That data is collected from dating sites, where people rate opposite sex by looking at the pictures?
If so, this is such an oversimplification of female attraction. Yes, physical appearance plays a big role in attraction, much bigger for men than for women, but for women, chemistry, emotional connection, shared values - all together comprise a larger factor. A typical man disgusts a typical woman to a much lesser degree than this chart suggests.
The data above doesn't show that, if anything, it shows the opposite. Men and women rate people according to appearance and on that dimension women are fussier about appearance than men.
Men’s attractiveness to women is not primarily visual or based in physical beauty. So attraction does not register when there is only visual information. This does not mean that men are on average unattractive to women as the title suggests, but rather *unattractive based on looks alone*
Like the article says, men generally win women over with other means- devotion, loyalty, humor, charm, charisma, etc
I think the truth is in the middle. Yes women are less driven by pure visuals-it's very rare for women to masturbate to a photo of a man, even a super hot, fit one. But they do to erotic literature, usually envisioning a conventionally attractive man in the narrative. Looks are important but they usually need to be accompanied by more than just the visual.
The issue with this piece is it's assuming men and women are operating from the same baseline in terms of the variables of attraction, and it's more like apples and oranges. That women aren't rating men highly from just photos doesn't equate to "most men disgust women."
Probably one reason the sexes seem totally, almost pathologically unable to empathize with the other's experiences on dating sites. Some men - a number of whom may have developed actual self-esteem issues from their experiences on those sites - look at all that easy attention and validation and get legitimately angry about what they see as women complaining about their many suitors not being sufficiently hot.
But I think many women find this obsession with superficial attention to be just as baffling - why are they supposed to enjoy getting random DTF (or at best low-effort copypasta) messages from strangers? The sexes are very different, nowhere moreso than in matters of romance, and without the ability to even comprehend how things look from the other side, discourse itself just stalls out.
I use dating apps; they are no magic bullet, that’s for sure.
But two advantages they do have is: 1) you can get dealbreakers out of the way immediately, and 2) you expand the pool of people available. If I go to the same coffee shop, the same workplace, the same gym, the same pub, the same grocery store….and at roughly the same time for each, it’s likely I’m running into generally the same people.
This, The OK Cupid data also shows that the correlation between "this person is attractive" and "I would date this person" is much lower for women than for men.
For my sister-in-law, her rating of men was 99% least attractive, 0.99% acceptably attractive and 0.01% most attractive. Most attractive being certain especially talented performers who don't know she exists. When my sister-in-law was in her 20s she would have dates with some of the 0.99%, but these men were never that interested in her.
The crazy thing is that the negative vibes my sister-in-law had about the 99% of men she found unattractive oozed from her persona. All the more crazier as my sister-in-law was not gifted with the looks to be in a position of being picky about men, but she absolutely was! And so it is that she has never married.
Fortunately, my wife was less picky and somehow I got her to fall for me.
"When firms reject job applicants, they usually don’t ghost them" Actually, this isn't true, I've applied to hundreds of jobs and they almost always ghost.
Not only is Bryan wrong here, he's *egregiously* wrong. Ghosting happens all the time when applying to jobs. It even happens pretty frequently after an interview has happened.
Aella did a survey on women rating men's attractiveness that isn't *that* grim. A lot of men in the 4-5/10 category, but at least it's not as many under "least attractive".
Yes, I find Aella's data much more persuasive. The data presented in the post simply don't pass the sniff test; most women do, indeed, settle, and outside of the artificial environment of dating sites actually settle pretty easily.
That said, the bottom quartile of men really are atrocious and extremely low quality, you have to get to bottom 5 percent of women to get that bad.
Aella adjusted the raw data, so her post can't be used as evidence for this:
"I normalized the results, cause it’s hard to get an average of ‘1’ if the lowest possible ranking is 1, so by default the lowest ranking was pulled down to 1, and the highest to 10, stretching all the men evenly across this spectrum."
EDIT: Maybe I misunderstood, and that normalization was only for that one section, and not for the histogram?
Aella's data was only 100 women selected from her audience ("probably disproportionately liberal, white, etc., and reflects the tastes of that type of woman") though. So even if the results are more intuitive (mostly negative ratings, but closer to the midpoint), I think the data is likely much lower quality (I don't see a reference to the OKCupid data, but my recollection was that it was much higher n, and the OKCupid userbase, assuming it was that, should be more representative than Aella's followers). It seems plausible to me that Aella's audience are simply being nicer and more reflective than the OKCupid audience.
