The issue of feminine hypergamy comes up every once in a while in gender conversations, particularly in discussions about the different ways gender dynamics are enforced for men and for women. I think a lot of confusion is generated because the concept of ‘feminine hypergamy’ in this context isn’t quite the same as hypergamy as defined by the dictionary.
So let’s start off with what ‘feminine hypergamy’ in this context is not.
It is not marrying someone of a superior caste or class (i.e. the dictionary definition). It is not preferring the most sexually attractive of potential mates over those who are less attractive (which, after all, is a bit of a tautology when you get right down to it). It is not seeing men as ‘success objects.’
‘Feminine hypergamy’ — the feminine sexual preference which tends to create disparate sexual dynamics — is seeing moderately attractive men or those of average attractiveness as ‘sub-par’. This was most clearly demonstrated by the analysis of attractiveness ratings done at OK Cupid a few years ago (and which we’ve linked to here often enough).
Men rated women’s attractiveness along a pretty standard bell curve. Average-looking women were rated as average-looking:
Women’s ratings of men, on the other hand, were strongly skewed. The majority of men were rated as ‘sub-par’:
I don’t see these results as absolutely definitive because of the possibility of some unforeseen bias in the sample at hand, but the results are pretty strong evidence given the sheer numbers of people involved in OKCupid data. I’ve yet to see a gynocentric feminist either refute the results or come up with a reasonable counter-argument against feminine hypergamy’s existence.
It can be plausibly argued that feminine hypergamy drives a number of gender dynamics, most of which I won’t go into here. However, it would explain some of the frustration that both sides experience during discussions of Nice Guys when some gynocentric critics of ‘Nice Guy-ism’ suggest that the Nice Guys are attempting to date ‘out of their league.’ It may very well be that, objectively speaking, the said Nice Guy is in fact in the same ‘league’ as the woman he’s attracted to, but is only ranked ‘out of the woman’s league’ due to women’s hypergamous inclinations.
I’ll also add that age introduces an important complexity; it’s not entirely clear to me if women are overall more hypergamous than men once you include post-menopausal women (and similarly-aged men). However, even the inclusion of age doesn’t make the dynamic ‘symmetrical’ for reasons beyond the scope of this post.
My point with this post is just to clarify that ‘feminine hypergamy’ — women’s sexual preferences that appear to drive some imbalanced gender dynamics — is not (strictly speaking) ‘women finding the hottest guys to be the hottest’ or ‘women marrying above their class.’
This comment thread is the “No Hostility” thread. Please read this and this for the ground rules. The “Regular Parallel” thread can be found here.
Very interesting.
This seems pretty obviously true. Haven’t we all experienced this ?
Average males will consider average women to be attractive while average women will consider only a small fraction of men attractive.
This study considers -only- looks, more specifically attractiveness of facial portraits though. I do think that the female evaluations are more bell-shaped if you expanded the survey to be overall attractiveness.
Welcome to the blog, Agrajag.
It wasn’t 100% clear to me whether the profiles that the people were reacting to were just pictures or if they included some self-descriptions … I thought the latter, but I will defer to you if you know for sure otherwise.
Maybe. I do think feminine hypergamy could plausibly be connected to some dating asymmetries (why women have ‘dating passivity privilege’; why women tend to date men who are older and wealthier, etc.).
I don’t see their full methodology mentioned, but the description does include this bit: “We’re going to look at how your photos affect both the messages you get and how successful your own outgoing messages are.”
That would seem to indicate that the research only looked at the attractiveness of your photos, and that other aspects of your profile where not considered.
Is there a meaningful distinction bewteen having “unrealistically high expectations of the opposite sex and your own value” and flat-out entitlement?
I tend to think so, Copyleft. I think there’s a difference between saying, “This tendency among women as a group creates a dynamic that arguably imposes gender disprivilege on men,” and “Your sexual desires are immoral” (which to me is what referring to someone’s “high expectations” as “entitlement” seems to imply).
I’ve been pounding on this for a while now because it seems so obvious for me – the hypergamy is caused by female passivity – in more than one way. So, this post offers one perfectly valid hypothesis for these results, but I can see other ways in which these ratings can get skewed.
It’s almost certain (given the way OkCupid implements its rating system) that women make their ratings by comparing male users to real-life men, so you can’t discount the fact that maybe men on OkCupid are less attractive than average men in real life. This may or may not be the case, but we have to at least consider it.
It may be a “sausage-fest” effect that is caused by the Stable Marriage Problem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.....ge_problem and how it applies to online dating. We have a situation where women of all levels of attraction get messages and can choose a man anytime they wish. Men, on the other hand, have to stay in the dating pool for as long as it takes for a woman to pick them. This creates an imbalance on the male side of the dating pool. Women’s time in the dating pool is governed mainly by how long they can hold out before they get lonely, i.e., it’s probably a constant time for all levels of attraction. But men’s time in the dating pool is a function of their physical attraction and social status. The less attractive, the less likely to be picked as a top choice for any woman on any given day. A woman must be incredibly attention-starved to pick one of these men. This same exact mechanism is what is responsible for men sending out dozens if not hundreds of messages per day – the men are willing to go as far down as their 100th-best-pick in order to try to get out of the pool of unattached men.
This hypothesis explains the skewed attractiveness ratings on OkCupid purely based on the fact that women being passive, men being active. In order to rule it out, we would need to run an experiment where men and women rate a random sample of men and see if the perceptions are still skewed there. And keep in mind, this is still hypergamic behavior because women are holding out for the best men. And I wouldn’t be surprised if both this hypothesis as well as ballgame’s couldn’t be true at the same time. In fact it could be that both effects taken together have a multiplying effect.
There’s yet another way to explain these skewed results, through psychology. It’s closer to the explanation that ballgame was getting at, maybe just a different take on it. Again, this is theory based on who is active and who is passive. I’ve pointed out the Speed Dating Experiment many times in the past, which showed that the person who is choosing becomes pickier than the person who is approaching; so when women approach men, they literally see the same exact men as more attractive than if that man were to approach the woman. One theory behind this behavior is that it’s an evolved conservation-of-effort mechanism that tricks out our brains to make us more likely to settle on a choice when we are doing hard work to get it. Imagine walking through the desert to find an oasis, but not being able to settle on drinking the water until you’ve walked to every other oasis to see which one is really best. On the other hand, imagine if you had several oases side by side but you drank from the first one you came to instead of checking which one had clean water. Clearly both strategies would be averse to your survival. So it seems like a good presumption to say that organisms which evolved to adjust their preferences to compensate for scarcity/effort have a better shot at survival. So why not humans in sexual selection? Our brains have plenty of irrational quirks, such as the endowment effect.
I am sure that there are other factors involved, including female hypergamy that is not explained by anything else, but we can’t know for sure. I would say that this is still female hypergamy, because that’s the effect that it has, but at it’s root it’s mainly caused by female passivity. Whether female passivity is inherently “biological” or not is yet another question, But I see enough of it that is based on nothing more sexism against men which benefits women as a class, so if we can just tackle that within our lifetimes, I’d be pretty happy.
The study was based on data mining the OkCupid profile database. Whenever you’re looking at a profile on that website, you can give it 1-5 stars. This means that whatever photographs people upload is what got rated. Browse through OkCupid profiles yourself to get an idea of the types of photos that people encounter. I am sure that there is an “average picture” that is more – or less – facially oriented. OkCupid has a policy of rejecting photographs that do not depict the user’s face, but they do not force anyone to depict their body, remove makeup, etc.
You’re sort of saying “they can’t help it – it’s how their brains work!” but as a matter of fact, it may very well be an effect of a sense of entitlement on a societal scale that makes their brains work this way. It’s the rich man fallacy – the rich man thinks he is rich because he behaves differently from a poor man, while the poor man tries to get rich by imitating the behavior of the rich man. But it doesn’t work that way. Being privileged can change your behavior and in fact give you a sense of entitlement. Imitating privileged behavior seems to promote sociopathy. We have a problem seeing this clearly in our society – which is why the middle class keeps voting against its own interests in every other election and why women seem to think that acting like a diva will help them land Brad Pitt.
oh, I think this post unofficially officially makes FC part of the manosphere now
I remember one time the manboobz crew was complaining against PUA. I left a comment that if they wanted to end PUA, women should approach men more. I was called an @$$hole among other things….
anyways, here’s my response to female hypergamy:
http://stonerwithaboner.wordpr.....hypergamy/
read with a grain of salt….
I don’t consider myself a feminist by any stretch for many of the same criticisms we see on this site, so please don’t take me as dogmatically defending what very well may be female privilege. But good analysis needs to be able to hold up to criticisms and I fear ballgame you may be making a couple errors in interpreting this data.
As dungone pointed out earlier there very well could be an issue of bias sampling.
Another thing on the site you linked shows that even though women believe 80% of men are below average they still send messages in close to the same trend. As they wrote, “But with the basic ratings so out-of-whack, the two curves together suggest some strange possibilities for the female thought process, the most salient of which is that the average-looking woman has convinced herself that the vast majority of males aren’t good enough for her, but she then goes right out and messages them anyway.”
This I believe is the big assumption with this study at least. Average women go out with men they view as below average to them. Because she views herself as settling this dynamic makes relationships and dating even more problematic for men who may have an unfair burden placed on them to prove that they are indeed worthy of her.
We still haven’t proved that the woman is average though and being forced to settle in her mind. We are basing this off what guys thought of the woman and not what she thinks of herself. It very well could be that women believe that 80% of men are below average while at the same time thinking 80% of them are below average too. In this scenario there is no hypergamy but simply women showing huge problems in their ability to relatively judge people.
My opinion tends to agree with you that there is an aspect of hypergamy in women in western culture now in days. That women on some levels feel entitled to things and standards that are not realistic or logical. I also wish in the future more studies like this come about. We tend to worry about doing studies that could hurt female self image (the irony) yet show no aversion to say studying the effects of testosterone on violence.
I’m going to channel Rumsfeld on this one and say, “You message the men who message you, not the men you might want to message you.”
Women don’t message men first by any stretch of the imagination – it happens so rarely that it’s safe to call it “never.”
Women can respond to these men provisionally. With each round of messages they respond to their top pick just to have a sort of backup plan, but this does not mean that it will result in actual dates or relationships. In other words, they still think these men are unattractive and that’s all that matters to the end results. The really quirky thing about OkCupid is that a significant number of people delete their profiles after they find a mate and OkCupid honors that by actually deleting their personal data. So merely by having a predominant number of average and less than average men on the site, it’s enough to say that there’s still hypergamy, probably.
anyways, I’m definitely not a feminist but….
