, that's what's most important. Once secure, you have the freedom to move up to higher order desires that aren't mission critical, and become much choosier because you can afford to be. People with power and resources get what they want, and people without take what they can get.
My professional background includes evolutionary psychology, so the substantive points in this post were already familiar to me. What I found surprising (and rather delightful) is that Richard has co-opted the term "socially constructed" in the service of his evolutionary arguments about gender and sexual preferences. More typically, arguments from social constructivism are used by leftists who seek to deny claims about gender and sexuality from evolutionary psychology (and personality psychology, too--see https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/cui-bono/201909/are-all-personality-descriptions-social-constructions). If I were still teaching at the university, this post would be required reading for my students.
One other thought: being a professor is now a very bad way for an intellectual guy to find a partner (for a heterosexual man anyway). You wonder what new niche those guys are going to go into.
It took me a second to understand this comment, but when it finally clicked for me, I couldn't agree more.
I would say that rise of "power dynamics" discourse has greatly hampered men who excel as provisioners and as masters of their technical craft. Women naturally look up to the high-status men in their local social circles. But since we as a society has decided that status gaps are problematic and exploitative, it means that men have a harder time directly leveraging their status at work into mating success. This causes an imbalance in what traits are rewarded in the sexual marketplace. It's easy for society to say "He's 30, she's 20, that's taboo" versus saying "He's a 9, she's a 5, that's taboo." So increasingly mating competition among men is reduced to "illegible" status gaps that aren't susceptible to purity spirals--like social skills and looks.
Like it's one thing for a man to say "I'm a doctor". It's another thing to be a nurse at a large hospital and to watch the head doctor in your unit navigate high-pressure situations, give direct orders, be gossiped about by your coworkers, etc. The later situation is much more amenable to raw attraction than seeing someone's profession on their dating app profile.
I've thought that for a while, actually. You wind up rewarding attractive or manipulative men over technically competent or financially successful men.
I suspect this has negative second-order effects, but I doubt anyone cares.
I think about this with respect to the chatter about the decline of the university/academia, and the different profile of academics and research today vs yesteryear.
I'm not sure if the Dead Bedrooms exists on Reddit these days, but there's a whole of lot of sexually frustrated men who more than likely have wives who married them for stability instead of attraction. Of course when men are jerks or don't help out with the home and kids enough, women will also withhold sex because of that too.
How much sex would Bill Belachick continue to get from his young lover once she secured the bag with a ring?
You make a lot of assertions but you don't really have much in the way of evidence besides "vibes". Your evidence for women being attracted to mediocre guys in the 70s is sitcom tropes; hardly bullet proof evidence. You don't get into much detail about women getting into rational relationships to men who they aren't super attracted to; I don't mean gold diggers, I mean like women in the 50s who have a lot of social and economic pressure to marry anyone.
From my anecdotal experience, there are a lot of women who are attracted to older men because they're older, not just because they're wealthier. I don't think this is purely socially constructed, I think there are biological roots. If you look at other primates, often newly pubescent females will be very much attracted to the older males who are closer to their peak of physical power. They aren't interested in other newly pubescent males remotely, and probably won't be until those males age many more years.
Among male humans, physical and social power almost never peak a the same time. A man's peak physical power is in his early to mid 20s. No human societies are led by men that young.
It's interesting that in a lot of science fiction and fantasy, there's a trope of men fighting for leadership of the tribe or group. (We saw that in Black Panther and in Dune, but it's all over the place in that sort of literature.) Notably, while it's kind of dramatic, literally nobody does it that way.
It a classic trope also that the most powerful person is also the political leader. Dumbledore was the most powerful good guy and also their leader; Voldemort was the most powerful bad guy and their leader. Superman is the most powerful DC superhero and leads the justice league. In Naruto, the most powerful ninjas lead their villages. Etc.
Dumbledore and Voldemort exist (not really, but you know what I mean) in a magical world in which power is unrelated to youth and strength. Superman is a fictional alien. In our society, the average private in the army could beat up the President.
So far as I know, fiction aside, there is no human society, from Hunter-gatherer tribe to Great Empire to a Republic in which top leaders are routinely chosen in single combat.
Last I checked (at least in the western world) women marry men who earn more than them while men marry women who are more educated. Even in my conservative home country of Bangladesh, women are motivated to pursue higher education simply to attract a high earning man. Given relatively rare the passport bro phenomenon it should suggest that men also prioritise status at least of the women they would want to marry.
i think the passport bro phenomenon is rare because it requires the bro to travel to a different country, getting to know someone who may not even be a basic level english speaker, and enduring the stigma from their colleagues, family and friends.
not to mention the bureaucratic trouble.
Stigmas can be surprisingly short-lived if the individual incentive is strong enough (and there isn't a compelling moral argument undergirding the stigma). Think about how quickly online dating went from weird to the default way to date.
Idk. Governments and religions haven't been able to ban alcohol, drugs, illegal migration etc. Doesn't seem like society had to try that hard to get rid of this phenomenon.