But in addition to the point about unflattering pictures, note that the OkCupid users were generally single, and the pool of single men as a whole is much worse than the pool of coupled men. Especially beyond maybe age 30.
Also true of women but the effect is weaker, because as someone else noted the bottom quartile of men is really, really bad. Way worse than the bottom quartile of women.
Yeah, ignore any of Aella's "data" - it's all absurdly biased. There's a reason she does not work for a reputable organization and is an "independent researcher."
In fairness to Aella, I think many of her surveys, especially the larger sample ones, are much higher (and acceptable) quality; not just, or majority, her twitter followers.
Having lead academic social science research, I think people overstate the difference between the samples of and hers: much social science research is just based on convenience samples, like hers, whether that's unrepresentative online opt-in samples (ubiquitous in psychology), but especially in sex research (and prior to the rise of online crowd-sourcing, much social science and sex research was just on whatever undergrads you had to hand to pay in course credit).
Yeah, there are similar problems in academic research, though not as extreme. In any case her data is limited to a very specific subgroup and is unrepresentative.
That seems surprising. One might expect people to select their most flattering pictures for their dating profile. What is the explanation for it being the reverse?
Many men have literally no flattering photos. One of the reasons why "man with a fish" is such a tinder stereotype is because after catching a fish is one of the rare times men get their photo taken in good lighting
They might pick what they think is their most flattering picture but that doesn’t mean it’s not really low effort. IIRC OkCupid was free. I never looked at men on dating sites but lots of women had e.g. selfies that they took in a mirror, which is less flattering than the style of any of Aella’s pictures.
I expect the average man put less effort into his dating profile picture than the average woman because men put less thought into their appearance than women in general.
When you say that the bottom quartile of men are as bad as the bottom 5 percent of women, are you speaking only of appearance, or of overall "quality?" Either way, that seems wrong. What is the basis of this claim?
Agree with this. It seems like Bryan is reading off and old script where the overwhelmingly vast majority of people get married. That's becoming less and less true every year.
"The study, co-authored by Claudia Brumbaugh of Queens College, appears in the June issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
"Men agree a lot more about who they find attractive and unattractive than women agree about who they find attractive and unattractive," says Wood, assistant professor of psychology. "This study shows we can quantify the extent to which men agree about which women are attractive and vice versa."
More than 4,000 participants in the study rated photographs of men and women (ages 18-25) for attractiveness on a 10-point scale ranging from "not at all" to "very." In exchange for their participation, raters were told what characteristics they found attractive compared with the average person. The raters ranged in age from 18 to more than 70.
Before the participants judged the photographs for attractiveness, the members of the research team rated the images for how seductive, confident, thin, sensitive, stylish, curvaceous (women), muscular (men), traditional, masculine/feminine, classy, well-groomed, or upbeat the people looked.
Breaking out these factors helped the researchers figure out what common characteristics appealed most to women and men.
Men's judgments of women's attractiveness were based primarily around physical features and they rated highly those who looked thin and seductive. Most of the men in the study also rated photographs of women who looked confident as more attractive.
As a group, the women rating men showed some preference for thin, muscular subjects, but disagreed on how attractive many men in the study were. Some women gave high attractiveness ratings to the men other women said were not attractive at all."
Yes, good comment. This rings true, I’ve been saying it for years, but I hadn’t seen the research.
This is partly why it’s a numbers game for men. Some women will just plain find you a lot more attractive than the median woman does. I’m married to such a woman.
