Rich men like being rich and they choose ambitious women with good careers. They have ample opportunity to choose hot waitresses, but they don't! Revealed preferences show that women choose men around 2-5 years older than they are; very few women want much older men. Revealed preferences show that wealthy men want wealthy women. Ambition wants ambition.
Agreed. Cartoons Hate Her on Substack has visted this phenomenon multiple times and even done polls on this herself. Educated and successful men want educated and successful women, not poor bimbos.
And if you meet the guy who marries a poor bimbo, he is often not pleased in the long run, and the marriage likely won't last.
I mean, I tried it. I was 26, I sucked at finding a GF, but I had a good job and my parents also had money, so why not just try to pick up the hairdresser chick?
And I found it does not work. I cannot impress her taking her to ballet, she finds it boring. I cannot impress her taking her to a gourmet restaurant, she finds it boring and does not have the clothes for it. Her idea of being rich was going to a shit bar, and buying literally everybody a round of drink, or buying a 25 years old sports car and doing burnouts.
We just had entirely different status ladders, so to speak.
Why are you assuming a much younger woman is an uneducated bimbo? I was a 19 year old student when I fell in love (and later married) my 35 year old college lecturer. I was never a bimbo. I have just completed my fourth university qualification, as a matter of fact. If anything, my background was more affluent than his. One reason he was attracted to me was because he admired my intelligence. And because, as he said, I was "the only woman he'd ever met that [he] could spend more than a long weekend with."
Just look at the first wives of Bezos, Gates and any other male billionaires for example. All their wives are successful women from Ivy League universities, sure when they’re older and divorced they go for young hot women but it’s pretty clear that their baseline preference for women is high achieving women when they’re not desperately single and using their money for attraction.
These days men also get status from the status of their wives, if your wife is equally impressive/accomplished as you are without outshining you, it does elevate the man’s status up to as he managed to pull her.
Calling Lauren Sanchez "hot" is an interesting take.
I look at her and the words I would choose are closer to "plastic," "desperate," "grotesque," "low class," and "opportunist," but definitely not "hot."
It's complicated IMO. One thing that Hanania doesn't really talk about is diminishing returns - at a certain point, hot is hot, and the men with real options will look for other things (with "hot" remaining the necessary baseline).
I definitely don't agree that every man is seeking the most attractive partner with no other considerations. Men are looks-focused, but they also tend to be binary in their thinking in a way I think many women find hard to understand. Straight/gay, adequate/inadequate, hot/not... this is a quintessentially male brain. There are pros and cons to it, but one consequence is that men tend to be more willing to settle for something (or someone) Good Enough.
It's more that smart guys appreciate and want to be around smart women. Ambitious/competitive guys also tend to desire ambitious/competitive women (take a look at how many athletes marry athletes). And the hotter the better. Also the closer to 20's the better. It's just that for a guy in his 20's, he can't exactly go a ton younger (LOL; and smart gals lock those guys up in their 20's). Not so much wealth or even career. How much money did MacKenzie make in her career?
Mackenzie is the wrong person to do this with, if not for her relationship with Bezos, she would clearly be classified as a cofounder! She was very very instrumental in Amazon founding and did almost equal work to Bezos before she left after Amazon started becoming successful and they decided she should stay home.
Mackenzie is soooooooo mucn hotter than that Mar-A-Lago faced woman that Bezos is with now. It's hard to argue that this was an upgrade. The only thing I can guess is that maybe the new one fucks his brains out or something.
I don't buy it. Rich old men would still prefer a young hot woman who can be on his schedule. There just aren't many of those...so they "settle" with ambitious boss babes. I think the latter women still can get most men they want anyway. Men have the burden of attracting women.
There are plenty of hot waitresses. Why aren't these rich men hanging out in places like hooters (I believe an American restaurant with scantily clad women)
There could be various reasons, social conformity and not being confident in their chances. There is a study that showed most women find most men unattractive, while most men find most women somewhat attractive. Interesting contrast. So I don't think an old rich balding guy thinks it's worth it going to Hooters to pick up chicks. It's more worth finding a 35+ year old career woman in his social circles who's willing to be with him (for whatever reason) than being alone.
Um, no. Read more carefully pls. If they could do it, most men absolutely would!! But most high status men feel having a wife is part of that status, so they go for women who buy in, women who settle with them. Not all of them are tall with a full head of hair at 50.
I think the reality here is not that those women aren’t getting hit on all the time by all sorts of men, rich and poor, but that they revealed preferences that they don’t want to be with them… because they value things other than being a rich autist
TBH, I'm sure a lot of young upwardly mobile & successful guys probably fantasize about dating a hot Hooters chick, but the truth is that those kind of women don't like young upwardly mobile guys - they like heavily tatooed, musculed, tough bad boys or rich divorced older sugar daddies.
Rich old men will happily make a young hot woman into his mistress. But they almost never promote them to wife. Would you want your kids' mom to be a bimbo?
I would suggest that people date people who they come in contact with. If most people meet in school, they will probably come from similar backgrounds. Schools are surprisingly segregated by social classes. University only somewhat less so.
I suspect Bezos got mate poached while on TRT. It looks to me as though MaKenzie Scott is lighting a match to her half of their fortune.
If a man that earn 6 to 7 Fig have a harder time than he would wish to find a woman he could try to pick someone with a little bit less prestigious career but attractive. No one is saying that they do not have that preference but if it is taking more time than they have to find a woman there is a disparity between what would be optimal and what he is trying to get with there
Okay, but you are observing this outcome in a world that is shaped by the cultural pressures Richard discusses in the piece. It's not incompatible with what he argues. He's suggesting that cultural tastemakers are moving the goalposts in terms of what types of relationships are acceptable. Relative to a man in 1960, a man in 1990 would face greater informal social sanction for pairing up with someone dumber, younger, and hotter. A man in 2020 would face greater social sanction than the man in 1990. Culture has steered men away from these choices on the margin, which isn't at all inconsistent with what your comment suggests and what CHH has written about. Not to mention, as other commenters raised below, the threat of needing to pay alimony.
"Revealed preferences" aren't revealed in a vacuum. That which is revealed is filtered through the lenses of cultural and political institutions. You can say "men don't want to have sex with 17-year olds, look around, none of them are!" when they will get sent to jail and called a pedophile and have their lives ruined for doing so. (That's just an example; I'm not saying they should be able to.)
No one is going to look askance if a 30 year old tech bro marries a gorgeous, hot 30 year old waitress. Matt Damon basically did this and he gets only praise. Yet it doesn’t happen much. For a reason!
There is a strong reputational incentive for these men not to come off as shallow, so they kind of have to marry a specific kind of a woman. I would be surprised if most of them didn't have a lifelong baseline preference for young and hot women.
I wonder how much is the divorce/alimony issue there. I am asking this as a genuine question; it was decisive for me (I remained unmarried) but I don't know how big it is for other men.
i agree with the article 100% but you have to acknowledge that at least wrt gen z men and women are equal status-wise (with women sometimes surpassing men; college enrollment, employment, thanks to affirmative action) This means that even if we were to normalize the idea of transactional relationships again it would do nothing against the loneliness epidemic or TFR. I think this is the real reason for looksmaxxing phenomena, the men have nothing else to attract women with so all they have left is looks.