Do the men marry women who are more educated *than them*? I had the sense they went for equality for long-term mating, but they generally didn't want a woman with *more* education.
The most recent stats show that majority of marriages are now with a wife with more education. That's what he's saying. It's been the case since 2015: https://ifstudies.org/blog/a-record-share-of-men-are-marrying-up-educationally#:~:text=Good%20news%20for%20American%20men,more%20education%20than%20his%20wife.
It is mostly automatic result of women getting more education on average.
Heh, weird. They were talking about that all my life but it never happened. Thanks for bringing me up to date!
If they didn't want a woman with more education why did pick them for long term mating?
No, that's exactly the point. Equal to them, but not greater than them.
Yeah. That's my point of why the passport bro phenomenon is niche because of individual preferences and not government regulations.
Well, turns out it doesn't matter, because I'm wrong (see below)!
An alternative explanation, which fits evolutionary theory far better, is that those men are valuing hereditary intelligence directly. This would predict that income is less important to which IQ-signaling field women pursue to raise their status, and I think that's indeed what we see. A classical musician and duplicate bridge champion is a great wife for a man who values hereditary intelligence.
And intelligence—with education as a rough proxy for same. Men don’t want unintelligent women as the mothers of their children.
That's basically my point. Men, like women, marry to increase outcomes for their kids. Sorry I should have made that more clear.
The increase in education for men resulting in more education for women seems kind of universal.
Didn't listen to their discussion, but I agree with Richard. It's mostly social conformity. If passport bros become *really* popular, then I suspect adverse selection will start to become a serious concern for those on the margin. But right now: it probably represents a straightforward dating improvement for a non-trivial fraction of men.
Insightful.
That last bullet point about male homosexuality, sissy-ism, and pedophilia, is sure thrown in quickly and moved on from, LOL. I appreciate that you even acknowledge it - it speaks well to your intellectual honesty, versus most analyses of this type which simply posit men are attracted to fertility traits (nice breasts and the right hip-to-bust ratio) and move on.
I can't fault you for not having more to say about it, as I also have no idea what the hell happened there (in Ancient Greece/Rome), or has happened in more recent instances where that phenomenon has bloomed. Nonetheless, it's important if you're going to do this type of analysis, as it definitely occurs, and it should be acknowledged rather than memory-holed (as happens with scholars who usually like and want to avoid demonizing the culture they're studying - as some contemporary Arabists do in denying the prevalence of these preferences in the recent Middle East, to the point that some pretend to be befuddled why Lawrence of Arabia begins The Pillars of Wisdom enthusiastically discussing the prevalence and tolerance for homosexual relations with younger men in the Arabian cultures he interacted with...).
> I can't fault you for not having more to say about it, as I also have no idea what the hell happened there (in Ancient Greece/Rome), or has happened in more recent instances where that phenomenon has bloomed.
It emerges in environments where men don't have access to women. Ancient Greek society was notable even in its own time for how cloistered the women were.
It was comparable to Afghanistan, where they also have a thing for beardless boys.
This. Men are also not pretty for nearly as large a portion of our lives as women are. Even pretty boys who don't deliberately ugly themselves up with tattoos lose their prettiness to age and noticeably coarsen in features by their twenties. Hence why gay men put so much effort into beauty regiments, and also hence the prevelance of the phenomenon of homosexual transexuality, which for a long time was the only for of transexuality at all.
"Among the Greeks it was called Paederastia, the love of boys, not Andrerastia, the love of men. Among the Romans the act was called Paedicare because the object of it was a boy. There was a particular name for those who had past the short period beyond which no man hoped to be an object of desire to his own sex. They were called exoleti. No male therefore who was passed this short period of life could expect to find in this way any reciprocity of affection; he must be as odious to the boy from the beginning as in a short time the boy would be to him. The objects of this kind of sensuality would therefore come only in the place of common prostitutes; they could never even to a person of this depraved taste answer the purposes of a virtuous woman."
Jeremy Bentham https://paganpressbooks.com/jpl/JB-ESSAY.HTM
I can affirm the above bullet points as being valuable. I would like to add one meta-bullet point in favor of social constructionism:
In pickup, this was called a Reality Warping Field. In short, it's not just that we have predefined ways of fitting our attraction into different narratives ie. asian women and white racists, old men and young women, rich men and poor women etc., but you can create a mini-narrative about yourself that a woman will buy into if they are attracted to you.
I will give two specific examples from a few years ago when I was in a fraternity at a party school.
We had an indian named Hassan (parents very recently moved to US, all of his family was in India. I believe a higher social class). Hassan majored in business. He was the biggest partier ever, and had what you could call the gift of gab - He could talk to anyone and everyone no matter who, and have a good time with them, it was quite something. Anyway, part of Hassan's game was he would have this partygoer-fuckboy personality, but a soft inside. Maybe this fits into RH's 'badboy' bullet point, but I'm not sure.