- "90% of swipes by women are for men over 6’0, which does not reflect the importance women place on height in the real world. …What we see with algorithmic online dating isn't a mechanism to assign the perfect match to each person of the opposite sex. Instead, we've created a machine where the top 20% of men mate with many different partners and the top 80% women try to get the top 20% of men to date and ultimately marry them (and not just have sex with them)." Arnold Kling, 24 Sep 23, https://archive.ph/MKrpq
- "Men swipe right on 60% of women, women swipe right on 4.5% of men. The bottom 80% of men are competing for the bottom 22% of women and the top 78% of women are competing for the top 20% of men. A guy with average attractiveness can only expect to be liked by slightly less than 1% of females. This means one “like” for every 115 women that see his profile." Erik Torenberg, 23 Sep 23, https://archive.ph/Ps8pI
- “Most single men on dating apps struggle to even get “likes” from women. Only a tiny minority of men receive a preponderance of matches, and that this disparity was comparable in scale to the income inequality of South Africa under apartheid. In contrast, the match disparity among females was similar to the magnitude of economic inequality found in Western Europe.” Attraction Inequality and the Dating Economy, Quillette, 12 Mar 19, https://archive.is/EvIj5
- "Women Say 80% of Men Are “Below Average. Are women’s standards just too high? A study by dating app OkCupid found that women find 80% of men unattractive or 'below average.'", Medium, 9 Sep 22, https://archive.is/SvBrV /
So this graph doesn't measure men's "holistic" attractiveness. It only says that most guys can't get by on looks alone. But there are several other ways to be very attractive to women!
Yes this is based on an initial impression from women’s perception of status where they are being driven by their evolutionary heritage to acquire resources by having their choices to mate.
However if you accounted for men’s attraction to a woman’s personality outside of her sexual appeal, the graphs would be so skewed against women.
That’s why the modern woman has discovered they can spread themselves on tinder etc but can’t find someone to sincerely invest in them long-term.
>if you accounted for men's attraction to a woman's personality
This is meaningless. There is no separating the two in romantic or sexual relationships. If a man is interested in a woman sexually, the woman would have to go out of her way to make him dislike her personally. Likewise, if a man does not initially find a woman attractive, but ends up hanging out with her and getting to know her anyway; then the more he ends up liking her personally, the higher the likelihood he will end up liking her romantically.
Life isn't Dungeons & Dragons. There's no balance here. The vast majority of men are not physically attractive enough to seduce women by their looks alone. We should be accepting of this, and make some effort to create and restore spaces for courtship that don't leave the vast majority out in the cold.
Or maybe evolution is telling us something; the 19th century romantic novel, aggravated by Disney musical in the 20th century, where two young people meet and fall in love because they're the best of the best for each other (prince and princess), is a rare anomaly.
Maybe it's natural that half of men never reproduce (because historically they've always been cannon fodder) unless they kidnap women; maybe it's healthy for rich men to accumulate several women and for them to accept it (many already do so as lovers in an informal way, cause monogamy prohibits them from being wives).
Maybe evolution tells us: "Young men, don't look for a wife, sublimate your high libido in building and/or destroying the world around you, and as Achilles said, you die gloriously or old in your cot surrounded by offspring." And perhaps evolution is telling us: "Young women, don't idealize young men. Don't you see? In the end, none of them are that good. Save yourself to attract a man who has already accumulated power and your children will grow up safe."
This is 2009 data pre-smart phone era when dating sites were actual sites.
How representative were the male and female populations? Haven't these sites typically been far more skewed to have more males and likely males who, especially back then when there was more of a stigma to using dating sites, were more 'desperate' and lacked social skills to find women in real life?
Yes, makeup matters. Not just in hiding flaws but a woman who wears makeup is conscientious of her appearance. As the article points out, what hurts many men is they make no effort to improve their appearance.
It would be a interesting research challenge to take 100 men and test their success with women based on how they dress. I'm thinking that men who dress well do much better gaining the positive attention of women.
But why do more men not dress better and spend more money on their looks? Do men have a non-verbal pact not to outdo each other? Women seem inclined to compete against each other.
In certain localities of the USA plastic surgery is a huge business and such business is clearly targeted at women. Women are clearly more likely to spend money on such surgery. Why is this?
Do women not understand that that if they could get together and stop competing with each other they could save a lot of time and money?
Because men compete with each other mostly for dominance and resources, which outweighs the importance of physical attractiveness. Women place SOME importance on physical attractiveness, but not as much.
Women may have evolved to compete through appearance because men are more visually oriented in mate selection.
As for you last question, I recommend reading up on Game Theory. Women’s competition over appearance persists because the individual incentives to defect from collective action are very strong, and coordination problem is very large.
But in the modern era where we humans are able to think for ourselves instead of being slaves to evolution, as you correctly pointed out, why not simply hire a woman for the night instead?
It is wayyyyyyyyyyyy cheaper, comes with minimal downsides if you practice safety precautions, and is legal in many countries.
The rule of thumb is that for women, boats and airplanes, you should typically charter them instead of purchasing them since the rental cost is much more economical.