Yes, the big reason why fertility is falling (besides social media and cost of housing going up) is because many men (especially working class men) in the developed world _don't_ achieve the stable secure well-paying jobs in their 20's that their working class fathers had in their 20's (and unlike their grandparents/great-grandparents, birth control is much more easily available and less stigmatized, as is sex outside of marriage). So even if many women still prefer men with (decent/good/respectable) status/money/power/earnings, there's less to choose from, especially if they're working class. Heck, many working class men don't achieve it in their 30's either. And women just aren't going to shack up and produce babies with low status men with unstable income and no wealth.
Note that the professional white-collar educated class (at least before/until AI destroys those occupations) is still marrying and producing babies at almost the same rates as the professional white-collar educated in previous generations.
Yes, I think this is a huge piece of the puzzle. I think Richard is also just plain underestimating how much women care about looks. True, they don't tend to care nearly as much for young pretty faces as men do, but looks, and physical traits more generally, still matter a ton to them and I think always have.
It's not really a surprise that young men these days are "looksmaxxed" or "blackpilled" or whatever other made up internet term they're calling themselves. The old terminology doesn't reflect modern social and economic conditions. The study showing that men care so much more about looks was from 1993. Some of those people could literally be the parents of today's looksmaxxers.
Ah but women care A LOT about looks too. That's what Richard is missing. It aligns well with his thesis though--you mostly cannot change the important things...your height and your face shape. It's no use seeking validation from virtue signallers who pretend height doesn't matter or "beauty is in the eye of the beholder".
Have any of you actually looked at the scientific litterature on what predicts dating success? The number one variable is "attractiveness", which is basically an average of the face ratings given to men by women.
This seems wrong on several levels. Yes, women have higher college graduation rates but that doesn't equate with higher employment. There is still a significant gender pay gap and women's career trajectories tend to be much more tentative because of childrearing. I don't think gen z men and women are equal status-wise
The gender gap comes about almost solely due to women falling behind when they get pregnant and take years out of the workforce. Which is already after the "pair up" (or at least "produce babies" phase). Women who don't get pregnant don't fall behind men in pay.
It's not obvious to me that a society which is indifferent gerontocratic hypergamy (rich old men and attractive young women) is better off than a society which tends to discourage this. It will happen anyway at the extreme because human nature, but tends to leave a lot of single younger men which is inherently destabilising. You'd also leave a pool of middle-aged divorcées. Mostly, though, there's just something galling and anti-human about an attractive young woman who could be coupling up with an attractive young man instead ending up with a balding old man who happens to have been an unusually successful dishwasher salesman. Markets are good, but ideally the currency of romance should be genetic.
Seriously, people give all these power-based and coercion/manipulation reasons for opposing age gaps. I don't care about that aspect at all, but to me it's just plain rude and gross and self-centered to impose your greying old ass upon beautiful vital youthful flesh, and ruin the brief period of their life when they should lifwise be enjoying beautiful vital youthful flesh. Everyone has plenty of time to be a creaky oldster...taking that away from someone young by making them have to be with an old bag of bones just feels vampiric and cruel to me.
But then, I did always care about looks a lot when I was young. And I still think my husband is attractive at 50 when he's greying and has a gut, but that's bc I remember the younger hotter version of him, and I'm older too. I definitely would not have thought that how he looks now was hot when I was 28. Much easier to age with someone bc you barely notice the day by day changes.
I mean, young guys will eventually become old guys, so I don't see guys missing out in such a society. In any case. It's only a minority of women who prefer large age gaps. But they do tend to prefer guys with more potential. It's only a minority of women who prefer loser guys. Hotness tends to matter more to young folks too, but to guys more than gals.
Being an old school Equality Feminist myself, I obviously have a lot of disagreements with this essay. But it's particularly difficult to understand the logic that encouraging Epstein-style relationships will somehow lead to increased fertility and monogamous, family focused pairings.
One of the striking things about Epstein was how uninterested he was in actually having children. He certainly had a lot of opportunities (Ghislaine herself was desperate to have his child) but he never followed up on any of them. Leonardo Dicaprio is similarly childless. Andrew Tate claims to have a lot of children, but if he does, he has no meaningful relationship with them. A lot of the prominent sex-obsessed freaks of the past few years, like Jimmy Savile or Larry Nassar, also never seemed to want children with the girls or women they abused.
These are some of the paradigmatic examples of men who utilize "wealth and power differentials" to attract much younger girls and women, yet they are remarkably indifferent to the supposed social goal of coupling up and having babies with any of those women. It's hard for me to understand how anyone could look at these men and think that encouraging those dynamics will lead to more couplings with higher fertility.
I would argue those men embody a very different model of patriarchal masculinity, one which typically scorns fatherhood and focuses instead on rapidly attracting and discarding multiple young women. This is not a model of masculinity that leads men to long term commitments to women and high fertility, monogamous pairings. Nor is this the kind of guy most women actually want to procreate with.
(And if you seriously think encouraging female teachers to sleep with male students would help, go look up how many children Emmanuel Macron has. Not exactly a guy who has come away from high school able to form healthy relationships with women his own age!)
"But it's particularly difficult to understand the logic that encouraging Epstein-style relationships will somehow lead to increased fertility and monogamous, family focused pairings."
The very last paragraph: "It’s probably unhealthy to give every man social carte blanche to indulge his inner Jeffrey Epstein." Epstein is not a model. But any society that treats him as akin to a Modern Pol Pot is crazy.
There isn't just a stigmatization of stereotypical heterosexual male attraction. There has also been an as big, possibly bigger stigmatization of *young female* sexual attraction. A couple of pop culture examples:
When was the last time a movie like The Little Mermaid was made? Teenage girls are no longer allowed to fall in love for "bad reasons." This movie even has a very sympathetic, overreactive, concerned Dad who comes around in the end. I got into a conversation with my sister about this once that went something like:
Sister: But she fell in love based on nothing but seeing him playing a flute to a dog!
Me: Are you telling me most guys who play flutes to dogs aren't either A) above average likely to be keepers or B) lunatics and that you can't tell the difference?
Sister: You may have a point.
Disney heroines are now weird sexless drones who are bizarrely precocious and possessed of the wisdom of grandmas at the age of 16.
Second, I have gotten into Dr Who lately. The reboot of the show from 2005 features a 19-year-old hot chav girl falling in love with the titular character (who is a 900+ year old extraterrestrial who runs around in a time machine having crazy space adventures). This was wildly popular "shipping" material among online fangirls in circa 2005. It was also peak popularity for the show in terms of viewership and popular appeal among regular audiences. If you look at the fandom now, everybody now shits all over this period of the show for being "problematic."
Young female attraction has been assaulted from two fronts. A) Safety obsession, already covered here B) Because people tend to belittle anything and everything teenage girls like in general as the epitome of shallow stupidity.
Let teenage girls fall in love for "bad reasons" again! 1)Because safetyism is stupid and B) what teenage girls enjoy is no more stupid or vapid than what teenage boys enjoy. To go back to Dr Who, that relationship doesn't end well, but so what? To quote the show itself "Some things are worth getting your heart broken over." How else are you supposed to grow up anyway?