I think I saw one of these studies somewhere and they showed a few “average” guys and a few “average” girls….
The girls looked better but….
anyone who knew anything about photography….
One of the guys had “red eye”-bad photo.
another guy had silly hair and maybe his ears looked weird….
It struck me that a good photographer with maybe a stylist could’ve gotten better results….
some of the average girls….
one was wearing sunglasses-could hide allot…
another had her hair down-could hide allot….
If all things being equal…
ie all photos were taken by pro photographers-with the emphasis of putting people in the best light, not hiding features then had a third party rank them as “hot or not.” Then if you got the same results you might have something….
I think that there are a couple of other factors at least that are working here, other than just women’s inclinations. Firstly most people are exposed a lot less to knowledge about how men can appear more attractive to women. Beautification is assumed to mean increasing certain female visual traits that are attractive to many straight men. There’s also more of a stigma against men trying to improve their appearance.
So the women that are average on average can have used a lot of effort on their appearance, while the men rated under average don’t feel they’re allowed to (or if they’ve internalized it feel like it’d be wrong of them to) and don’t know how they would if they tried.
Dungone makes a very important point: “We have a situation where women of all levels of attraction get messages and can choose a man anytime they wish. Men, on the other hand, have to stay in the dating pool for as long as it takes for a woman to pick them.”
I agree. Men face a scarcity problem with regard to sexual contact that simply doesn’t exist for women. Yes, that’s a generalization–but you have to hunt pretty long to find a woman who’s so unappealing that she can’t find ANY takers. For women, it’s a question of how far she’s willing to lower her standards to get what’s always available “if you’re desperate enough.” For a very significant portion of men, that scenario will never occur.
Seems to me that true love can’t really exist unless it is truly unconditional, which requires there to be not even the least consideration of darwinistic concepts of status, ‘league,’ etc.
Are humans capable of being truly decent, egalitarian people by following such a standard?
Therefore, if humans are incapable of that, why bother?
Many of my female friends seem to rate *themselves* on a similarly skewed curve – I think they’re 4s, they think they’re 2s.
@Eliezer, I would say that anyone below average is more likely to have a confidence issue and rate themselves lower. They probably compare themselves to girls they know who are a 5 and think, “she is getting twice as much attention of the kind that I wish I had so I can’t be a 4, I must be a 2.”
I keep hearing girls say “I have no friends” when their phones ring off the hook and they get invited to parties left and right. It’s just that their friends aren’t good enough versus their slightly more popular female friends. Female jealousy/competition, etc… I keep hearing girls say, “guys don’t hit on me” when I see men hit on them 12 times a day. It’s just that these men aren’t good enough so they don’t count. A girl who is a 2 might judge herself by the number of men who are 5′s who hit on her and not even consider men who are 2′s themselves. If this results in her believing she is less attractive than what actual men would rate her, I’m sorry but that’s just her own brain working against itself. That is my personal experience and other people may feel differently, but it’s what I keep seeing time and again. I get so tired of women who reject 10 men a day who say, “it’s so hard to find a man…”
When I point out things like this to a gynocentric feminist I know, she usually turns it around and blames the men. I think she’d say, “Men are less discriminating, and if they weren’t so liberal about sending out messages women would send out more. And in any event, the women are being honest with their preferences and being selective and what’s wrong with that?”
I think there must be a more objective middle ground instead of it being either men or women at fault on this or other issues.
And yeah, dungone made a lot of good points above about being careful about how to interpret this study.
dugone, just to clarify, are you suggesting that these women are attracted to those me and just deciding not to date them because of some arbitrary attractiveness matching algorithm they’re running?
In my experience, and I can’t emphasize this enough, attracted-ness cannot be willed. I’ve been in more than one relationship with a very good guy that I was just not attracted to at all, though I tried very hard to be. It’s no fun dating someone you’re not attracted to, and it made both of us miserable in both cases. I won’t date someone now, unless I’m attracted to them. Isn’t that basically how it works with guys, too?
If these women aren’t attracted to those tens of men that proposition them every week, from their perspective they might have gotten offers, but none of them were viable. I’ll admit to excluding the guys that “don’t count” from my own personal numbers in this way (Not to mention a non-trivial number of blatantly rude approaches that also get excluded). There was never a chance in the first place, doesn’t seem right to count them as possibilities.
Of course, I would never tell someone I didn’t get hit on. I get hit on all the time (Well, less so now, living in rural Japan). But that doesn’t change the fact that it is still “hard to find a man [whom I'm attracted too]“
It’s sort of true.
As I was explaining to a friend of mine the other day, since she was trying to come up with overly charitable explanations for gold digging behavior, I decided to do the same for the “one track mind” crowd which comprises a lot of young men: Society teaches men that their identity as a man depends on whether or not they are able to have sex with women, that’s why so many of us come off as desperate, either to have as much sex as possible, or to even just have sex in the first place.
I would also add, that in the case of rejection, I think a lot guys hear a woman’s rejection, not as a mere rejection, but a statement amounting to “You’re not a man.” Compounding that issue is that half the time, it genuinely does sound like that, because of the reasons that amount to stating an objective preference for the best possible traits in a guy (success, handsome, etc) which of course would leave lesser men hanging out to dry.
And you’re right about one thing…this would be a whole lot easier to bear if it didn’t seem like some women were out to completely exonerate women as a whole from any kind of meaningful blame for this. As if we men are supposed to take upon ourselves the burden of shame/guilt for “male privilege” simply on their sayso, but they seek absolute exoneration for their own gender because they fear it would discredit social justice altogether? As if to not have unflinching moral superiority means they have to get back in the kitchen?
Ahem…well, I would say that it becomes easier as you get older, to be more selective about the women you choose, as well as feeling less overall urgent to “prove” yourself, so you end up being more picky in the end.
@Cactuar, that’s actually a very good question. I’m not suggesting anything more than such an algorithm describes the behavior at the group level. I’m also not suggesting that nautilus’s use Fibonacci sequences to figure out how to build their shells, but it describes how they look like very well. What I am suggesting is that, as a hypothesis, this emergent pattern is the way that female hypergamy works in our culture and that it could possibly be driven by female passivity.
I’d be interested in both numbers – the ones who never had a chance as well as the ones you count. I just ask that you consider the context of the question in order to give an appropriate answer. One woman once told me no one ever messages her on OkCupid and I gave her this pep talk about hanging in there because she’s really beautiful and I couldn’t believe no one messaged her… so then a week later she complained that her inbox got full and she had to delete all the messages without reading most of them.
Couldn’t this be an example of the way women provisionally accept a suitor?
It works a little differently. If a guy doesn’t find a girl attractive, he looks for one who is and pursues her. If a thousand ugly women messaged a guy but he didn’t message the one girl he found attractive, people would probably laugh in his face.
@Cactuar I understand what you’re saying but if this type of behavior is indeed cultural then it is correctable. Perhaps not for you or other people raised as you were but it’s always interesting how actions can have unintended consequences. The best answer may be non-intuitive such as to stop barraging girls with the message that “they’re worth it”, we may just be setting them up to not be able to succeed with what would have otherwise been good partners who would have made them happy.
The first step would be studies such as this that try to find out if indeed women have skewed perceptions on who they find attractive.
@Dungone You bring up a very good point I didn’t think about. That being women are traditionally responders and thus work on the level of those who’ve already initiated. That leads to some interesting possible dynamics. It still doesn’t alleviate my criticism that this data fails to control for a ton of variables (social sciences are notoriously difficult for this) and we may be noticing an inability for the girls to make good judgments on what is average. In other words we can’t be certain that the women are in fact “settling” in their minds.
@Cactuar I think that displays massive priviledge. I’ve lost count of the women who’s complained to me about how hard it is to find a man, while in actual fact they get hit on all the time. From my point of view it appears that what they mean with “hard” is: “The most desirable men to me, those I’d pick if I could freely pick *anyone*, aren’t falling into my lap left and right without me lifting a finger.”
A few times I’ve asked what they’ve actually done. What unsucesful attempts they made, that make them qualify it as hard. Did they get turned down for dates a lot ? Do guys not respons to their messages ? Are they rejected often when initiating intimacy ?
Normally they don’t mean any of these things, since they’ve not ever tried any of them, rather they think the men have an obligation to come to them, and when the “right” ones don’t do that in sufficient numbers, they complain that it’s “hard”.
From the POV of a pretty average male, that’s insane. Surely, for something to qualify as hard, you must atleast have *attempted* it unsuccessfully ?
When a woman says: “It’s so hard to find a man”, she means: “I don’t get my first choice in men without lifting a finger, I get several opportunities, but they’re usually not up to my standards”.
When a man says “It’s so hard to find a woman”, he means: “I never get hit on by *anyone*. When I do initiate contact, which I attempt regularily, I tend to be rejected or turned down, sometimes rudely.” (actually, he’ll probably not include the first part, because even the possibility that anyone could simply sit passively and have potential partners throw themselves at you seems so wildly unlikely to him that it’s not even worth mentioning.) *offcourse* he never gets hit on — he ain’t even *asking* for that.
I don’t think “passively wait, then say ‘yes’ when an attractive proposal comes in” can reasonably be described as “hard”.
I think one of the biggest problems trying to discuss this issue is the massive gender divide when it comes to dating scripts (and the active/passive roles). Every time I see a Woman or a super-attractive Man say anything about rejecting people they aren’t attracted to, it means they’re already pretty deep into foreign territory. As a guy, especially a guy who isn’t particularly assertive, I don’t even have the option of a coffee date unless I expend significant effort getting it – let alone be in a position of rejecting people I don’t find attractive. Being in a position to offer rejection implicitly involves being in a position of power. So hearing “…X is an issue or lack with the people who approach me” is almost an absurd statement, because the idea of other people approaching *you* – ever – is absurd by itself, so passing a normative evaluation based on that approach seems twice absurd.
At any rate, I think using the studies this post mentions, in this context, sort of conflate results with causes. While I wouldn’t disagree that there’s a degree of hypergamy, I would be more likely to say that the attractiveness study *results* from that, as opposed to the other way around.
Dating, and online dating especially, Women are faced with an overwhelming degree of suiters, while Men are more or less scrambling for even a mild response. The fact that a Woman can sign up for a dating site and get a date with far, far less effort than it might take a comparative Man – that’s an example of hypergamy. The related attracting-judging resulting in these study results? That’s just the outcome of such unbalanced dating scenarios.