I am not saying your advice is terrible. But it is sorta like giving advice on how to get the best lease rates* on a brand-new car, when that is not the recommended method of having a car to begin with.
*the recent low lease rates on EVs being the exception
It’s in the woman’s interest to loudly and publicly proclaim the “ick” factor when she is approached by a man she doesn’t find attractive.
The woman needs to make it clear to her social circle, to herself, and to other men, that she is out of the low status guy’s league, lest his interest end up suggesting she’s not as attractive and high status as she makes herself out to be. The best way to do this is to label the guy a “creep” or “out of touch”, so his advances don’t suggest anything about her status as much as they do about his delusions.
Everyone always forgets the second half of this stat, which found that women were willing to date an “average” man (which due to their distorted perceptions really meant a top 20% man) while men were only willing to date a top 20% woman (which actually meant top 20%, because their perceptions were accurate). But both men and women were only willing to date the best of the opposite sex.
I like this piece of writing. Well thought out. I agree we should let down an unwanted suitor gently ( the workplace analogy is perfect) but sometimes that’s not enough. There is always the narcissist, the man who won’t take ‘thanks but no thanks’ for an answer, gets nasty, and we end up having to be cruel. That can be alarming.
On what criteria do women rate a man on an app? Do they ask themselves if they would be willing to sleep with him on the first date? I bet very few men pass that test.
That data is collected from dating sites, where people rate opposite sex by looking at the pictures?
If so, this is such an oversimplification of female attraction. Yes, physical appearance plays a big role in attraction, much bigger for men than for women, but for women, chemistry, emotional connection, shared values - all together comprise a larger factor. A typical man disgusts a typical woman to a much lesser degree than this chart suggests.
Exactly what this data reveals is that men are more visual than women. Playboy is for men, and Playgirl is for gay men.
The data above doesn't show that, if anything, it shows the opposite. Men and women rate people according to appearance and on that dimension women are fussier about appearance than men.
It does.
Men’s attractiveness to women is not primarily visual or based in physical beauty. So attraction does not register when there is only visual information. This does not mean that men are on average unattractive to women as the title suggests, but rather *unattractive based on looks alone*
Like the article says, men generally win women over with other means- devotion, loyalty, humor, charm, charisma, etc
I think the truth is in the middle. Yes women are less driven by pure visuals-it's very rare for women to masturbate to a photo of a man, even a super hot, fit one. But they do to erotic literature, usually envisioning a conventionally attractive man in the narrative. Looks are important but they usually need to be accompanied by more than just the visual.
The issue with this piece is it's assuming men and women are operating from the same baseline in terms of the variables of attraction, and it's more like apples and oranges. That women aren't rating men highly from just photos doesn't equate to "most men disgust women."
Probably one reason the sexes seem totally, almost pathologically unable to empathize with the other's experiences on dating sites. Some men - a number of whom may have developed actual self-esteem issues from their experiences on those sites - look at all that easy attention and validation and get legitimately angry about what they see as women complaining about their many suitors not being sufficiently hot.
But I think many women find this obsession with superficial attention to be just as baffling - why are they supposed to enjoy getting random DTF (or at best low-effort copypasta) messages from strangers? The sexes are very different, nowhere moreso than in matters of romance, and without the ability to even comprehend how things look from the other side, discourse itself just stalls out.
It would seem the answer is dating apps are a poor method to search for a mate, since there's almost no room for personality to come through.
I use dating apps; they are no magic bullet, that’s for sure.
But two advantages they do have is: 1) you can get dealbreakers out of the way immediately, and 2) you expand the pool of people available. If I go to the same coffee shop, the same workplace, the same gym, the same pub, the same grocery store….and at roughly the same time for each, it’s likely I’m running into generally the same people.
This, The OK Cupid data also shows that the correlation between "this person is attractive" and "I would date this person" is much lower for women than for men.
The chart shows responses of women.
For my sister-in-law, her rating of men was 99% least attractive, 0.99% acceptably attractive and 0.01% most attractive. Most attractive being certain especially talented performers who don't know she exists. When my sister-in-law was in her 20s she would have dates with some of the 0.99%, but these men were never that interested in her.
The crazy thing is that the negative vibes my sister-in-law had about the 99% of men she found unattractive oozed from her persona. All the more crazier as my sister-in-law was not gifted with the looks to be in a position of being picky about men, but she absolutely was! And so it is that she has never married.