As an aside, I am *not* a woman who slots into the stereotypical heterosexual arrangement at all even though I am aggressively heterosexual and have 0 same sex attraction. I am married to a dude 5 years younger than me who is basically a house husband and I do not want to change this. We have been together for about 15 years. So, I'm all for removing stupid stigma from people's relationships, but *not* at the expense of stigmatizing mine instead.
Specifically, I actually have a pretty high tolerance for having divergent hobbies and values and such. But if I suspect a dude is constantly trying to "handle" me - telling me what they think I want to hear instead of the truth more or less to shut me up, there is 0 chance that will work out.
I think there might be something missing here, all those kind of relationships are still common in YA novels and teen dramas! It might have reduced in disney shows but I think that's mostly because they assume it's primarily for like 5 to 10yr olds not teenagers that watch teen dramas and YA novels now.
Like YA novels are full of those centuries yr old age gap with teen girls. Like AcCOTAr and ToG is one of the biggest book of the decade it's a romance between 500 yr old fae and 16 to 18 yr girls. And its fan base are heavily prog women.
Sure, I don't really read YA romance novels (never really did) because I'm too male-brained. I was always reading epic fantasy and sci-fi. I liked romance when it was merely part of the plot and not *the* plot. I can only speak to the way I've seen things evolve in the spaces I do occupy. It may be more a trend among weird, nerd girls who were the sorts of girls I did encounter in the spaces I was in.
I have seen some countervailing trends - the aggressive general sex positivity of Baldur's Gate 3 (which is by some measures the most popular single-player game of all time) as one example which allows equal opportunity randiness for everyone. This roleplaying game is "woke" from a representation point of view, but it also allows highly "problematic" relationships between everyone. It's even more immersive considering you can make a character and play that character having the romance yourself.
However, I also notice in the fandom that people enthusiastically engage in these relationships in the game, and then in the fandom itself still engage in extremely aggressive cliche Gen Z gatekeeping. There is a lot of cognitive dissonance. I don't know, but I suspect that the relationship to YA novels may be similar to this.
There is actually a great overlap with sci-fi fan girls in those community too, and the genre of romantasy or fantasy romance and stuff do try to make romance not the main thing but still integral.
The circle i ran in in hs were science nerd girls (I'm a dude and they were guys there too) but they read these too. I'm a bit young tho (24) and the YA circles actually have weirdly overrepresented nerd girls and sci fi circles.
Sure, I think all the speculative genres and media types have kind of sludged together over the years. I'm just old enough (40) that when I was really in the fandom trenches in my teens and early twenties, the lines were much harder and more gendered. Fantasy/sci-fi had pretty hard barriers and so did subgenres. Urban fantasy overwhelmingly read by women, military sci-fi overwhelmingly men, etc. The specific places I hung around tended to skew like 9/1 men to women.
I think ~Harry Potter is when the sludging together began to happen in earnest. I would say that the entire space has become much more feminized (not intending that as a pejorative) as 1) the genre barriers broke down and 2) men in general stopped reading and writing as much as they used to do.
Overall, I agree with this. But if "lesbians still have the preferences of women," then why don't they seem to "like status, money, and power?" That is an aspect of the theory that needs more refinement
I don't know that much about Lesbian dating, but I think it still plays some role, but it's more downplayed. I'll just have a few guesses what factors could be at play here:
- Lesbians are on average more masculine, possibly due to higher T (debated), whereas "falling in love with status and dominance" seems particularly pronounced among very feminine women.
- Lesbians tend to identify with the political left and are more likely to oppose capitalistic thinking on principle.
- Most lesbians still seem to have largely feminine values (empathy, communication, arts, feelings and romance) which in straight women often collide with their sexual instincts (dreaming of a sensitive partner, but then falling for a guy who is / loves to act like an asshole). This probably happens to some extent among Lesbians, but here, female social control is more effective, so I imagine it would be more subtle.
Maybe . . but in the same sense that lesbian women are on average more masculine, gay men are more feminine. But gay men live the way most straight men would if they could, sexually.
Yeah, the overall attitude to sex is obviously affected by sex more than sexuality: gay men are positive & open (and often reckless) about it (like most straight men want to be), while lesbians tend to be way more neurotic about it, just like straight women.
I can't offer any definite proof, but that is my observation based on what lesbian friends tell me about their dating scene, and it dovetails with the general cultural understanding
Oh, sorry, I read that too fast and thought you asked "why" not "what." The people I know best have very well-compensated corporate jobs and tell me that that is almost a liability on the lesbian dating scene in NYC, which really surprised me. Lots of people are underemployed in artsy crunchy ways and that has more status i guess
I think on some level the "find stuff you have in common" advice is just prudence. Looks fade. Hedonic adaptation means that you will likely become used to power and wealth over time, whether it is your own or your partner's. Finding stuff you have in common that you like doing together means that your relationship will still have a reason to exist over a long period of time.
The reason you want a relationship with someone more like you is that you want the relationship to last and make both partners happy. If all a man cares about is a woman’s looks, that ‘relationship’ will end on her 26th birthday. If all she wants his money and status, unless he’s Jeff Bezos that ends soon as well. How do you avoid seeing this?
I think Bezos got a lot more popular with the ladies when he became a billionaire and couldn't resist temptation. Same thing happened with Gates apparently. Zuck appears to have resisted so far, but given the Roman emperor kid names he probably figures he is building some sort of eugenic dynasty with his Harvard Medical School wife and doesn't want to screw things up.
Musk appears to have just figured he was going to offspringmaxx and acted accordingly. Well, he can afford it... We'll see how many of the problems of single parenthood get compensated for by megabucks.
Bezos got popular with the ladies?? Gates got popular with the ladies?? I'm don't see any Bezos or Gates groupies...Bezos married another narcissist, I'm sure they are very happy, Gates hung around with Epstein who pimped hookers to him. This does not look like being "popular with the ladies."
Well, *more* popular. They were nerds to start with. I think my point is they suddenly had a lot more temptation than they did earlier in life and then succumbed.
I don't know how "alike" you really have to be. Most of my wife's and my interests differ and we mostly have very different personalities as well, but we're comfortable around each other and can make each other laugh (and our values are generally aligned) so we'll grow old with each other (and yes, she's a cutie too, even at an age when most women in the US, uh, aren't).
I don’t think the ideal for lesbians is desexualization. That happens as an unintended consequence of otherwise competing priorities. It’s like a gay male couple that brings a child into the world and suddenly realizes how much work it is to raise a child.
I also can’t agree w this sentence vis-à-vis people who marry for money: “and the relationships that are formed on such grounds are not any less real or valuable than others”. Those relationships tend to create instability for the kids in the picture. So yes, less valuable.