It would be interesting to test how much of this is cultural, either by the nation or by the dating site. There are international dating sites where the women outnumber the men, with the women from Asia/Eastern Europe typically looking to marry a successful older American/European, and the messaging statistics are very different. I have no idea how the attractiveness issue would play out there, but I could imagine it might be very different than OKCupid working primarily with western culture.
@Mike: Are they really ?
I was under the impression that even on those dating-sites where women outnumber the men, where the men are typically from wealthy western nations while the women are eastern-european or asian, the men initiate.
Those sites are mainly funded by having the men pay for the privilege of sending a lady a message. It’s not as if the women, even on this very uneven playing-field are the ones to pay to get into contact with men. The men are the ones with the money, that does obviously make it easier to extract money from them, but even so, the mechanism isn’t: “Woman such-and-such has sent you an invitation to connect with her, pay $4.95 to get access to her contact-details.” instead the mechanism follows the standard pattern where the man searches for, and carries the cost of, contacting one or more women, only to then *hope* for a positive response. The women passively wait and respond according to if the guy is up to their standard or not.
Still, I agree, the stats would be interesting.
Interesting thoughts, Tovsain. Welcome to the blog.
dungone, I agree that’s possible, but I’m very skeptical because of the examples they gave of guys that had been rated as ‘sub-par.’ Those guys appeared to me range from moderately attractive to, at worst, average-looking. Some of them seemed to have a slight ‘not the ideal photo’ thing going on because of tousled hair, but seriously, how many guys would downgrade a female 6 to a 4 (10 point scale) because of tousled hair?
I’m open-minded about the possible causes of feminine hypergamy. That female dating passivity might contribute or cause it seems plausible, though not logically inevitable. The idea that there’s some sort of ‘conservation of effort’ thing going on is plausible as well.
I confess I’m not quite sure what you think my “hypothesis” is, dungone … that feminine hypergamy exists? I was basically just trying to clarify the conceptual difference between ‘feminine hypergamy as a current issue between the genders’ and ‘feminine hypergamy as defined by the dictionary or some feminist observers.’
No, actually that’s not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is that an individual has every right to decide for themselves who they do and don’t find attractive or who they want to date. If someone (male or female) decides that they are only attracted to (or only want to date) 6 foot blue-eyed blondes, that is not an immoral decision or desire. If the entire population of, say, men were to make this ‘decision’, that would obviously cause a great deal of pain to those non-blonde or short or brown-eyed women (and men) seeking male romantic partners. But it wouldn’t make the ‘decision’ of the ‘tall blonde’-seeking men immoral. (Please note that I’m using the word ‘decision’ very loosely here; I realize that we often don’t actually ‘choose’ who or what we’re attracted to.)
I would, however, certainly affirm that the pain that the non-blondes in this scenario feel is real, and that it would be wrong to disparage that pain or imply that pain is the non-blonde’s own ‘fault.’
Uh oh! Do you think Melissa McEwen is going to stop sending me fanmail now, SWAB?
@ballgame, I read your hypothesis as one where women on okcupid downgrade good looking guys, as in they see a 6 and think he is a 4. And I agree with that possibility, not trying to discount it. I also have been troubled by the photos of clearly good looking men who got rated as just average. But those photos were hand picked by the okcupid staff to make their point.
Hi everyone
I remember Alex Novy having some interesting ideas about why there is such backlash against nice guys in certain circles, hypergamy is another area of discussion that is pushed back against hard. Does anyone have any idea why female hypergamy might be such a taboo, in the same circles?
MODS – I cannot remember which handle I said I’d use here before, so I’m using this one in the hope that its the one.
“I remember Alex Novy having some interesting ideas about why there is such backlash against nice guys in certain circles, hypergamy is another area of discussion that is pushed back against hard. Does anyone have any idea why female hypergamy might be such a taboo, in the same circles?”
Most oversimplified answer to a complex problem—
in many feminist circles it seems to be blame men for ALL the worlds problems.
ie-Patriachy-they might say something like this is a system in which all men participate to subjugate women. The reality is many men are as powerless as many women. The term Apex Fallacy comes to mind…
ie-men can stop rape. How can I stop another person from committing a criminal act when the only thing we have in common is gender. Can I stop another person from committing fraud? An act of terrorism? We are not a “hivemind”….
ie-you may have heard about hegemonic masculinity, have you heard about hegemonic femininity? Also toxic masculinity-where’s toxic femininity-Man Up-where’s Woman Up?
If a man is having trouble finding a date, you might hear someone say- “well, there are tons of available gorgeous women but men only chase after the one’s that look like Playboy centerfolds.”
To suggest that a woman’s choice is part of the thing that makes things as they are is disruptive to certain worldviews….
@Agrajag, I tried a few at one point and it varied wildly, with the most skewed case being dozens of women messaging me a day, over the months it added up to *thousands* of women. On the money thing, yes, a subscription cost something per month for me, nothing for the women. It was kind of shocking after being on sites like OKCupid, where I did get occasional dates and one former long-term girlfriend, but with the typical kind of message economy discussed here (rare message from a woman, low response rate for my messages to women). I was put in a position where I had too many messages to respond to, and became very selective, and hardly even had time to look at profiles to do my own initiating. Made me much more sympathetic to U.S. women in that situation, even though it felt like I personally was in the Twilight Zone.
I feel like the dating economy is very sensitive to imblances, and even relatively small differenes in demographics can shift the playing field dramatically. I went to a college that was 45% male, 55% female, but the typical room party was 30 guys and 3 girls, and there was the perception that the average girl was “out of their league” for many guys there.
I also recall an interesting study I will try to look up. It found a correlation between how photos were perceived in online profiles, and how text was perceived. In other words, people rated as attractive in their photos also tended to be rated as attractive based only on what they wrote. I think there’s a lot of complicated effects with various feedbacks that make causality hard to sort out.
I think it’s useful to separate a well-formed definition of a phenomenon, e.g. female hypergamy, from the empirical question of whether the phenomenon exists in the world. Along these lines, here’s a simple example of the first of these:
What is female hypergamy? Back in the Edith Wharton era, you can describe it very simply:
1. Take a co-ed group of singles in some social setting.
2. Arrange the males and females into two parallel lines, each ordered according to “social class rank” as they would have graded themselves in that era.
3. Have everyone look at their counterpart in the other line; ie the woman at the 57th percentile considers the man at the 57th percentile, and vice versa.
4. “Female hypergamy” is well-defined, simply, as the strong tendency for the women at any given point in the line not to accept marriage to the man at the same point in the line; she insists on marrying someone “better” from farther up the line.
The translation to the modern era is exact, once we substitute “generalized sexual attractiveness” for “social class” and “having any kind of sexual relationship” for “marriage”. Basically, “female hypergamy” today is the statement that a mid-pack woman will not generally show any favor to a mid-pack man, but will only seek/permit/agree to a sexual relationship with men of higher percentile. [NB: it's important to emphasize the ordering according to "generalized attractiveness", not just physical appearance.] That’s very well-defined, I think; what’s up to you as an observer is to confirm or deny that this phenomenon is present in the world; and if it is, then you can speculate on its causes.
[Realistically, even in this description the mid-pack 70% or so is probably where all the action is: the top 15% of both lines will likely dally with each other willingly, while no one will touch the bottom 15% of either line; juggle the numbers as you see fit, but it's really the large middle that we're talking about by default.]
@dugone
Thanks for the clarification. I actually think that’s an important distinction to make, especially considering how some of these conversations tend to go.
Yeah, I would agree with that sentiment for sure, as I said before I would never tell someone that “I never get hit on” or “never get messages,” and I think the kind of sorting that winds out excluding (what are perceived as) sub-par offers from one’s reality entirely is indicative of a mindset that needs to be changed.
As for my numbers. Well, it’s hard to actually come up with a number for the ones that don’t get counted. I mean, that’s the thing. Guys coming up to me when I am out on the street or shopping or whatever just became kind of a ‘thing that tended to happen’ it wasn’t an out of the ordinary thing, so I only remember a few specific instances, and they skew towards the rude or odd or bad approaches, because that’s what would stick out in your memory. I’m afraid the first number just can’t be retrieved.
The second number, outside of people I’ve actually dated, it’s a little fuzzy, but I think I could probably ballpark it if I really thought back. It’s much, much smaller than the first.
Yes, perhaps. I don’t think I was clear on what you meant by that. Just, ‘settling’? If so, than maybe not. I don’t think it could be described as ‘settling,’ at least in my case. I was just much younger and didn’t have any experience. If you had asked me at that time, I couldn’t have told you what the problem was. I thought I was frigid/broken and couldn’t experience attraction, not that I just wasn’t attracted to those guys.
Ok, I think I see what you’re saying here.
I certainly do agree that there are a lot of non-attracted-ness-anchored dating selectivity behaviors that need be overcome. I.E. women passively rejecting guys they are actually attracted to because ‘guys should ask first’ and they don’t want to make a move themselves. And, also, women rejecting men they are actually attracted to because for example, he asked her if she wanted to be kissed instead of just doing it or he had a ‘very pink’ car or was studying to be a hair stylist. (Those last two are actual things my friends have complained about to me, vis-a-vis guys they went on dates with. I can’t relate.)
I don’t think people are bad for having those preferences, but I think they are manifestations of harmful social norms and we should do our best to overcome them. People in general just don’t do enough thinking about thinking. We’re socialized to just accept our feelings as ‘right’ instead of examining them. The world needs more meta.
I always enjoy a good OKCupid survey. Their information is always awesome. I had never really heard anything like this before I read this article. It’s an interesting phenomenon to say the least. Can you point me to more articles discussing this, possibly on this blog? I’d like to become a little more educated on the matter.
Zac, welcome to the blog. The issue feminine hypergamy has been referenced here in a number of discussion threads — typically those discussing Nice Guys and pickup artists — but this post may have been the first here to have been devoted to the topic. (I ended up adding the category when I filed the post.) Your best bet is to do a search via the Google Search box in the bottom of the right hand column.
@Agrajag
Well, in my experience, “getting hit on all the time” has been largely unpleasant in the moment, and almost entirely useless as far as “finding a [good/compatible] man,” so forgive me if I think it’s more of a curse than a blessing.
I’d personally rather have the burden of approach. All of my most successful dates/relationships, such that they are, have been initiated by me, anyway. Even the self-initiated failures have been more positive experiences, overall, than the rest.