Women would literally fall over themselves for this guy - in their mind they got to know the Real Hassan, the soft, self-conscious, almost weak man who just wanted to find love (this was nonsense btw). This was his own script that he came up with that worked for him. He's now happily married to a beautiful woman, and I believe he has a successful career in sales.
For me, the angle that I had was similar - I was a really big partier, lost my scholarship because I chased girls instead of grades, but I had a more complicated inside - not the nice-guy inner personality like Hassan, but I was into musical theatre and acting. I loved performing and working at our theatre school, and I had nerdy interests too. This I think made me somewhat disarming compared to some other parts of our social circle that were a bit macho. I had a long and quality dating life off of this framing.
TL;DR - you have the freedom to take parts of your personality and fit them into a total package - you don't have to fall into the bullet points RH laid out to have a good dating life, but you do have to have some aspect to you that is appealing; a part of you that you want to share with other people who get close to you, as a reward for sticking with you. I'm romantic at heart so it sounds emotionally motivated for me to say, but the results speak for themselves. The point of my Ritalin-fueled rant is to say that a lot of love, and how people view you is socially constructed, but you have a very important role to play in that constructive process. Not saying you can make everyone fall in love with you, but there are powerful things you can do on the margin to make yourself more likeable.
Someone who is fun, interesting, funny, and fun to be around is it's own resource that women value very, very highly and that men often dramatically underestimate as a factor, for some bizarre reason. Being popular and well liked and bringing a social circle of friends is also a coveted resource. It sounds to me like what you're describing is mostly just having good social skills...guys like that rarely want for dates.
I spend a lot of time on women's forums where they bitch and moan about their boyfriends and husbands, and I can tell you that their main complaints have nothing to do with money or looks. #1 is not helping enough with kids or around the house, though that one is way more common for women with kids, obviously. But close behind, almost equal to #1 is simply the man being grumpy and boring and a downer who isn't fun or pleasant to be around. Being grumpy and unpleasant is a massive proportion of female complaints. #3 is not putting any effort into sex and just expecting them to put out without putting any effort to get them off or be sexy.
Looks and money are rarely if ever mentioned at all. Though admittedly, I am talking about guys they're already in relationships with, so presumably whatever their minimal standards were on those measures were already cleared.
>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
This begs the question, why do these women sort into different subcultures like that in the first place? The obvious answer here is innate personality traits, which in turn determine women's sexual preferences. It's not that the subculture had conditioned the political science major into preferring men who value scholarship and moral rectitude, but rather that she herself has sorted herself into a group where preference for men who value scholarship and moral rectitude is common! There might have been social factors that drove her to make such a decision, but the fact that these factors worked on her and not on others should make us ascribe more weight to the innate personality aspect.
>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.
I don't know where you get this from. Pretty sure women in criminal societies have a preference for criminal men, otherwise there wouldn't be so many criminals in the first place. Keep in mind that usually in such societies, cops are the worst and most violent criminals of all. I imagine in such a society the "bad boy" archetype might be transmuted so that it makes women attracted to cops, rather than criminals.
>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.
I also have no idea where you got that from. This is contradicted by the large numbers of foreign men who marry East Asian women. Walk through Tokyo and you'll see many foreign male native female couples, but almost never the other way around. Also, have you ever watched a K-drama or some romance anime? The male protagonists are all sensitive heartthrobs acutely attuned to the emotional needs of their love interests, hardly the image of emotionless Asian autism. Conditions in Siberia might've selected for autism back in the distant evolutionary past, but autism is clearly not the first preference of Asian women.
I think it's more 'introverted' than 'autistic'. They don't go for the loud or muscular types as much.
> Pretty sure women in criminal societies have a preference for criminal men, otherwise there wouldn't be so many criminals in the first place.
You're talking past each other. You're picturing a high-crime society like much of Latin America or the US ghetto. Richard is talking about something like 18th-century England here, or maybe modern Singapore - very low crime rates secured by brutal punishments of criminals. And I don't think "bad boys" were popular in either.
Roy Baumeister has a review paper about the flexibility of female sexuality. lining up lots of evidence
>There was a time when a hairy chest was considered attractive, but that’s usually not the case anymore.
I think this is an example of a common fallacy - seeing dating as a market. It is not, because you want one customer, or if you are poly, four. It is not like selling a million products or getting a million votes. It does not matter much if 90% or 10% of women like hairy chests - if you can find the 10%. Moreover if it is 10% then it will be so that they will really like it a lot, so much that they are willing to counter social opinion for it - basically a fetish. And that is a good place to be in. This is why online beats offline - show that hairy chest to ten thousand women and there will be a catch.
There is a niche market for anything. I know a femboy who is doing well with women. He just sort of manages to find "half-lesbian" women, apparently that is a thing. The only thing that does not work is not standing out from the crowd in any way.
Sadly so many young men do not get it. There was an am I ugly post on reddit. First pic, metalhead guy, big messy hair, metal t-shirt. That can work. Add sunglasses, biker leathers and go to a metal concert and hit on women there. Next pic, normal clothes, combed hair, trying to fit in... no, that's absolutely the worst idea ever.