Power breeds abuse. If we can figure out how to have power differentials without risk of abuse, great. But getting in/out of abusive situations is a whole lifetime of pain (if you make it out at all). And then whoops, there goes your genetic line 🤷♀️
I think Hanania is confusing "marriage" with "fucking", along with with the differing values that heterosexual women and men bring to those situations. If we're talking "fucking" and pure sexual desire, I think you might find that the "looks" values of *both* women and men are roughly about the same priority - a "one night stand" or even the early start to most relationships is formulated off attraction and pheromones in which looks for each sex play a big role in driving. Women in their 20's generally find men in their 20's and maybe early 30's to be the most attractive "fuckable" and prize attributes like height, musculature etc, as much as younger men mostly also prefer women around that same age range, of a certain standard of weight and fitness that (happily) comes naturally to most in that age range, which is why (under normal circumstances!) there's lots of "fucking" amongst the 20-some set with each other.
"Marriage", however, is different. It's a social and economic contract that brings in those other considerations: women preferring a "provider" type (that is maybe less important for that one night stand deal), men wanting some blend of the sex/attraction *but* also prizing a complimentary partner of more or less equal social status that they view as being a strong partner to run the household and raise the kids with. Being young and hot, but dumb as a rock, is not marriage material - it's fucking material. That's why strip clubs and OnlyFans and the rest exist to satisfy that seeking in men, but few of those are going to qualify for marriage mate material.
And then there's of course the affair seeking of both (typically more wealthy) women and men that typically involve younger partners for both. Or the "cougar" stereotype of older, attractive and (tend to be) wealthier women seeking younger men as much as the stereotype of older,w wealthier dudes with "sugar babies". But again, "fucking" != "marriage" when discussing these things.
It's a good point. You have to distinguish short-term from long-term mating (as evolutionary psychologists often do). In the short-term market, men are heavily interested in looks. Long-term, other factors play a larger role.
Of course, the line can be blurry, as human beings aren't always sure or even know what they want.
A corollary to this: a few years ago I noticed some women would become furious in the comments section if an article described rape as "sex." Given that the definition of rape is literally "nonconsensual sex" I initially found this baffling. Eventually I realized that when they see the word "sex" they reflexively define it as "make sweet gentle love."
I do think "find someone similar" concerns more things like values, goals and preferences, even basic approach to life, and that's not bad advice if you want to pair long term and make families.
As to the gist, I generally agree with pretty much everything you're saying and I'm agreeing as a outlier preference weirdo (aka so called "dominant woman", both sexually and relationally) looking from a perspective of almost-finished "mating" life (a widow with two adult children).
While that niche preference affects what I want in a partner in private (and is compounded by a certain distaste for conventional material ambition) I am still attracted to socially competent men who own their shit, can decouple emotion from opinion and ESPECIALLY ones who are good at manipulating matter and physically moving through the world with competence: generally fairly "masculine" men.
The idea that looking at homosexual behaviour will show us "natural" preferences of sexes has been around since I dabbled with ev psych in its early stages (David Buss made this point some time in the late 80s/early 90s iirc).
And the person in my nearly 40 year relationship history who was BY FAR the most impressed and sexually and romantically affected by my "traditionally dominant" traits was a lesbian woman half my age ;) So while anecdote isn't data, there's that.
And to finish this long comment, the insanity about "power disparities" is now being stretched to "reverse" heterosexual dynamics where the woman is "more powerful" which is making an absolute mockery of the whole idea.
A few years ago I got access to a dataset (now deaccessioned) of about 2000 respondents on a Reddit board which asked a whole bunch of kink questions. The first finding was that there was a *huge* tendency for women to prefer submission and a smaller but larger tendency for men to prefer dominance.
But the study had options for whether you wanted someone submissive in the bedroom but dominant outside or vice versa, as well as submissive or dominant in and out, and you could check more than one. (Even Aella doesn't have this, though her Big Kink Survey does have a lot of fun data--go check it out at https://bigkinksurvey.com).
The small number of female doms overwhelmingly wanted a guy who's submissive in the bedroom but dominant out--the other three groups (male doms, female subs, male subs) had primarily bedroom preferences for a sub or dom with the outside-the-bedroom preference less important. (Switches tended to prefer having a partner who was dominant in one and submissive in the other or vice versa.) Which basically suggests the advice for male subs is "do all the standard male stuff, but even more so, then go find your queen."
So it fits what you say. I'm guessing the female preference for competent, i.e. high-value men is winning out here.
Sadly as to our original question the lesbian sample size was pretty small as I recall. EDIT: I did go back and check my notes and bi women were a *little* more likely to be doms (though still more likely to be subs or switches) but there were no significant finds for lesbians, probably due to sample size issues. EDIT2: Aella's BKS dataset confirms this. Of course then you run into the 'tops women, bottoms to men' situation (or vice versa) which I had at least a few prior partners describe.
You know nothing about women and you also seem to be unfamiliar with the difference between being attracted to younger-looking women and sex trafficking.
Women are attracted to men who are physically attractive, who like women and like sex, who are uninhibited and playful and fun to be with. Yes if we want to marry them and have children with them we also want them to have a job and be responsible, but that's not about "attraction" that's about practicality.
This is a weird sentence: "If I did meet one, odds are I wouldn’t be attracted to her, since I am very annoying." It would be more, uh, normal, to say: "she wouldn't be attracted to me, since I am very annoying."
No, the logic there is: "If I did meet one [like me], odds are I wouldn't be attracted to her, since I am very annoying [and thus she, being like me, would be very annoying as well]".
Oops, you are correct. I don’t know how much of a deficiency in reading comprehension this reveals me to have, but I clearly do have one, to some degree.
I think you misunderstood the advice, it's not like become entirely like women of course, just find a woman that shares one specific interests of yours like maybe politics, economy, literature, type of movies, wine preference, it doesn't mean you had to interact exactly the same with this interest as they do but something to at least strike a conversation about.
I happen to have a lot of interests generally that includes a lot of overwhelmingly female interests as well as overwhelmingly male interests. Someone once tried to tell my brother we have similar interests (and we also look like twins) and he just said I had lots of similar interests with basically everyone cause I have a lot of interests.
Hmm. Interests may not hurt, but there doesn't have to be a ton of overlap in interests so long as you both can make each other laugh and be comfortable around each other (I'm thinking of myself and my wife).
Agree, just one random stuff is enough really, no need for a lot of overlap, one random book, movie or hobby style, it's mostly great for starting the initial connection not for maintaining of course.
Rich men like being rich and they choose ambitious women with good careers. They have ample opportunity to choose hot waitresses, but they don't! Revealed preferences show that women choose men around 2-5 years older than they are; very few women want much older men. Revealed preferences show that wealthy men want wealthy women. Ambition wants ambition.
Agreed. Cartoons Hate Her on Substack has visted this phenomenon multiple times and even done polls on this herself. Educated and successful men want educated and successful women, not poor bimbos.
And if you meet the guy who marries a poor bimbo, he is often not pleased in the long run, and the marriage likely won't last.
I mean, I tried it. I was 26, I sucked at finding a GF, but I had a good job and my parents also had money, so why not just try to pick up the hairdresser chick?
And I found it does not work. I cannot impress her taking her to ballet, she finds it boring. I cannot impress her taking her to a gourmet restaurant, she finds it boring and does not have the clothes for it. Her idea of being rich was going to a shit bar, and buying literally everybody a round of drink, or buying a 25 years old sports car and doing burnouts.
We just had entirely different status ladders, so to speak.