I don’t actually think that’s an accurate representation of what most women actually mean (de facto as well as from their own biased perspective) when they say that. It’s not that much more valid than saying that “Nice Guys” really just want to date supermodels.
And, with respect to the current conversation, since this is a reply to a post that I made, that is certainly not what I mean, I think the “men should initiate” norms are harmful and that women should initiate too, and I absolutely practice what I preach.
Not ‘a lot,’ but I get turned down. Er, look. I’m not really interested in claiming women have it worse. I just hope you’re not under the mistaken impression that women (attractive women, even) never get turned down.
Yeah, even when they were all like “Call me!” they do that sometimes. And they flake, too. They do that.
Well, I’ve not had a lot of intimacy period but this has still happened once. I’m pretty much of the opinion that all of these behaviors are less anchored to gender than they are to ‘role.’
Now, I do think you’re being a little unfair. I don’t agree with or condone the norms that say women ought to be nothing but passive, but those norms exist. From the perspective of those women, I think they are probably following the script as hard as they can. Maybe they are putting mad effort into putting themselves out there and looking pretty and tossing indicators of interest around like confetti. And when a compatible guy doesn’t come along like society told them he would, they get frustrated and upset.
Clearly their behavior is causing the un-sucess, but if they’ve bought into the false premises and rules of the game that we are all taught, then acting that way is not insane.
Hmm. What do you mean by standards?
Because when I say I’m not attracted to those guys I didn’t count, I don’t mean, ‘hmmm. I’m kind of attracted to him but not super attracted. Guess I’ll keep looking until someone AWESOME comes along’ … I mean Zero. Attraction. There is no “making it work,” there is no “giving it a chance.” Those are terrible ideas, because attraction can’t be willed.
I’m not sure what you’re proposing the alternative would be when one is often propositioned by people one is not attracted to at all.
@cactuar:
I think that would have to depend on what the alternative is. Certainly being hit on all the time is a nuisance, and I guess everyone that experiences that, would prefer being hit on more seldom, but with higher quality.
But if the alternative was being entirely convinced that absolutely -nobody- from your prefered sex could possibly ever have any interest in you at all, I think it’s pretty clear that being hit on, and saying no, is preferable. “The wrong guys are interested in me” has to be preferable to “Nobody are interested in me.”
Passivity is a priviledge because women *can* be passive, it’s not that they *must* be passive. You’re not the only woman on the planet who sometimes initiate, and I think, on those occasions when women do initiate, their success-rate is atleast as good as that of the males. So again, having the choice between initiating or not, has to be preferable to being forced to initiate (or accept a life in celibacy, I guess)
In your opinion, what *do* women tend to mean when they complain about finding a man being “hard” while at the same time admitting that they’ve not actually even attempted to start a relationship with one of the men they’d want ?
I agree that these women likely aren’t even consciously aware of the fact that they’re putting the entire burden of a relationship starting on the guy, that they’re in essence complaining that they should have desirable offers presented to them on a silver plate, and when that doesn’t happen, they, as you say, get frustrated.
It’s rare that one can tell with certanity from a 10-line text-message or two sentences of talking for sure if one if there’s potential for attraction to someone or not. It happens, but it’s fairly rare. Or perhaps it’s more common for others.
I’d say if you let me talk to 100 random women for a minute each, and then asked me to rate which ones would have potential as a partner, I’d probably end up with 10% no, 20% yes, and 70% possibly, thus rejecting the “not attracted to at all” women would for me result in a 10% or so refusal-rate.
I think attraction must be more complicated than a binary yes/no detectable in the first minute for women too, because I’ve had girlfriends myself that initially rejected me based on, I guess, insufficient attraction – but which then later turned out to have plenty of attraction to me afterall.
I think this has a lot to do with the fact that women get hit on so much more.
The world being what it is, a single me, would accept a date from ~90% of the worlds women around my own age. But *if* I lived in a world where I got date-requests from women all the time, yes I think I’d get pickier, start turning down many more of them. Not because they where of zero potential, but because when you’ve got a lot to choose from, it makes sense to choose that with the *most* potential.
Which means if men started hitting on women a lot more seldom, it’s plausible to me that this would result in the women saying “yes” a lot more often.
Stoner With a Boner
yeah that makes sense, that resistance to acknowledging anything that indicates a certain group has power is strong – there is also the knee jerk backlash against anything that sounds like Evo Psych.
@ballgame
Thanks for the quick response. Much appreciated!
“Because when I say I’m not attracted to those guys I didn’t count, I don’t mean, ‘hmmm. I’m kind of attracted to him but not super attracted. Guess I’ll keep looking until someone AWESOME comes along’ … I mean Zero. Attraction. There is no “making it work,” there is no “giving it a chance.” Those are terrible ideas, because attraction can’t be willed. ”
My attraction doesn’t work like that. I can’t tell if I’m sexually, even less romantically, attracted to someone at first sight, or within 30 minutes (of talking to them, of course – just looking is nonsensical to telling how attracted I am). I can tell you after a few weeks though.
Cactuar: Well, in my experience, “getting hit on all the time” has been largely unpleasant in the moment, and almost entirely useless as far as “finding a [good/compatible] man,” so forgive me if I think it’s more of a curse than a blessing.
The truth here might depend on what the meaning of “it” is, exactly.
Being unable to get any enjoyment out of the world around you, from seeing things, going places and interacting with other people, is a symptom of depression. Depression is a disorder, where the person is not functioning well; many who suffer intractable depression might well describe it as a curse.
If a woman finds nothing attractive in dozens of men who’ve approached her, then we might simply say she has “high standards”, or perhaps very particular/narrow tastes. But when dozens turn into hundreds [juggle the numbers as you like] and she still can’t find anything attractive in any of them, then at some point it must be fair to say that the “problem”/dysfunction is not in men but in her. Her “curse” is not that she’s surrounded by inadequate men, it’s that she lacks the character to appreciate men as they are.
What do you mean by “zero attraction”? Most women have something attractive about them, in my experience. Maybe this is another gender difference? Perhaps one that plays into ballgame’s observations in the OP?
I mean, don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of women I wouldn’t actually be interested in dating or having sex with when everything is considered. But that’s usually due to not getting along with them, or having nothing in common. Or, if I haven’t met them yet, there are certain cues (the venue we’re at, how they dress, how they interact with other people, who they choose to interact with, how they carry themselves, etc.) that give me a first impression of a person. If we’re at a pop-culture venue, and she’s dressed up all pop-culture with pop-makeup, and she’s interacting with other pop-culture-seeming-people, and she’s posing all dainty, then over-all I’ll be very disinterested.
But that still doesn’t mean that there’s zero attraction. I may still think she’s cute or sexy or hot or whatever, and be attracted on that level. Or, alternatively, there may be someone I’m not so attracted to on a physical level, but the way they act and carry themselves can be attractive to me. Or if I start interacting with a woman, and she’s into computer programming, that can be attractive. Etc. Etc.
And, of course, there are women that I’m just not attracted to at all. But they make up maybe 10-20% of the women I see or interact with who are within, say, ~20 years of my age. Usually there’s some attraction there for me, even if I am not over-all attracted or interested in them.
How my attraction seems to work is that I can be aesthetically attracted to certain things. In both men and women. And repulsed by others. Either driven by ideology or base preference (I dislike overuse of make-up and “obvious” make up goes into that. I also dislike anyone who will deliberately put emphasis on their breasts – I’d prolly dislike the same about men putting a lot of emphasis on their penis…it just doesn’t seem to come up much.)
It’s not sexual however. There is no “I’d do him/her” thing. Only a “I wouldn’t not do them, if I count only appearance”. I still reject a minority of people on first impression. I reject a lot more people on perceived incompatibility (something about them potentially being transphobic maybe) than disgust. On the other hand, I probably get rejected out of hand by 90% of people for being trans outright.
“Seen as a cis female” only makes me not-a-pariah. It still elects most people’s propaganda-spirit that I’m just “a guy pretending”, who “looks like a footballer wearing a tutu”, and has Stepford Wives tendencies to mimicry feminine 1950s stereotypes to a T (without really pulling it off, of course, thus a parody).
Not that I mind that 90% of people, a significant portion being bigots (others just being ignorant), would reject me out of hand. I don’t want to date transphobes after all. But dating is indeed harder.
Getting sex is easy, doing a shemale is a fantasy after all.
Note that my libido is low enough that I could go without sex for years, decades, forever. I want intimacy, cuddling, hugging, a lot more.
@ballgame
Oops. I’ve actually posted before, but apparently it was under a different name. Tovyasagan or something like that? I couldn’t remember the exact spelling. Also Dovahkin something or other. I actually wrote down my handle, I won’t change it this time.
@Agrajag
Bingo. The privilege of having a choice between passive/active is a really, really valuable trait to anyone with a passive nature.
If your default role is passive, and you behave in a passive manner, society generally will have mechanisms that include you. If you behave in an active manner, society includes you *and* you include yourself anyways.
If your default role is active, and you behave in an active manner, you’re a part of the world. If you behave in a passive manner, society lacks the mechanisms to include you, because you’re supposed to be active.
It’s an issue I imagine those with disabilities run into all the time, and to a greater degree – society doesn’t always have a means to keep them involved.
“not being hit on” can certainly be viewed as a privilege – but I personally (albeit in a “grass is greener on the other side” sort of sense) think the privilege of “being included in society” is a privilege so important it’s almost akin to a right. It’s something you should have by default unless it’s abused through lack of character, not something you should have to earn.
Ok, a lot to respond to so I hope I can be forgiven breaking this up into a couple of posts. It should cut down on horrific verbosity, or at least break it up into palatable chunks.
First of all, on attraction/lack thereof and it’s associated implications. I have to correct something going in, and this is super important so it get’s its own post:
Relevant bit bolded. There were a few comments to this effect, but this is the best example, I think.
I just… I don’t know how to make myself clear. This is not about there being ‘problems’ with the men I’m not attracted to, or about them being ‘inadequate’ or ‘dysfunctional.’ It’s not even about their raw level of physical attractiveness being low.
Not at all!
It’s only about whether or not I’m attracted to them.
I’m not “Not attracted to them because they are sup-par/inadequate/bad/ugly,” I’m just not attracted to them.
Many of them are quite good looking. Many of them are very nice, decent people. I share common interests and enjoy spending time with many others. But I’m just not attracted to them.