Fortunately, my wife was less picky and somehow I got her to fall for me.
"When firms reject job applicants, they usually don’t ghost them" Actually, this isn't true, I've applied to hundreds of jobs and they almost always ghost.
Not only is Bryan wrong here, he's *egregiously* wrong. Ghosting happens all the time when applying to jobs. It even happens pretty frequently after an interview has happened.
Ghosting must be by far the most common response to job applications – partly because the barriers to applying for many roles are so low.
Aella did a survey on women rating men's attractiveness that isn't *that* grim. A lot of men in the 4-5/10 category, but at least it's not as many under "least attractive".
https://x.com/doobydoobadooby/status/1878844614016410108
https://aella.substack.com/p/mens-hotness-scale
Yes, I find Aella's data much more persuasive. The data presented in the post simply don't pass the sniff test; most women do, indeed, settle, and outside of the artificial environment of dating sites actually settle pretty easily.
That said, the bottom quartile of men really are atrocious and extremely low quality, you have to get to bottom 5 percent of women to get that bad.
Aella adjusted the raw data, so her post can't be used as evidence for this:
"I normalized the results, cause it’s hard to get an average of ‘1’ if the lowest possible ranking is 1, so by default the lowest ranking was pulled down to 1, and the highest to 10, stretching all the men evenly across this spectrum."
EDIT: Maybe I misunderstood, and that normalization was only for that one section, and not for the histogram?
If you only have the preview, I don't think it shows the non-normalized histogram, but that's why I included the tweet that does include it
Aella's data was only 100 women selected from her audience ("probably disproportionately liberal, white, etc., and reflects the tastes of that type of woman") though. So even if the results are more intuitive (mostly negative ratings, but closer to the midpoint), I think the data is likely much lower quality (I don't see a reference to the OKCupid data, but my recollection was that it was much higher n, and the OKCupid userbase, assuming it was that, should be more representative than Aella's followers). It seems plausible to me that Aella's audience are simply being nicer and more reflective than the OKCupid audience.
I don’t think you’re entirely wrong.
But in addition to the point about unflattering pictures, note that the OkCupid users were generally single, and the pool of single men as a whole is much worse than the pool of coupled men. Especially beyond maybe age 30.
Also true of women but the effect is weaker, because as someone else noted the bottom quartile of men is really, really bad. Way worse than the bottom quartile of women.
Yeah, ignore any of Aella's "data" - it's all absurdly biased. There's a reason she does not work for a reputable organization and is an "independent researcher."
In fairness to Aella, I think many of her surveys, especially the larger sample ones, are much higher (and acceptable) quality; not just, or majority, her twitter followers.
Having lead academic social science research, I think people overstate the difference between the samples of and hers: much social science research is just based on convenience samples, like hers, whether that's unrepresentative online opt-in samples (ubiquitous in psychology), but especially in sex research (and prior to the rise of online crowd-sourcing, much social science and sex research was just on whatever undergrads you had to hand to pay in course credit).
Yeah, there are similar problems in academic research, though not as extreme. In any case her data is limited to a very specific subgroup and is unrepresentative.
I think a more likely possibility is that a lot of men on the OKCupid audience just had very unflattering pictures of themselves.
That seems surprising. One might expect people to select their most flattering pictures for their dating profile. What is the explanation for it being the reverse?
Many men have literally no flattering photos. One of the reasons why "man with a fish" is such a tinder stereotype is because after catching a fish is one of the rare times men get their photo taken in good lighting
They might pick what they think is their most flattering picture but that doesn’t mean it’s not really low effort. IIRC OkCupid was free. I never looked at men on dating sites but lots of women had e.g. selfies that they took in a mirror, which is less flattering than the style of any of Aella’s pictures.
I expect the average man put less effort into his dating profile picture than the average woman because men put less thought into their appearance than women in general.
When you say that the bottom quartile of men are as bad as the bottom 5 percent of women, are you speaking only of appearance, or of overall "quality?" Either way, that seems wrong. What is the basis of this claim?
> It will work out eventually
For an opponent of social desirability bias, it's surprising for you to embrace a "pretty lie". https://www.econlib.org/monopolize-the-pretty-lies/ For some people, it won't.
Agree with this. It seems like Bryan is reading off and old script where the overwhelmingly vast majority of people get married. That's becoming less and less true every year.