Why are you assuming a much younger woman is an uneducated bimbo? I was a 19 year old student when I fell in love (and later married) my 35 year old college lecturer. I was never a bimbo. I have just completed my fourth university qualification, as a matter of fact. If anything, my background was more affluent than his. One reason he was attracted to me was because he admired my intelligence. And because, as he said, I was "the only woman he'd ever met that [he] could spend more than a long weekend with."
1. You're putting words in my mouth. When did I discuss age gaps at all?
2. Your anecdote proves the point I was trying to make. Educated men like educated women.
Maybe you have a problem with Jessumsica. I never mentioned age gaps.
Just look at the first wives of Bezos, Gates and any other male billionaires for example. All their wives are successful women from Ivy League universities, sure when they’re older and divorced they go for young hot women but it’s pretty clear that their baseline preference for women is high achieving women when they’re not desperately single and using their money for attraction.
These days men also get status from the status of their wives, if your wife is equally impressive/accomplished as you are without outshining you, it does elevate the man’s status up to as he managed to pull her.
Calling Lauren Sanchez "hot" is an interesting take.
I look at her and the words I would choose are closer to "plastic," "desperate," "grotesque," "low class," and "opportunist," but definitely not "hot."
Then again, I'm female so what do I know?
See my comment in response.
It's complicated IMO. One thing that Hanania doesn't really talk about is diminishing returns - at a certain point, hot is hot, and the men with real options will look for other things (with "hot" remaining the necessary baseline).
I definitely don't agree that every man is seeking the most attractive partner with no other considerations. Men are looks-focused, but they also tend to be binary in their thinking in a way I think many women find hard to understand. Straight/gay, adequate/inadequate, hot/not... this is a quintessentially male brain. There are pros and cons to it, but one consequence is that men tend to be more willing to settle for something (or someone) Good Enough.
It's more that smart guys appreciate and want to be around smart women. Ambitious/competitive guys also tend to desire ambitious/competitive women (take a look at how many athletes marry athletes). And the hotter the better. Also the closer to 20's the better. It's just that for a guy in his 20's, he can't exactly go a ton younger (LOL; and smart gals lock those guys up in their 20's). Not so much wealth or even career. How much money did MacKenzie make in her career?
Mackenzie is the wrong person to do this with, if not for her relationship with Bezos, she would clearly be classified as a cofounder! She was very very instrumental in Amazon founding and did almost equal work to Bezos before she left after Amazon started becoming successful and they decided she should stay home.
Mackenzie is soooooooo mucn hotter than that Mar-A-Lago faced woman that Bezos is with now. It's hard to argue that this was an upgrade. The only thing I can guess is that maybe the new one fucks his brains out or something.
Yes and most smart women have good careers and went to university. They are not in dead end careers, waiting to be rescued!
Most went to uni/college, though a decent number then enter careers that just don't pay a lot.
I don't buy it. Rich old men would still prefer a young hot woman who can be on his schedule. There just aren't many of those...so they "settle" with ambitious boss babes. I think the latter women still can get most men they want anyway. Men have the burden of attracting women.
There are plenty of hot waitresses. Why aren't these rich men hanging out in places like hooters (I believe an American restaurant with scantily clad women)
There could be various reasons, social conformity and not being confident in their chances. There is a study that showed most women find most men unattractive, while most men find most women somewhat attractive. Interesting contrast. So I don't think an old rich balding guy thinks it's worth it going to Hooters to pick up chicks. It's more worth finding a 35+ year old career woman in his social circles who's willing to be with him (for whatever reason) than being alone.
Well right, this is the whole point! Not only do men not actually want poor hot women, the poor hot women don't want rich old men!
Um, no. Read more carefully pls. If they could do it, most men absolutely would!! But most high status men feel having a wife is part of that status, so they go for women who buy in, women who settle with them. Not all of them are tall with a full head of hair at 50.
I mean they can, they just choose not to, because other things are more important to them. That’s the whole point!
I think the reality here is not that those women aren’t getting hit on all the time by all sorts of men, rich and poor, but that they revealed preferences that they don’t want to be with them… because they value things other than being a rich autist
TBH, I'm sure a lot of young upwardly mobile & successful guys probably fantasize about dating a hot Hooters chick, but the truth is that those kind of women don't like young upwardly mobile guys - they like heavily tatooed, musculed, tough bad boys or rich divorced older sugar daddies.
Rich old men will happily make a young hot woman into his mistress. But they almost never promote them to wife. Would you want your kids' mom to be a bimbo?
There are more poor women than rich women, so I think there are probably more hot waitresses than ambitious boss babes.
The boss babes have the advantage of proximity. A woman with a career is also less dangerous from the alimony point of view.
I would suggest that people date people who they come in contact with. If most people meet in school, they will probably come from similar backgrounds. Schools are surprisingly segregated by social classes. University only somewhat less so.
I suspect Bezos got mate poached while on TRT. It looks to me as though MaKenzie Scott is lighting a match to her half of their fortune.
She’ll be fine
If a man that earn 6 to 7 Fig have a harder time than he would wish to find a woman he could try to pick someone with a little bit less prestigious career but attractive. No one is saying that they do not have that preference but if it is taking more time than they have to find a woman there is a disparity between what would be optimal and what he is trying to get with there
Okay, but you are observing this outcome in a world that is shaped by the cultural pressures Richard discusses in the piece. It's not incompatible with what he argues. He's suggesting that cultural tastemakers are moving the goalposts in terms of what types of relationships are acceptable. Relative to a man in 1960, a man in 1990 would face greater informal social sanction for pairing up with someone dumber, younger, and hotter. A man in 2020 would face greater social sanction than the man in 1990. Culture has steered men away from these choices on the margin, which isn't at all inconsistent with what your comment suggests and what CHH has written about. Not to mention, as other commenters raised below, the threat of needing to pay alimony.
"Revealed preferences" aren't revealed in a vacuum. That which is revealed is filtered through the lenses of cultural and political institutions. You can say "men don't want to have sex with 17-year olds, look around, none of them are!" when they will get sent to jail and called a pedophile and have their lives ruined for doing so. (That's just an example; I'm not saying they should be able to.)
No one is going to look askance if a 30 year old tech bro marries a gorgeous, hot 30 year old waitress. Matt Damon basically did this and he gets only praise. Yet it doesn’t happen much. For a reason!
This is a reasonable take based on actual evidence, but for some reason causes a lot people to get upset.
There is a strong reputational incentive for these men not to come off as shallow, so they kind of have to marry a specific kind of a woman. I would be surprised if most of them didn't have a lifelong baseline preference for young and hot women.
I wonder how much is the divorce/alimony issue there. I am asking this as a genuine question; it was decisive for me (I remained unmarried) but I don't know how big it is for other men.
i agree with the article 100% but you have to acknowledge that at least wrt gen z men and women are equal status-wise (with women sometimes surpassing men; college enrollment, employment, thanks to affirmative action) This means that even if we were to normalize the idea of transactional relationships again it would do nothing against the loneliness epidemic or TFR. I think this is the real reason for looksmaxxing phenomena, the men have nothing else to attract women with so all they have left is looks.