They are not generally worse or worse in worse ways than most other people I know, although the rudeness ratio is higher among people who randomly approach me on the street.
This is not even about standards. Standards are those things that you use when you’re deciding whether you want to date or keep dating someone you’re already attracted to. Standards don’t even come into play until that hurdle has been cleared.
So please, stop hearing “they have been judged and found wanting” every time I say “not attracted to them.” That is a complete misconstrual of what I am saying.
@Xakudo
Well, it’s like…
As I mentioned in the post above this one, it’s not that I can’t recognize them as physically appealing/possessing other positive qualities, or perhaps even possessing both of those qualities in abundance. It’s just I don’t feel any romantic/sexual attraction to them. I just…don’t.
As an example, in the last year we had two new guys get hired into my workplace. Both around my same age. Let’s call them A and B.
I would have to say that they are both decent looking, but A is better looking. Taller, better figure, clearer skin. Also, B kind of has pretty bad teeth, I guess. If you asked me about their ‘attractiveness’ That’s what I would tell you. But if you asked me who I was attracted to, I would say B, and only B. I feel literally no interest in A at all, and I haven’t ever. It’s not like I’m repulsed by him or anything…As a co-worker I am positively disposed towards him, but as far as attraction, I’m just, blank towards him, there’s nothing.
But B makes me feel all kinds of attracted, a little bit when we met and moreso as time has passed. And I think he likes me too. He kind of acts adorably shy around me. Or maybe I’m imagining it. I asked him out recently and he accepted, so hopefully I’ll have the chance to find out.
But, that’s how it works. As best as I can explain it. I experience various levels of being attracted to someone, but attracted/not-attracted is pretty much a binary proposition, and there is some set of people that I just don’t and apparently can’t feel attracted towards.
This isn’t hard science here, so I’m not saying it’s definitively impossible for someone to move between the categories, but ATM I can’t think of an example of when it has ever happened, and I believe such a thing would be very rare for me.
Maybe an analogy would be to explain it in orientation terms? As a straight person, one might be able to asses the attractiveness of one’s own gender without feeling the least bit attracted to those people. Well, for me, I can assess the attractiveness of all people, without feeling the least bit attracted to some subset of them. (And though I lean het, the set of people I find myself attracted to includes women)
“It’s just I don’t feel any romantic/sexual attraction to them. I just…don’t.”
I’m not certain how you can tell that from first meet. I can tell if I’m more trusting of someone (which is always a plus), but not if I’m romantically or sexually attracted. Not until we’ve had a long time talking and being together (like months).
You’d present me A and B, and I couldn’t tell which I’m attracted to. If you ask me outright, I’d say neither. I can’t know until I know them for sure. This whole “instant chemical deal” is the kind of thing I either don’t have, or will never trust.
Sort of like how I shouldn’t trust my social anxiety with measuring reasonable risks.
@Cactuar:
To be clear, I don’t think there’s anything wrong or broken about your experiences of attraction or not. You just peaked my curiosity, is all, because what you described just seemed very foreign to my experiences of attraction to my gender of preference.
Except, perhaps I can relate. The way you describe your reactions to man A and man B actually sounds very similar to my experiences being attracted to men as well. I consider myself straight, but I have been attracted to men before. And your experience sounds very similar to mine in that regard. I can recognize when men are attractive, and even appreciate their looks, but without personally feeling any attraction to them at all. But then every odd once in a while there’s just something about a guy that really does it for me.
But my experience with attraction to women is quite different. Usually with most women there is at least something that does attract me to them, at least to a lesser extent. It may be overridden by other things, so that on-the-whole I am not interested. But that attraction is still there none-the-less, and is still part of my experience of that person.
It’s not just brief encounters, Schala. Over my lifetime I’ve had time to spend time around plenty of the people in question. I might not be able to tell how much I can be attracted to someone, right away. I might feel more attracted to someone over time, or less depending on how our interaction goes. But it’s never taken months, and I can tell right away whether there is potential or not.
I’m not perfect, I could be being overcautious about attraction to some extent. I don’t think this is the case, I think it’s the opposite in practice because quite frankly, I have a high libido and I don’t like being so infrequently attracted to actual people. Seriously some of those people who say they’d only be not-attracted-to 10-20% out of 100? Bottle that shit and send me some.
Even so… given how unpleasant even kissing someone I’m not attracted to is for me, I think a small rate of false negatives would be an acceptable thing, if that were the case.
EDIT (No need for multiple comments)
@Xakudo
Yeah, I think that may be the best way to analogize it.
And, just to clarify, I also experience the a-bit-attracted-but-on-the-whole-not-interested thing within the subset of people I’m attracted to. I think I experience the whole range of what you experience attraction as, but within just a slice of humanity instead of the whole thing.
“I’m not sure what you’re proposing the alternative would be when one is often propositioned by people one is not attracted to at all.”
Seems the answer is you become the propositioner which I guess you did with guy B…
@Sigil: I think “Nice Guys” and female hypergamy provokes a subset of feminists for the same fairly simple reason: Because these discussions tend to point out that there’s things *females* as a group, tend to do wrong. Yes *wrong*.
If you’re heavily invested in the idea that everything that’s wrong with gender-dynamics, perhaps even everything that’s wrong with society comes down to males behaving badly, you don’t appreciate arguments that come down to *females* having to carry even a fraction of the blame for the state of the world.
Thus the insistence that guys who are *actually* nice, yet can’t get a date cannot exist. Instead they twist it, and claim that these men only pretend to be, or only -think- that they are nice, but in actual fact are entitled assholes.
And for the same reason, strong insistence that there’s nothing whatsoever wrong with the way women pick mates.
@Cactuar:
Fair enough.
It strikes me that if this is not just coincidence, but in fact a typical gender difference in how attraction functions, that could well explain the OKCupid results quite handily. Given that it’s a personal dating site, I imagine people would typically be rating based on their own actual preferences and attractions.
@cactuar The sum of individuals is a society. Yes, I agree, that one individual woman is not attracted to a certain guy, does not imply that he’s ugly or otherwise not good enough, but when women collectively tend to be not attracted to some guys, then it means precisely that: that those men are unattractive.
In the context of dating and sexuality, that’s precisely what attractive means to a heterosexual male: able to *attract* women.
Sure, there’s some variance, thus there may be guys who are plenty attractive (to other women), yet unattractive to you. Nevertheless there’s pretty strong correlation let each of 100 women independently rate some men, then do statistics to see to which degree they agree with oneanother, and you’ll find that there’s a close match.
@Tovsain: I’m actually not particularily passive, I’d rate myself as about average active in initiating for a male. That only makes it worse when the successes are rare though, because you then get the combination-effect: No woman ever shows interest in you of her own accord, and when you initiate, you get rejected, thus confirming your belief that no woman could ever be interested in you.
As it turns out, in my case the major problem was having a low social standing at school, thus even those girls who might as such have been interested enough, would’ve commited social suicide if they went out with me, so they didn’t.
The moment I got access to social arenas unrelated to school, it turned out that women who where unaware of my social standing at school, liked me about average and my success-rate was like that of most males. (i.e. lower than I’d prefer, but high enough that I never felt as if there was anything in particular wrong with me)
I don’t think I was a totally different person just as a result of being 25 miles away from home, thus I never bought the feminist rhetoric that “if it wasn’t working, you *cannot* genuinely have been okay, the problem -must- have been exclusionarily with you.”
I edited the above comment, and it got garbled. No idea why. Repasting it here, hopefully sans garble, please delete the former comment:
@cactuar The sum of individuals is a society. Yes, I agree, that one individual woman is not attracted to a certain guy, does not imply that he’s ugly or otherwise not good enough, but when women collectively tend to be not attracted to some guys, then it means precisely that: that those men are unattractive.
In the context of dating and sexuality, that’s precisely what attractive means to a heterosexual male: able to *attract* women.
Sure, there’s some variance, thus there may be guys who are plenty attractive (to other women), yet unattractive to you. Nevertheless there’s pretty strong correlation let each of 100 women independently rate some men, then do statistics to see to which degree they agree with oneanother, and you’ll find that there’s a close match.
@Tovsain: I’m actually not particularily passive, I’d rate myself as about average active in initiating for a male. That only makes it worse when the successes are rare though, because you then get the combination-effect: No woman ever shows interest in you of her own accord, and when you initiate, you get rejected, thus confirming your belief that no woman could ever be interested in you.
As it turns out, in my case the major problem was having a low social standing at school, thus even those girls who might as such have been interested enough, would’ve commited social suicide if they went out with me, so they didn’t.
The moment I got access to social arenas unrelated to school, it turned out that women who where unaware of my social standing at school, liked me about average and my success-rate was like that of most males. (i.e. lower than I’d prefer, but high enough that I never felt as if there was anything in particular wrong with me)
I don’t think I was a totally different person just as a result of being 25 miles away from home, thus I never bought the feminist rhetoric that “if it wasn’t working, you *cannot* genuinely have been okay, the problem -must- have been exclusionarily with you.”
Imagine that you’re traveling through a distant land and come upon a society where a man who wants a relationship must go into an arena with innumerable doors. All the women who have seen the man and are attracted to him then enter the back of the arena and take up behind some of the doors. But the rest of the doors are supplied with fierce tigers that would eat the man. There are many doors – hundreds perhaps – and the ratio of women to tigers is what we shall call “attraction.” The lower the ratio, the more likely the man will meet his fate in the jaws of a tiger. But men are fighters – they can fend off at least a few of the tigers, acquiring a few scars and losing some blood along the way – and are willing to do this so long as one of the doors eventually reveals a loving woman. But still, these men can only fight off so many tigers before they end up a mangled wreck of their former selves. And the women, who peer out through secret peep holes, see a progressively uglier man until they lose interest and walk off, in turn being replaced with more tigers. Eventually the man must admit defeat. Yes, there may be one unopened door left that holds his lover, but at some point it just stops being worth it. It’s just not worth it.
The really attractive men – well, they sometimes open multiple doors and have their way with all the women before moving on to yet another – completely unconcerned for the occasional tiger. And the women complain about this, they think it’s awful. But the less attractive men keep getting mangled. Everyone is unhappy about this arrangement, men and women alike. Women think it’s next to impossible to find the right guy… they peer at them through the peep holes as they either have their way with every other girl in town or else are mangled by the tigers.
