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.
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
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 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
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.
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.
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."
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 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).
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.
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.
Gays and straights have similar base attractions; however straights are attracted to neoteny at a higher level, so the comparable would be a 14 year old boy to even a 23 year old woman.
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 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.
The upshot of this coming to be is even greater numbers of lower status men and lower looks women being left out of romantic relationships no? Like they don’t seem to figure into this worldview.
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.
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.
See my comment in response.
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
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?
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 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.
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.
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
??? 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
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.
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.
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
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 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).
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.
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.
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.
Yes, Richard, you are annoying -- as all libertarians are. But this essay was amusing and insightful. Kudos.
As a cougar, I approve of this message
bravo! 9.9/10. the only thing i would've changed is I would've made the title "the Selfcest Economy", which would be even funnier clickbait
Trad-het is boring. I want to be a gay man in all ways but physical. They seem to be having a blast.
Gays and straights have similar base attractions; however straights are attracted to neoteny at a higher level, so the comparable would be a 14 year old boy to even a 23 year old woman.
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 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.
The upshot of this coming to be is even greater numbers of lower status men and lower looks women being left out of romantic relationships no? Like they don’t seem to figure into this worldview.