Yes, the big reason why fertility is falling (besides social media and cost of housing going up) is because many men (especially working class men) in the developed world _don't_ achieve the stable secure well-paying jobs in their 20's that their working class fathers had in their 20's (and unlike their grandparents/great-grandparents, birth control is much more easily available and less stigmatized, as is sex outside of marriage). So even if many women still prefer men with (decent/good/respectable) status/money/power/earnings, there's less to choose from, especially if they're working class. Heck, many working class men don't achieve it in their 30's either. And women just aren't going to shack up and produce babies with low status men with unstable income and no wealth.
Note that the professional white-collar educated class (at least before/until AI destroys those occupations) is still marrying and producing babies at almost the same rates as the professional white-collar educated in previous generations.
Yes, I think this is a huge piece of the puzzle. I think Richard is also just plain underestimating how much women care about looks. True, they don't tend to care nearly as much for young pretty faces as men do, but looks, and physical traits more generally, still matter a ton to them and I think always have.
It's not really a surprise that young men these days are "looksmaxxed" or "blackpilled" or whatever other made up internet term they're calling themselves. The old terminology doesn't reflect modern social and economic conditions. The study showing that men care so much more about looks was from 1993. Some of those people could literally be the parents of today's looksmaxxers.
Ah but women care A LOT about looks too. That's what Richard is missing. It aligns well with his thesis though--you mostly cannot change the important things...your height and your face shape. It's no use seeking validation from virtue signallers who pretend height doesn't matter or "beauty is in the eye of the beholder".
Have any of you actually looked at the scientific litterature on what predicts dating success? The number one variable is "attractiveness", which is basically an average of the face ratings given to men by women.
I'm reasonably sure this is false. The number one predictor of success in dating is extraversion by a large degree.
i agree women also care about looks a lot
This seems wrong on several levels. Yes, women have higher college graduation rates but that doesn't equate with higher employment. There is still a significant gender pay gap and women's career trajectories tend to be much more tentative because of childrearing. I don't think gen z men and women are equal status-wise
The gender gap comes about almost solely due to women falling behind when they get pregnant and take years out of the workforce. Which is already after the "pair up" (or at least "produce babies" phase). Women who don't get pregnant don't fall behind men in pay.
It's not obvious to me that a society which is indifferent gerontocratic hypergamy (rich old men and attractive young women) is better off than a society which tends to discourage this. It will happen anyway at the extreme because human nature, but tends to leave a lot of single younger men which is inherently destabilising. You'd also leave a pool of middle-aged divorcées. Mostly, though, there's just something galling and anti-human about an attractive young woman who could be coupling up with an attractive young man instead ending up with a balding old man who happens to have been an unusually successful dishwasher salesman. Markets are good, but ideally the currency of romance should be genetic.
Seriously, people give all these power-based and coercion/manipulation reasons for opposing age gaps. I don't care about that aspect at all, but to me it's just plain rude and gross and self-centered to impose your greying old ass upon beautiful vital youthful flesh, and ruin the brief period of their life when they should lifwise be enjoying beautiful vital youthful flesh. Everyone has plenty of time to be a creaky oldster...taking that away from someone young by making them have to be with an old bag of bones just feels vampiric and cruel to me.
But then, I did always care about looks a lot when I was young. And I still think my husband is attractive at 50 when he's greying and has a gut, but that's bc I remember the younger hotter version of him, and I'm older too. I definitely would not have thought that how he looks now was hot when I was 28. Much easier to age with someone bc you barely notice the day by day changes.
I like your phrasing, “gerontocratic hypergamy.” It’s an upper class R strategy which exploits and undermines civilization.
You must be an indigent attractive young man. Give yourself a little time and money and your opinion will reverse. ;)
I mean, young guys will eventually become old guys, so I don't see guys missing out in such a society. In any case. It's only a minority of women who prefer large age gaps. But they do tend to prefer guys with more potential. It's only a minority of women who prefer loser guys. Hotness tends to matter more to young folks too, but to guys more than gals.
Being an old school Equality Feminist myself, I obviously have a lot of disagreements with this essay. But it's particularly difficult to understand the logic that encouraging Epstein-style relationships will somehow lead to increased fertility and monogamous, family focused pairings.
One of the striking things about Epstein was how uninterested he was in actually having children. He certainly had a lot of opportunities (Ghislaine herself was desperate to have his child) but he never followed up on any of them. Leonardo Dicaprio is similarly childless. Andrew Tate claims to have a lot of children, but if he does, he has no meaningful relationship with them. A lot of the prominent sex-obsessed freaks of the past few years, like Jimmy Savile or Larry Nassar, also never seemed to want children with the girls or women they abused.
These are some of the paradigmatic examples of men who utilize "wealth and power differentials" to attract much younger girls and women, yet they are remarkably indifferent to the supposed social goal of coupling up and having babies with any of those women. It's hard for me to understand how anyone could look at these men and think that encouraging those dynamics will lead to more couplings with higher fertility.
I would argue those men embody a very different model of patriarchal masculinity, one which typically scorns fatherhood and focuses instead on rapidly attracting and discarding multiple young women. This is not a model of masculinity that leads men to long term commitments to women and high fertility, monogamous pairings. Nor is this the kind of guy most women actually want to procreate with.
(And if you seriously think encouraging female teachers to sleep with male students would help, go look up how many children Emmanuel Macron has. Not exactly a guy who has come away from high school able to form healthy relationships with women his own age!)
"But it's particularly difficult to understand the logic that encouraging Epstein-style relationships will somehow lead to increased fertility and monogamous, family focused pairings."
The very last paragraph: "It’s probably unhealthy to give every man social carte blanche to indulge his inner Jeffrey Epstein." Epstein is not a model. But any society that treats him as akin to a Modern Pol Pot is crazy.
Is that the baseline? If you don't massacre thousands of people you aren't really that bad?
Well, you can still be bad, but not as bad as the guy who massacres thousands.
There isn't just a stigmatization of stereotypical heterosexual male attraction. There has also been an as big, possibly bigger stigmatization of *young female* sexual attraction. A couple of pop culture examples:
When was the last time a movie like The Little Mermaid was made? Teenage girls are no longer allowed to fall in love for "bad reasons." This movie even has a very sympathetic, overreactive, concerned Dad who comes around in the end. I got into a conversation with my sister about this once that went something like:
Sister: But she fell in love based on nothing but seeing him playing a flute to a dog!
Me: Are you telling me most guys who play flutes to dogs aren't either A) above average likely to be keepers or B) lunatics and that you can't tell the difference?
Sister: You may have a point.
Disney heroines are now weird sexless drones who are bizarrely precocious and possessed of the wisdom of grandmas at the age of 16.
Second, I have gotten into Dr Who lately. The reboot of the show from 2005 features a 19-year-old hot chav girl falling in love with the titular character (who is a 900+ year old extraterrestrial who runs around in a time machine having crazy space adventures). This was wildly popular "shipping" material among online fangirls in circa 2005. It was also peak popularity for the show in terms of viewership and popular appeal among regular audiences. If you look at the fandom now, everybody now shits all over this period of the show for being "problematic."
Young female attraction has been assaulted from two fronts. A) Safety obsession, already covered here B) Because people tend to belittle anything and everything teenage girls like in general as the epitome of shallow stupidity.