The ridiculousness of this society becomes apparent to you when you find out that at any time, the women who are standing behind those doors can just open the doors themselves, walk into the arena with the man and say, “here I am, the interested one!” But they don’t. They just don’t. So you find one of the women who lives in this society and ask her why they don’t end the game even when they can. And she answers it flatly: because they just aren’t interested in a man who wouldn’t risk getting eaten by a tiger in order to be with her. She can open the door but she doesn’t want to. She swears up and down that she finds these men who are being mangled by tigers to be very attractive and feels extremely sorry for them now that they’re dead, but she is just unwilling to end the ritual. She can’t overcome her own macabre curiosity. Yet, she claims up and down that the reason why she is alone or that she has been used and discarded is because men are either cowards or assholes. It has nothing to do with her own behavior.
Would you want to live in that society? As a man? As a woman?
I like your metaphor, dungone.
@ballgame, I sort of wish I had included yet another dynamic into the metaphor, but it would have muddied it. The less “attractive” a man is and the fewer women there are who are attracted to him, the less “attractive” the women who do line up behind the doors become. I was going by the premise that “there’s no such thing as an unattractive person – there are just fewer people who are attracted to them” in order to highlight how even that is a problem for the “attractive men to whom few women are attracted.”
Usually in life we are used to high risk / high payoff and low risk / low reward situations. But in the case of attraction, it becomes a high risk / low payoff scenario. The reality is that a lot of people at the very bottom of the attraction scale of both sexes end up living alone and depressed because the social dating scripts force both sexes through a dating script designed for 50:50 odds, not 1000:1 odds.
I suppose the one place where your metaphor breaks down a bit is that if the women were to start opening doors, they would face the occasional tiger as well.
looking at Dungone’s analogy above-I see how this fits with “male disposability.”
Going back to that Clarisse Thorn article at TGMP-it makes allot more “sense” if you go in with the assumption that men’s feelings are less important or that they feel less and can better handle rejection. Clarisse says she doesn’t like being rejected, then there’s a bunch of nonsense by Schwyzer where he doesn’t actually say anything.
http://goodmenproject.com/feat.....tionships/
from my point of view it’s more of the status quo from them trying to enforce a code of masculinity on us…..
Tigers are some of the biggest predators in the world and would be hard pressed to only injure you a little and not kill you.
How about vicious bobcats? Or mad monkeys? Otherwise, yeah.
And I think the women would BELIEVE there’s a high chance of a tiger that wouldn’t just scar them but would kill them, and their extreme fear keeps them from doing much more than cracking open the door a tiny bit, once in a while, then complaining that the man didn’t open it all the way for them after they went to that huge effort. Of course it’s irrational and unfair, but…I guess that’s the criticism, isn’t it?
Of course – the metaphor could turn into some weird M C Escher lithograph at that point. Still, is it really unfair to ask women to face the same “risks” as the men? It doesn’t necessarily break anything down.
Or you could just ask that everyone enters the arena all at once and makes their intentions known to one another so that no one needs to face the tigers. Not as far fetched as it sounds. If women let each man they’re attracted to know, and each man let every woman they’re attracted to know, then approaching someone would be less about a potential rejection and more about a potential acceptance.
Disclaimer: it’s adopted from a story I read back in high school. My metaphor isn’t the same, but the original is here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T....._the_Tiger
@Mike, let them be magic tigers that start out as tiger pups the first time you open the door and progressively get bigger and fiercer each time you open another wrong door.
@SWAB, Wow, that Clarice Thorn… she says she knows what it’s like to be rejected because it happened to her once when she was 13… and this “caused” her to be unable to make the first move for the rest of her life… no really, I think it was something else entirely that got her off the hook from approach duty, and it wasn’t the pain of being rejected once at age 13.
Then she does the classic feminist bait and switch – substituting harassment for advances and calling it “unwanted advances.” Guess what – I get catcalled by guys when I go jogging almost every single time. Even women will shout harassing and unwelcome things at me. So? But I’m not going to write an article that equates the couple of girls who ever approached me and put themselves out there, risking rejection, with every harassing thing I’ve ever heard in my life. But she’s willing to do that to potentially hundreds of well intentioned, good-mannered men. You’d think from reading her article that the only time she ever rejected a man was when he walked up behind her and grabbed her ass.
I feel I ought to clarify something,
I certainly don’t believe there are no such thing as ‘attractive’ and ‘unattractive’. It’s sometimes fairly obvious to me, or at least seems so, why I’m not attracted to a guy. Sometimes I am attracted, but he’s got a lot of bad qualities that cancel it out for me. And conversely, sometimes guys are (what I perceive to be) very hot and so it’s easy to tell why I’m attracted.
I certainly didn’t say and don’t believe that everyone is equally special and awesome, and attraction is pure magic, but none of that effects the fact that for a very not trivial number of guys I see, I just don’t feel attracted to them for no very apparent reason. They seem fine to me. Honestly.
What am I to do about that? Is honesty a bad policy? I am already asking out at pretty equal rates to being asked out. The ratio is even poised to tip towards me asking out more often, although I’m sure that might be different if I still lived in the West. (Not because I’d be asking less, but because I’d be getting asked more)
As for the tigers, and things being said before. It’s not like most of these women are holding the solution to everyone’s happiness in their hands and they could help but they just don’t feel like it.
Its that society tells them implicitly and explicitly all the time to stick to the script because you have to and it just isn’t going to work if you don’t. My mother used to tell me all the time that I should make guys pay for dates instead of bringing my own money or when I’d tell her about ideas I’d have to give romantic gifts to guys she’d say I’d better not because that would emasculate them, etc, etc. My father and brother put one of my boyfriends down at ever opportunity for being ‘obviously gay,’ and my friends were all constantly ‘that’s a guy?’ about another verrryy attractive guy I was interested in.
There’s tons of pressure to conform to expectations in how you date and who you date, (I don’t believe it’s any different for guys, either) and it’s not even about having the fortitude to resist the messages, it’s about the fact that most people can’t see any reason to try. Not because they’re bad or stupid but because they are surrounded by people telling them that they’re doing it right and things are supposed to be this way.
It’s like being a member of a religion. Sure, it’s all falsehood, but you’ve grown up and still are surrounded by reasonable seeming people who believe it and tell you to believe it. Believing anything else doesn’t even seem like an option.
I’m don’t disagree with you that the behavior is very harmful, I’m on board for that. I just don’t see how you can not-blame men for banging their heads up against the walls of this fucked up system, but think women are consciously, actively withholding the solution because they just don’t want to help enough.
@Cactuar, so what do you think about the possibility that the “conservation of effort” effect, or the complete lack thereof when there is no effort required? It can make a person actually like someone more because they had to work for it. There are many such effects – for example Ben Franklin once noticed that he can make a person be loyal by asking for a favor rather than doing him a favor: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Franklin_effect . Don’t you think that it’s almost a disservice to women which prevents them from being able to feel attracted to numerous perfectly well-suited men if society forbids women from initiating anything with men? Hell, I think it could have a lot to do with the reason why there are so many sex-negative women out there.
Well, honestly the best policy is for you to actually approach the men you like and encourage other women to do so as well. Even if you are attracted to that hot guy who is obviously super-hot and you know exactly why, he’s still got to go through a bunch of tigers before he gets to your door. Think of it like this: every time you see a hot guy and you fail to make the first move, God kills a kitten.
For her part, your mother implicates the female gender as a source of the problem. Your mother wasn’t teaching you to be passive in order to “put you in your place,” but in order to get you to “fetch the highest price.” In other words, she was passing on hypergamic traits from mother to daughter. That’s not surprising at all. The question is this: why in the world would you listen to her if you believe that she’s actually wrong? I don’t get that part.
This doesn’t seem at all related. Does it have anything to do with whether or not you made the first move in those relationships, or was it just some quality about those guys that got teased in a cruel way? Still, guys get made fun of for the girls they go out with as well. Very cruelly at times as well. Actually – at around the time when I lost my virginity, I remember reading articles and hearing friends bash men who “just settled on the first girl who would have sex with them.” It’s always implied that these women are old, wrinkly, fat, and overbearing – and no self-respecting man would want them. Well that’s exactly what I did – I was absolutely thrilled at the very first girl that I ever found out had wanted to have sex with me – and so we did it and we had a relationship for a summer. But I remember how, when she broke up with me, she told me that it didn’t matter how I felt about her because I was a wuss who didn’t know how to “find his own” girl. Really? It wasn’t me caving in to social pressure who ended up being the problem in that one…
In the end, it seems to me that you recognize that you don’t want to be passive and that the people who made you passive and questioned your preferences in a way that didn’t make you happy. I know from everything you’ve said in numerous conversations we’ve had that you feel that women should be more active. So why not just take charge? After all – that’s what taking charge is all about – not listening to what you’re told to do anymore and doing what you want to do yourself.
Well, as I mentioned above, if the person who does the most work also ends up being the most enamored by virtue of having done the most work, then the start and end of the solution lies with women starting to do a little more of the work – voluntarily. Involuntarily, I guess that men could join forces and collectively refuse to have sex with women for 5-10 years or however long it would take to get most women to notice. But that seems like a less reasonable, less fun solution. Women doing more work now would allow everyone to have more sex and more fun instead of turning it into a brutal gender war. At any rate, there is the MGTOW movement and they get spoken about savagely by feminists, just as gay men were savaged by radical feminists at one point.
@Cactuar
I don’t think people (well, most, at any rate) were saying that that’s *wrong* – the reason people jumped on your comment was because there’s a subset of guys who *regularly* fit into the “unattractive for no discernible reason” category, and they’re used to hearing “But you’re totally attractive, just not to me” – from *everyone*. If you’re used to hearing “I don’t know why, I just don’t feel it” from every Women you meet, also hearing “But attraction is subjective, I’m sure other Women will like you” feels almost unintentionally condescending.
So to answer your question, honesty is the right policy – and your preference for initiating already sets you apart quite nicely from the existing dating script.
But on the whole, the vast majority of Women overlap in preferences for assertive behavior, and it’s not uncommon for it to get glossed over as something along the lines of “just not feeling a spark”(note: not quoting anyone in particular hear, just a generic example), as opposed to actually realizing “Oh, I was waiting for him to pick where we would sit for the coffee date, and was kind of turned off when he didn’t.”
That obviously doesn’t apply to you, but the “every Women likes different things” explanation sometimes ends up getting used to gloss over the fact that there are some preferences that are both very common, and usually unacknowledged… which is why I think people started responding to arguments you didn’t actually make.
Yes, I believe that is part of it. I hear a lot about these studies in a more generalized context in the er, skepti-sphere as it were.