While women judge men much more harshly on their looks than men do, there is also much more disagreement in their ratings.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/06/090626153511.htm
"The study, co-authored by Claudia Brumbaugh of Queens College, appears in the June issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
"Men agree a lot more about who they find attractive and unattractive than women agree about who they find attractive and unattractive," says Wood, assistant professor of psychology. "This study shows we can quantify the extent to which men agree about which women are attractive and vice versa."
More than 4,000 participants in the study rated photographs of men and women (ages 18-25) for attractiveness on a 10-point scale ranging from "not at all" to "very." In exchange for their participation, raters were told what characteristics they found attractive compared with the average person. The raters ranged in age from 18 to more than 70.
Before the participants judged the photographs for attractiveness, the members of the research team rated the images for how seductive, confident, thin, sensitive, stylish, curvaceous (women), muscular (men), traditional, masculine/feminine, classy, well-groomed, or upbeat the people looked.
Breaking out these factors helped the researchers figure out what common characteristics appealed most to women and men.
Men's judgments of women's attractiveness were based primarily around physical features and they rated highly those who looked thin and seductive. Most of the men in the study also rated photographs of women who looked confident as more attractive.
As a group, the women rating men showed some preference for thin, muscular subjects, but disagreed on how attractive many men in the study were. Some women gave high attractiveness ratings to the men other women said were not attractive at all."
Yes, good comment. This rings true, I’ve been saying it for years, but I hadn’t seen the research.
This is partly why it’s a numbers game for men. Some women will just plain find you a lot more attractive than the median woman does. I’m married to such a woman.
Thanks. For more examples, please see https://controlc.com/b3843b5a
Excerpts:
- "90% of swipes by women are for men over 6’0, which does not reflect the importance women place on height in the real world. …What we see with algorithmic online dating isn't a mechanism to assign the perfect match to each person of the opposite sex. Instead, we've created a machine where the top 20% of men mate with many different partners and the top 80% women try to get the top 20% of men to date and ultimately marry them (and not just have sex with them)." Arnold Kling, 24 Sep 23, https://archive.ph/MKrpq
- "Men swipe right on 60% of women, women swipe right on 4.5% of men. The bottom 80% of men are competing for the bottom 22% of women and the top 78% of women are competing for the top 20% of men. A guy with average attractiveness can only expect to be liked by slightly less than 1% of females. This means one “like” for every 115 women that see his profile." Erik Torenberg, 23 Sep 23, https://archive.ph/Ps8pI
- “Most single men on dating apps struggle to even get “likes” from women. Only a tiny minority of men receive a preponderance of matches, and that this disparity was comparable in scale to the income inequality of South Africa under apartheid. In contrast, the match disparity among females was similar to the magnitude of economic inequality found in Western Europe.” Attraction Inequality and the Dating Economy, Quillette, 12 Mar 19, https://archive.is/EvIj5
- "Women Say 80% of Men Are “Below Average. Are women’s standards just too high? A study by dating app OkCupid found that women find 80% of men unattractive or 'below average.'", Medium, 9 Sep 22, https://archive.is/SvBrV /
I think this misses an important point:
Looks are not that important to women!
So this graph doesn't measure men's "holistic" attractiveness. It only says that most guys can't get by on looks alone. But there are several other ways to be very attractive to women!
Yes this is based on an initial impression from women’s perception of status where they are being driven by their evolutionary heritage to acquire resources by having their choices to mate.
However if you accounted for men’s attraction to a woman’s personality outside of her sexual appeal, the graphs would be so skewed against women.
That’s why the modern woman has discovered they can spread themselves on tinder etc but can’t find someone to sincerely invest in them long-term.
>if you accounted for men's attraction to a woman's personality
This is meaningless. There is no separating the two in romantic or sexual relationships. If a man is interested in a woman sexually, the woman would have to go out of her way to make him dislike her personally. Likewise, if a man does not initially find a woman attractive, but ends up hanging out with her and getting to know her anyway; then the more he ends up liking her personally, the higher the likelihood he will end up liking her romantically.
Life isn't Dungeons & Dragons. There's no balance here. The vast majority of men are not physically attractive enough to seduce women by their looks alone. We should be accepting of this, and make some effort to create and restore spaces for courtship that don't leave the vast majority out in the cold.