Let teenage girls fall in love for "bad reasons" again! 1)Because safetyism is stupid and B) what teenage girls enjoy is no more stupid or vapid than what teenage boys enjoy. To go back to Dr Who, that relationship doesn't end well, but so what? To quote the show itself "Some things are worth getting your heart broken over." How else are you supposed to grow up anyway?
As an aside, I am *not* a woman who slots into the stereotypical heterosexual arrangement at all even though I am aggressively heterosexual and have 0 same sex attraction. I am married to a dude 5 years younger than me who is basically a house husband and I do not want to change this. We have been together for about 15 years. So, I'm all for removing stupid stigma from people's relationships, but *not* at the expense of stigmatizing mine instead.
Specifically, I actually have a pretty high tolerance for having divergent hobbies and values and such. But if I suspect a dude is constantly trying to "handle" me - telling me what they think I want to hear instead of the truth more or less to shut me up, there is 0 chance that will work out.
I think there might be something missing here, all those kind of relationships are still common in YA novels and teen dramas! It might have reduced in disney shows but I think that's mostly because they assume it's primarily for like 5 to 10yr olds not teenagers that watch teen dramas and YA novels now.
Like YA novels are full of those centuries yr old age gap with teen girls. Like AcCOTAr and ToG is one of the biggest book of the decade it's a romance between 500 yr old fae and 16 to 18 yr girls. And its fan base are heavily prog women.
Sure, I don't really read YA romance novels (never really did) because I'm too male-brained. I was always reading epic fantasy and sci-fi. I liked romance when it was merely part of the plot and not *the* plot. I can only speak to the way I've seen things evolve in the spaces I do occupy. It may be more a trend among weird, nerd girls who were the sorts of girls I did encounter in the spaces I was in.
I have seen some countervailing trends - the aggressive general sex positivity of Baldur's Gate 3 (which is by some measures the most popular single-player game of all time) as one example which allows equal opportunity randiness for everyone. This roleplaying game is "woke" from a representation point of view, but it also allows highly "problematic" relationships between everyone. It's even more immersive considering you can make a character and play that character having the romance yourself.
However, I also notice in the fandom that people enthusiastically engage in these relationships in the game, and then in the fandom itself still engage in extremely aggressive cliche Gen Z gatekeeping. There is a lot of cognitive dissonance. I don't know, but I suspect that the relationship to YA novels may be similar to this.
There is actually a great overlap with sci-fi fan girls in those community too, and the genre of romantasy or fantasy romance and stuff do try to make romance not the main thing but still integral.
The circle i ran in in hs were science nerd girls (I'm a dude and they were guys there too) but they read these too. I'm a bit young tho (24) and the YA circles actually have weirdly overrepresented nerd girls and sci fi circles.
Sure, I think all the speculative genres and media types have kind of sludged together over the years. I'm just old enough (40) that when I was really in the fandom trenches in my teens and early twenties, the lines were much harder and more gendered. Fantasy/sci-fi had pretty hard barriers and so did subgenres. Urban fantasy overwhelmingly read by women, military sci-fi overwhelmingly men, etc. The specific places I hung around tended to skew like 9/1 men to women.
I think ~Harry Potter is when the sludging together began to happen in earnest. I would say that the entire space has become much more feminized (not intending that as a pejorative) as 1) the genre barriers broke down and 2) men in general stopped reading and writing as much as they used to do.
2) is undoubtedly correct; I have a friend who can't find any books to interest her teenage boy in.
Overall, I agree with this. But if "lesbians still have the preferences of women," then why don't they seem to "like status, money, and power?" That is an aspect of the theory that needs more refinement
I don't know that much about Lesbian dating, but I think it still plays some role, but it's more downplayed. I'll just have a few guesses what factors could be at play here:
- Lesbians are on average more masculine, possibly due to higher T (debated), whereas "falling in love with status and dominance" seems particularly pronounced among very feminine women.
- Lesbians tend to identify with the political left and are more likely to oppose capitalistic thinking on principle.
- Most lesbians still seem to have largely feminine values (empathy, communication, arts, feelings and romance) which in straight women often collide with their sexual instincts (dreaming of a sensitive partner, but then falling for a guy who is / loves to act like an asshole). This probably happens to some extent among Lesbians, but here, female social control is more effective, so I imagine it would be more subtle.
Maybe . . but in the same sense that lesbian women are on average more masculine, gay men are more feminine. But gay men live the way most straight men would if they could, sexually.
Yeah, the overall attitude to sex is obviously affected by sex more than sexuality: gay men are positive & open (and often reckless) about it (like most straight men want to be), while lesbians tend to be way more neurotic about it, just like straight women.
??? Who says they don't? But lesbian status and power may not be measured the same way as hetero male status and power.
??? Who says they don't? But lesbian status and power may not be measured the same way as hetero male status and power.
I can't offer any definite proof, but that is my observation based on what lesbian friends tell me about their dating scene, and it dovetails with the general cultural understanding
What do they tell you about their dating scene? I wonder how the whole thing runs when the parties are of the same gender.
Either their dating life just come up because they are single, or sometimes I'll ask about it
Nah, I'm curious. What kind of status and power do they go after?
Oh, sorry, I read that too fast and thought you asked "why" not "what." The people I know best have very well-compensated corporate jobs and tell me that that is almost a liability on the lesbian dating scene in NYC, which really surprised me. Lots of people are underemployed in artsy crunchy ways and that has more status i guess
I think on some level the "find stuff you have in common" advice is just prudence. Looks fade. Hedonic adaptation means that you will likely become used to power and wealth over time, whether it is your own or your partner's. Finding stuff you have in common that you like doing together means that your relationship will still have a reason to exist over a long period of time.
The reason you want a relationship with someone more like you is that you want the relationship to last and make both partners happy. If all a man cares about is a woman’s looks, that ‘relationship’ will end on her 26th birthday. If all she wants his money and status, unless he’s Jeff Bezos that ends soon as well. How do you avoid seeing this?
I think Bezos got a lot more popular with the ladies when he became a billionaire and couldn't resist temptation. Same thing happened with Gates apparently. Zuck appears to have resisted so far, but given the Roman emperor kid names he probably figures he is building some sort of eugenic dynasty with his Harvard Medical School wife and doesn't want to screw things up.
Musk appears to have just figured he was going to offspringmaxx and acted accordingly. Well, he can afford it... We'll see how many of the problems of single parenthood get compensated for by megabucks.
Bezos got popular with the ladies?? Gates got popular with the ladies?? I'm don't see any Bezos or Gates groupies...Bezos married another narcissist, I'm sure they are very happy, Gates hung around with Epstein who pimped hookers to him. This does not look like being "popular with the ladies."
Well, *more* popular. They were nerds to start with. I think my point is they suddenly had a lot more temptation than they did earlier in life and then succumbed.
I don't know how "alike" you really have to be. Most of my wife's and my interests differ and we mostly have very different personalities as well, but we're comfortable around each other and can make each other laugh (and our values are generally aligned) so we'll grow old with each other (and yes, she's a cutie too, even at an age when most women in the US, uh, aren't).
Do you enjoy each other’s company? Do you share most of your beliefs?