I don’t know if I entirely believe that angle, but even if the norm is only preventing women from initiating with men they’re already attracted to anyway then enough damage has been done.
I personally think that has more to do with the social meme that mens’ sexuality damages everything it touches, and women are permanently damaged and lessened/tainted every time they have contact with it. That’s a huge thing in culture.
Except I’m pretty much already doing this. When I know someone I like, I’m never angsting about why he hasn’t asked me out yet. I’m worrying about how I’m going to ask him out and how not to fuck up the social interaction if he says yes. If a friend comes to me with such a dilemma, I will similarly tell her just to ask him out.
Yeah, mom wasn’t super awesome about the dating thing. She even explicitly said that, you know. “He should pay for the pleasure of your company” or something like that. It never made sense to me.
Yeah, that would confuse me too, if that had ever actually happened.
I never agreed with my mother. Her advice made no sense to me. I didn’t take it. In fact the conversation in question was started when I asked her to spot me 20 so I could go on a date. She eventually just gave me the money anyway after making sure I knew that I was doing it wrong.
It was related to the point I was making about how people get a lot of pressure about both how they should be dating (the point above) and who they should be dating (this point here).
Yes I believe I mentioned that as part of my point as well.
You should also know from things I’ve said in numerous conversations that that’s exactly what I am doing.
I ask out just as often, never expect men to pay, treat men to dinner, etc.
Because I already do?
I wasn’t talking about myself in the post, I was talking about experiences I’ve had which I observe mostly to be at least somewhat common, and which Most People ™ react to differently. I thought we were on the same page about that.
To repeat my religion analogy, while I am an atheist and think most religionists are terribly wrong , I do not think most of them are stupid or unreasonable for believing the things they do. On the contrary, given the environment, it probably seems incredibly reasonable to believe in supernatural myths.
I agree on the solution, I just think it’s wrong to ascribe this inflated level of hmm, malice? reckless indiference? to women for the harmful behavior, for the reasons stated above.
Are these Lysistratan men going to still respond to women who ask them? If so I’m OK with this. You really think it would take half a decade or more for women to notice?
Ok, I think this is crazily distorted. I’ve never seen anyone attack MGTOW for the ‘opting out’ concept. MGTOW gets attacked because they very often say blatantly horrible things about women. Terrible, genuinely misogynistic things. They would get attacked for that, and justifiably so, even if they were not ‘going their own way.’
“It’s like being a member of a religion. Sure, it’s all falsehood, but you’ve grown up and still are surrounded by reasonable seeming people who believe it and tell you to believe it. Believing anything else doesn’t even seem like an option. ”
It’s called critical thinking. Can be applied to anything in life. Even stuff you “swim in”.
Feminism is the advocacy of true equality for all never rang right…because the first thing I did was test the hypothesis, and it failed badly. Drinking the Kool-Aid might be easier, but you get no points for thinking.
“On the contrary, given the environment, it probably seems incredibly reasonable to believe in supernatural myths. ”
Yes, believe in anything you want. Except that others are inferior because they believe differently. Or that such beliefs about supernatural beings should direct national policy (theocratic thinking prevalent enough in the US to have same-sex marriage and abortion to be actual issues…and on an obvious religious front to boot – not about “This objectively horrible thing would happen, which is not based on any kind of theology”).
It’s amazing that theocratic states, and states that are borderline such, don’t get made irrelevant by other more enlightened countries. Countries that don’t believe in a Big Bearded Sky Daddy above their country leader, directing national policy and making them The World’s Police.
Cactuar: ” I just don’t see how you can … think women are consciously, actively withholding the solution because they just don’t want to help enough.”
Because the solution might not be what you’re thinking. If you ask me, the “solution” that women do hold, and are withholding, is not to feign or act out desire for someone if they don’t feel it; the solution is simply for women to generally tell the truth about what causes them to feel desire. That’s it. Not to say anything about Cactuar in particular, the injunction is very general: stop telling pretty lies. Stop saying “What I want most is a guy who’s kind, smart and funny”, when in plain fact the gutters are clogged with the crumpled remains of kind, smart funny guys.
If guys knew the score, truly, then they could make rational decisions about how to act: do I want to fake dominance and confidence to appeal to a wide range of women? or remain my normal self and keep looking for the exceptional one? Either way, the man would then be responsible for his choice, and he would know what kind of trade-off he’s making. That would be a much better world for everyone, better than what we live with now. And women as a group could bring it all about, without changing their desires one bit, through this one simple act of habitually telling the truth. But, I’m no longer waiting up nights, you know?
If you train your telescope on the very bowsprit of the very prow of the very flagship of the PUA fleet, what words do you find inscribed there? Not “How to get laid!” or “Pussy for all!”, but the rather more direct and sober: “Where pretty lies perish.” That’s the key: at the core, it’s not the sex, it’s the lying.
@Schala
I’m not advocating that we shouldn’t try to convince people of the merits of critical thinking or that public policy should be anything but reality based. I’m not saying I think it’s a-ok and fine that so many people believe things that are harmful and patently untrue. Hell, I’m not even saying that we ought to handle religion with kid gloves, I am no Mooney. I’m only saying you don’t have to be a fool or a villain to believe those things in this cultural environment.
I don’t think I was stupid or evil before I de-converted, or that any other atheist I know was. It’s not going to kill anyone to admit that in a society like American society where 80% of the country is Christian, and god-memes saturate the culture, religious claims very much resemble common sense and truth to a lot of people, and if the reality of the contrary doesn’t seem evident to them out of the blue, that’s not proof of some horrible personal failing.
And I think I’ll leave explanations there, since apparently I’m not doing a very good job of being clear if there’s a need in the first place and these corrections are causing the thread to wander. :/
Common sense needs examination to me. I’m quite alone in thinking that usually though.
It might be an aspie thing to question common assumptions, or to do stuff in ways that people did not even think was possible.
Like my boyfriend thinking I “prepare coffee wrong” because I put the filter, the coffee and then the water, before putting it on. And not the water first. Apparently it’s common sense to do so. Given I’ve had no issue doing it my way, I don’t see the problem.
I never thought wearing make-up on a daily basis, coloring your hair the day you turn 13 monthly, or watching TV reality, reading gossip magazines, and generally “following the script of normality so as to fit in and make the least waves and so on”…was actually a good thing.
You like make-up because it’s creative? Go ahead. You think it’s mandatory or you look ugly, look tired, pale, not as cool as your friends, etc? Then you’re a sheep. I’d never wear make-up for the latter reason. And the former doesn’t align with me much.
Similarly I’d color my hair because I want a certain color, not “because my friends do it and its a girly thing (because guys get shamed out of not doing it except expressly to cover grey hair, and maybe Halloween)”.
Gossip magazines scare me more than anything. And Cosmo is good for a cheap laugh (when it purports to be serious), but I ain’t going to spend money on that crap.
Reality TV is all about generating ratings with cheap scripted drama, and make it appear genuine. When documentaries are actually genuine. If I’m going to get scripted crap, I’d prefer if it is Two and a Half Men than Survivor. I also don’t watch much TV.
And following the script of normality? You lose your individuality, what makes you unique, makes you “you”, all in the name of not making waves. And then you regret on your death bed having lived only for others’ opinion of you, for no good reason. I mean don’t be an asshole…but being your own person means not apologizing for it.
And I’m no leader, I got no charisma, I hate social gatherings, and my people skills are pretty much non-existant. I’m a female lone wolf. Socially and sexually submissive, but still pretty assertive about what I like and why. If I avoided death to be genuine (transition), I might as well truly be, not just be a token female.
The “effort = attraction” thing has actually been tested. Some researchers gathered a group of men and women, then split each gender randomly into 2 equal-sized groups.
The first group had to walk over to each of the men, say hello and ask about their name, then mark how attractive they found them (I think, on a 1-10 scale) before moving on.
The second group sat down at a table, and had the candidates walk up to them and present themselves before moving on.
The result was that even the *very* modest effort of physically walking up to a person and saying: “Hello ! Who are you?” is sufficient to make you, on the average, rate those people about one point higher than you would have if the roles where reversed.
Couldn’t find the study at the moment, I’ll keep looking, quite fascinating stuff.
@Cactuar, major props for the most block quotes in a single comment I have ever seen on this blog
Are you really limiting this to guys you already know? Because men must approach complete strangers – which really they have no choice but to do given the odds of rejection. Guys who pursue their female friends are often derided as “Nice Guys(TM)” and get called out for being passive. And yes, that generally borders on the rather passive side as an approach.
I really don’t want to rehash a lot of splitting of hairs about this what you believe it takes for you to be attracted to someone, so let me first of all commend you on at least thinking of approaching men in the way that you do, which many women would find unthinkable from the start. But let me be clear – as a guy – if you were another guy – I would expect a little more than some of the already positive things that you’ve described to us before I’d be willing to say that it’s everything. My standard for that would be something along the lines of this: that for any man we pick out of a crowd, he wouldn’t be lowering his chances of getting to know you by waiting for you to approach instead of approaching you himself. In other words – do you ever accept offers that you haven’t yet made yourself?
And it’s important how the approach is made. If it’s more like “hey I just met you and this is crazy but here’s my number so call me maybe?” a guy would definitely get laughed at as some sort of a goon who will never get laid… Or is it more like you get his number and call him yourself? I swear… most girls who say they’re active (not you! not saying that) actually just sort of prod the guy a little bit, maybe ask him out at first but then expect him call first… or if she calls first, she still expects him to initiate the first kiss… and depending on what that girl’s threshold is, she’ll still ditch him if he doesn’t eventually take the lead role. I really wouldn’t call these types of approaches legitimately active because they’re more like a condescending hand-holding born out of impatience while still holding men up to the same old standards. Yes they’re active but they really do very little to break the toxic gender scripts so… no cigar for the girls who go that route.
By the way… I am hard pressed to find hateful MGTOW rhetoric when I search for it myself. I’m sure that there’s a select number of blogs where someone’s got a dark streak, but for every one of those I bet I can point you to ten feminist blogs that say ridiculous things such as that all men should be castrated. And besides, I see the good MGTOW members being made out to be the devil more often than not. I’m definitely not seeing feminists being on the up and up about this group of men.