Or maybe evolution is telling us something; the 19th century romantic novel, aggravated by Disney musical in the 20th century, where two young people meet and fall in love because they're the best of the best for each other (prince and princess), is a rare anomaly.
Maybe it's natural that half of men never reproduce (because historically they've always been cannon fodder) unless they kidnap women; maybe it's healthy for rich men to accumulate several women and for them to accept it (many already do so as lovers in an informal way, cause monogamy prohibits them from being wives).
Maybe evolution tells us: "Young men, don't look for a wife, sublimate your high libido in building and/or destroying the world around you, and as Achilles said, you die gloriously or old in your cot surrounded by offspring." And perhaps evolution is telling us: "Young women, don't idealize young men. Don't you see? In the end, none of them are that good. Save yourself to attract a man who has already accumulated power and your children will grow up safe."
This is 2009 data pre-smart phone era when dating sites were actual sites.
How representative were the male and female populations? Haven't these sites typically been far more skewed to have more males and likely males who, especially back then when there was more of a stigma to using dating sites, were more 'desperate' and lacked social skills to find women in real life?
https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2023/01/the-distribution-of-attractiveness/
Yes, makeup matters. Not just in hiding flaws but a woman who wears makeup is conscientious of her appearance. As the article points out, what hurts many men is they make no effort to improve their appearance.
It would be a interesting research challenge to take 100 men and test their success with women based on how they dress. I'm thinking that men who dress well do much better gaining the positive attention of women.
Women invest more into looking good because men value good looks more than women.
If a man dresses better, that will indeed gain the positive attention of women, as a signal of his higher status.
But why do more men not dress better and spend more money on their looks? Do men have a non-verbal pact not to outdo each other? Women seem inclined to compete against each other.
In certain localities of the USA plastic surgery is a huge business and such business is clearly targeted at women. Women are clearly more likely to spend money on such surgery. Why is this?
Do women not understand that that if they could get together and stop competing with each other they could save a lot of time and money?
Because men compete with each other mostly for dominance and resources, which outweighs the importance of physical attractiveness. Women place SOME importance on physical attractiveness, but not as much.
Women may have evolved to compete through appearance because men are more visually oriented in mate selection.
As for you last question, I recommend reading up on Game Theory. Women’s competition over appearance persists because the individual incentives to defect from collective action are very strong, and coordination problem is very large.
I don't dress/look better in large part because I don't know how.
I honestly can't tell good clothing/looks from bad with any certainty, so it's really hard to improve these things.
Of course, something I could do is hire experts to dress/groom me, but I don't have that level of ambition.
But in the modern era where we humans are able to think for ourselves instead of being slaves to evolution, as you correctly pointed out, why not simply hire a woman for the night instead?
It is wayyyyyyyyyyyy cheaper, comes with minimal downsides if you practice safety precautions, and is legal in many countries.
The rule of thumb is that for women, boats and airplanes, you should typically charter them instead of purchasing them since the rental cost is much more economical.
I am not saying your advice is terrible. But it is sorta like giving advice on how to get the best lease rates* on a brand-new car, when that is not the recommended method of having a car to begin with.
*the recent low lease rates on EVs being the exception
It’s in the woman’s interest to loudly and publicly proclaim the “ick” factor when she is approached by a man she doesn’t find attractive.
The woman needs to make it clear to her social circle, to herself, and to other men, that she is out of the low status guy’s league, lest his interest end up suggesting she’s not as attractive and high status as she makes herself out to be. The best way to do this is to label the guy a “creep” or “out of touch”, so his advances don’t suggest anything about her status as much as they do about his delusions.
Everyone always forgets the second half of this stat, which found that women were willing to date an “average” man (which due to their distorted perceptions really meant a top 20% man) while men were only willing to date a top 20% woman (which actually meant top 20%, because their perceptions were accurate). But both men and women were only willing to date the best of the opposite sex.
>while men were only willing to date a top 20% woman
Gonna need a source on that one. This strongly doesn't pass the sniff test.
Bullshit
Could you quote where the source said that?
I like this piece of writing. Well thought out. I agree we should let down an unwanted suitor gently ( the workplace analogy is perfect) but sometimes that’s not enough. There is always the narcissist, the man who won’t take ‘thanks but no thanks’ for an answer, gets nasty, and we end up having to be cruel. That can be alarming.
On what criteria do women rate a man on an app? Do they ask themselves if they would be willing to sleep with him on the first date? I bet very few men pass that test.