I don’t think the ideal for lesbians is desexualization. That happens as an unintended consequence of otherwise competing priorities. It’s like a gay male couple that brings a child into the world and suddenly realizes how much work it is to raise a child.
I also can’t agree w this sentence vis-à-vis people who marry for money: “and the relationships that are formed on such grounds are not any less real or valuable than others”. Those relationships tend to create instability for the kids in the picture. So yes, less valuable.
Power breeds abuse. If we can figure out how to have power differentials without risk of abuse, great. But getting in/out of abusive situations is a whole lifetime of pain (if you make it out at all). And then whoops, there goes your genetic line 🤷♀️
Yep
I think Hanania is confusing "marriage" with "fucking", along with with the differing values that heterosexual women and men bring to those situations. If we're talking "fucking" and pure sexual desire, I think you might find that the "looks" values of *both* women and men are roughly about the same priority - a "one night stand" or even the early start to most relationships is formulated off attraction and pheromones in which looks for each sex play a big role in driving. Women in their 20's generally find men in their 20's and maybe early 30's to be the most attractive "fuckable" and prize attributes like height, musculature etc, as much as younger men mostly also prefer women around that same age range, of a certain standard of weight and fitness that (happily) comes naturally to most in that age range, which is why (under normal circumstances!) there's lots of "fucking" amongst the 20-some set with each other.
"Marriage", however, is different. It's a social and economic contract that brings in those other considerations: women preferring a "provider" type (that is maybe less important for that one night stand deal), men wanting some blend of the sex/attraction *but* also prizing a complimentary partner of more or less equal social status that they view as being a strong partner to run the household and raise the kids with. Being young and hot, but dumb as a rock, is not marriage material - it's fucking material. That's why strip clubs and OnlyFans and the rest exist to satisfy that seeking in men, but few of those are going to qualify for marriage mate material.
And then there's of course the affair seeking of both (typically more wealthy) women and men that typically involve younger partners for both. Or the "cougar" stereotype of older, attractive and (tend to be) wealthier women seeking younger men as much as the stereotype of older,w wealthier dudes with "sugar babies". But again, "fucking" != "marriage" when discussing these things.
It's a good point. You have to distinguish short-term from long-term mating (as evolutionary psychologists often do). In the short-term market, men are heavily interested in looks. Long-term, other factors play a larger role.
Of course, the line can be blurry, as human beings aren't always sure or even know what they want.
A corollary to this: a few years ago I noticed some women would become furious in the comments section if an article described rape as "sex." Given that the definition of rape is literally "nonconsensual sex" I initially found this baffling. Eventually I realized that when they see the word "sex" they reflexively define it as "make sweet gentle love."
Old saying. When it comes to sex women need a reason men need a location.
Bill Engvall - Three Basic Needs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zalwQv2zSNg
I do think "find someone similar" concerns more things like values, goals and preferences, even basic approach to life, and that's not bad advice if you want to pair long term and make families.
As to the gist, I generally agree with pretty much everything you're saying and I'm agreeing as a outlier preference weirdo (aka so called "dominant woman", both sexually and relationally) looking from a perspective of almost-finished "mating" life (a widow with two adult children).
While that niche preference affects what I want in a partner in private (and is compounded by a certain distaste for conventional material ambition) I am still attracted to socially competent men who own their shit, can decouple emotion from opinion and ESPECIALLY ones who are good at manipulating matter and physically moving through the world with competence: generally fairly "masculine" men.
The idea that looking at homosexual behaviour will show us "natural" preferences of sexes has been around since I dabbled with ev psych in its early stages (David Buss made this point some time in the late 80s/early 90s iirc).
And the person in my nearly 40 year relationship history who was BY FAR the most impressed and sexually and romantically affected by my "traditionally dominant" traits was a lesbian woman half my age ;) So while anecdote isn't data, there's that.
And to finish this long comment, the insanity about "power disparities" is now being stretched to "reverse" heterosexual dynamics where the woman is "more powerful" which is making an absolute mockery of the whole idea.
A few years ago I got access to a dataset (now deaccessioned) of about 2000 respondents on a Reddit board which asked a whole bunch of kink questions. The first finding was that there was a *huge* tendency for women to prefer submission and a smaller but larger tendency for men to prefer dominance.
But the study had options for whether you wanted someone submissive in the bedroom but dominant outside or vice versa, as well as submissive or dominant in and out, and you could check more than one. (Even Aella doesn't have this, though her Big Kink Survey does have a lot of fun data--go check it out at https://bigkinksurvey.com).
The small number of female doms overwhelmingly wanted a guy who's submissive in the bedroom but dominant out--the other three groups (male doms, female subs, male subs) had primarily bedroom preferences for a sub or dom with the outside-the-bedroom preference less important. (Switches tended to prefer having a partner who was dominant in one and submissive in the other or vice versa.) Which basically suggests the advice for male subs is "do all the standard male stuff, but even more so, then go find your queen."
So it fits what you say. I'm guessing the female preference for competent, i.e. high-value men is winning out here.
Sadly as to our original question the lesbian sample size was pretty small as I recall. EDIT: I did go back and check my notes and bi women were a *little* more likely to be doms (though still more likely to be subs or switches) but there were no significant finds for lesbians, probably due to sample size issues. EDIT2: Aella's BKS dataset confirms this. Of course then you run into the 'tops women, bottoms to men' situation (or vice versa) which I had at least a few prior partners describe.
You know nothing about women and you also seem to be unfamiliar with the difference between being attracted to younger-looking women and sex trafficking.
Women are attracted to men who are physically attractive, who like women and like sex, who are uninhibited and playful and fun to be with. Yes if we want to marry them and have children with them we also want them to have a job and be responsible, but that's not about "attraction" that's about practicality.
As a cougar, I approve of this message
This is a weird sentence: "If I did meet one, odds are I wouldn’t be attracted to her, since I am very annoying." It would be more, uh, normal, to say: "she wouldn't be attracted to me, since I am very annoying."
No, the logic there is: "If I did meet one [like me], odds are I wouldn't be attracted to her, since I am very annoying [and thus she, being like me, would be very annoying as well]".
Oops, you are correct. I don’t know how much of a deficiency in reading comprehension this reveals me to have, but I clearly do have one, to some degree.
I think you misunderstood the advice, it's not like become entirely like women of course, just find a woman that shares one specific interests of yours like maybe politics, economy, literature, type of movies, wine preference, it doesn't mean you had to interact exactly the same with this interest as they do but something to at least strike a conversation about.
I happen to have a lot of interests generally that includes a lot of overwhelmingly female interests as well as overwhelmingly male interests. Someone once tried to tell my brother we have similar interests (and we also look like twins) and he just said I had lots of similar interests with basically everyone cause I have a lot of interests.
For me, it's largely "be able to talk intelligently about things." I can talk about almost any topic if it's discussed in an intelligent enough way.
Hmm. Interests may not hurt, but there doesn't have to be a ton of overlap in interests so long as you both can make each other laugh and be comfortable around each other (I'm thinking of myself and my wife).
Agree, just one random stuff is enough really, no need for a lot of overlap, one random book, movie or hobby style, it's mostly great for starting the initial connection not for maintaining of course.