@Uncalledfor, no offense but you need to rethink your rhetoric. I read it and I thought (and this is me we’re talking about) that maybe you’re just not going to be satisfied until you hear exactly what you wanted to hear – whether that itself is actually true or not. At best you’ll find yourself at an impasse with feminists if you take that kind of argument to them. Honestly, I feel you, trust me, I know that there’s a real lack of honesty but if your goal is to take charge and be macho and put pretty little lies to rest, then no wonder they’re lying to you, know what I mean?
@dugone
No quotes this time~
I ask out strangers, I just don’t angst about it so much. I don’t know them as well, so there’s not as much hanging on the outcome. Plus, since the window of opportunity is generally going to close forever in a few minutes when it comes to strangers, there’s more incentive to Just Do It. (and I am impulsive so it works out.) Sometimes I still chicken out once or twice though. I walked all the way past security to my gate once before I decided to run back and ask out this cute check-in guy at the airport.
I accept a few, and I’ve accepted dates on referral, sight unseen, from guys who didn’t click with me but wanted to suggest a friend.
It’s usually some variation of “would you like to do an activity at a time?” and exchange numbers, and then I follow up with a “how about that activity at that time?” kind of text, I guess? I’d never run up and drop my number without some idea of how well he was exposed to the idea, so if he didn’t want to give me his, I’d probably take it as a ‘don’t-want-to-explicitly-reject-you-but-no-thanks’ rejection.
Yeah, I hear a lot about that stuff. It bothers me too and I think we should fix it.
You’re right, my wording was pretty sloppy there, allow me to recant a bit of my hyperbole and fix it.
“I’ve never seen anyone attack MGTOW for the ‘opting out’ concept. MGTOW gets attacked when they
very oftensay blatantly horrible things about women. ” Ok, that gets rid of the exaggeration and is more accurate to the point I wanted to make.My claim is not that the MGTOW movement is full of horrible people who say horrible things, I will admit to largely having no contact with it. My claim is that I have never seen feminists bash/attack MGTOW for anything other than the saying of horrible things, with the obvious inclusion that merely responding or disagreeing with them does not constitute an attack.
FTR, Cactuar, I thought you’ve been pretty clear in all your comments, and it’s great to see that there are women like yourself who recognize that there are female gender scripts that adversely affect men and are taking responsibility for doing something about them.
Witness the discussion on this thread:
http://www.rolereboot.org/sex-.....her-stupid
Note the replies by “Minerva” in particular.
From drunken discussions I’ve had in rl about this with men and women, it seems to me that there are huge disparities in the way men and women consider who they are attracted to.
The men seem to have a shotgun approach where they’ll assess the attractiveness of practically every woman they come in to contact with, even women they pass in the street and will never see again. This is what sours the interaction “nice guys” have with most women; they’ve already made themselves nervous and invested emotionally in their interactions with women they are attracted to, yet are relaxed around women they aren’t attracted to. Hence the nervous or creepy vibe the woman feels from the stranger, and why nice guys typically find girlfriends though being friends with them first.
While women seem to only assess once they have been approached or once the idea has occured to them some other way. They will happily chat to a guy without the thought of whether they are attracted to him even entering their minds, while for men it is the first thing on their minds. This is also why the approach is so important; it can make or break whether the woman is attracted or not, whatever the actual physical attractiveness of the guy. It’s also why an early Expression of Interest is important, before being put in the friend-zone. Hell, it’s why an expression of interest in important, friend-zone or not.
There are exceptions to this of course. The most successful men have a more relaxed approach – they generally don’t care if the particular woman he approached is interested, and happily move on they aren’t; This is PUA advice in a nutshell. Likewise, women commonly adopt a male-orientated approach in cases where the man is extremely attractive, or at least several degrees more attractive than she is.
Just my meandering thoughts on the whole dynamic.
Edit to Clarify: By “they generally don’t care if the particular woman he approached is interested” I don’t mean that they will ignore the woman’s boundaries and get all “rapey”. I mean that any rejection will not affect him emotionally. He hasn’t invested any of his feelings of self-worth into whether she likes him back, as nice-guys seem prone to do, and so is more relaxed around her and appears more confident.
@Cactuar, I believe that this is almost an upside-down world from my experience as a male. I mean, to the point where you didn’t even bother mentioning it until I asked about it because it seemed unimportant? Actually, to me, women asking strangers is the only thing that matters, same standard that men are held to. I mean, especially given the horrible anti-male fear-mongering that goes into prevailing views such as Schrodinger’s Rapist. It’s not whether you angst about it much or not, but whether it makes a difference to the men by making things a little easier. A little less angst for you, a little less angst for him – sounds like a total win all around. In this case, if it’s easy then all the better! Do it more!
Again, specifics matter here. I have been “asked out” to coffee dates during working hours on a Monday… the most casual and un-romantic situations ever. I think every guy pretty much knows that the only times that matter are a Friday or a Saturday night – if you can give up the most popular time slot where all your friends are hanging out and most of the important romantic dates happen – then there’s some legitimacy to the date request, without needing further escalation by a man to be considered an “actual” date. Hell, when my last girlfriend was cheating on me, she would ask me to take her out to dinner on a Tuesday night and she’d mysteriously be “busy working” on a Friday night. You know what I mean? Specifics matter… the wrong activity at the wrong time can do more to de-escalate than to bring about romance.
A couple of times girls who were friends of friends have asked me to take them on a motorcycle ride immediately upon meeting me, which works out better than going to Starbucks on a Monday, and a few times “friends” who were interested had invited me to their places for home-cooked meals and a movie… but never strangers. But in general I don’t feel that most of the way in which women have initiated things with me really amount to a hill of beans… and a rare hill of beans at that.
I think everything is in the details. And that’s probably where a lot of the disconnect is. Not with you specifically, but between men and women generally, when women claim to be doing their fair share of romantic escalation. Someone like Clarice Thorn comes to mind.
Anyway, I suggest you capitalize on your great initiative with men and join us in criticizing feminists such as Clarice Thorn or “Minerva,” who are much more representative of the sort of views that are much more prevalent among feminist women than your own. I’ll count you as a great ally, even if I don’t consider you 100% up to snuff until proven otherwise. But I just don’t see the point of having had this entire discussion with you that ends up with us agreeing on everything… when you were never my intended audience to begin with. I mean great – of all the millions of women who could be reading my comments, it ends up being the one who is already doing what I am trying to suggest? You know that you are the exception, not the rule.
@TokenGreyGuy, Minerva seems to be much more representative of the prevailing view espoused by women. I’ve also heard “feminism schmeminism” dozens of times when it came to feminists asserting that men should always pay.
@Adiabat, if women had to approach men on anywhere near a regular basis, they would adopt more of a shotgun approach as well. Actually, men would tone theirs down if that happened. I don’t see this as a profound difference between the sexes, just a side effect of the dating scripts to which everyone is held.
And don’t be fooled – women judge, and they just judge harshly. Trust me, they know when a good looking guy walks in through the door. The behavior that they exhibit in the situations that you’re describing is merely entitlement – they will not acknowledge attraction until they are properly catered to. Like Minerva, on TokenGreyGuy’s link.
An old acquaintance once said word-for-word (well … in Danish, not in English) what Minerva ends her first post on that thread with:
At that time I had learned that dating requires not only some skills (learning a bewildering array of inconsistent, bizarre and self-contradicting rules of conduct that have no system and no logical justification, learning the correct techniques and etiquette of approach), but also certain natural abilities (ability to correctly identify and respond to nonverbal communication, ability to project confidence), that I simply lack. I bowed out of the tiger arena a while later.
I did not bow out with grace, though, and I think one thing the Romanticism-infested culture we live in sorely lacks is a way to do so with grace and dignity – possibly while we wait for dungone’s project of abolishing inconsistent, sexist and stupid dating scripts to come to fruition. In the current environment, certain types of people are simply so disadvantaged that shaming and deceiving them into continuing is nothing but utter cruelty.
This is perhaps one of the reasons why MGTOW are so despised: They tend to bow out with much noise (usually involving a generous helping of profanity), rather than quietly.
Do any of you guys think that Minerva is actually a troll?
I had not thought about that, but it is certainly possible.
I don’t know if she’s a troll, but her “I’m a feminist but…” line is awfully reminiscent of “I’m not a racist, but…”.
Thanks Grey. That’s the first time I’ve laughed out loud all day.
Is any activity at all where one woman does something with one man automatically considered a “date” ? I too, have had female colleagues pop their head into my office near lunch and say some variation of “I’m headed down to subway for lunch, wanna come?”, but I don’t consider those things *dates*.
There’s no reason (generally) to think that such a request signals attraction or interest beyond a friendly chat. Nor would the women feel romantically rejected if I turned them down with: “Not today, I’m skipping lunch so I can go home earlier.”
For the same reason, making such a request myself isn’t scary, and won’t scar me even if I’m turned down. (I’ll stop asking if someone says no all the time, though)
Now, if she’d asked instead: “I’m planning to make lasagne on friday, would you like to come over, perhaps around 8?” or: “I was thinking of paddling the Lutsi saturday, want to come ? I’ll bring some stuff and we can have a picnic ?”, then that’d be (to me) a date-invitation.
I’ve had even that happen to me once or twice, but in those cases it’s been invitations from girlfriends (or lately, from my wife). As such those examples can hardly be considered examples of taking initiative.
Agrajag,
I would agree with your definition of ‘date’, but I would apply it to almost any agreement to meet at a specific time and place(in the future). That is, I don’t draw a distinction between a ‘coffee meet’ and a ‘Real Date’.
I have been asked out a time or two, but always by women who already knew me pretty well. I don’t think I’ve ever been approached by a woman I didn’t know who just wanted to get to know me. My impression is that when(most) women talk about how they initiate, they count asking out guys they already know, and that few will initiate with completely unfamiliar men.
@dungone at June 5, 2012 at 10:08 pm [can we have numbered comments?]
With all due respect in turn I think it’s a clear sign, that if you are reduced to attacking someone’s rhetorical style and presuming (ie making up) their motivations, then you must have already lost any substantive argument. This is a reflex so typical of feminists — changing the subject from (nominally) objective facts to (certainly) unknowable motivations — that I’m shocked you would indulge it. Are you starting to go native on us?
Now, since you’ve made it so easy let me return some value here for the readers:
you’re just not going to be satisfied until you hear exactly what you wanted to hear – whether that itself is actually true or not.
My goal is to have the truth be told. What is yours?
but if your goal is to take charge and be macho and put pretty little lies to rest,…
My goal is to have the truth be told, period. Putting pretty lies to rest, along with other kinds of lies, is a natural and proper result. It has nothing in the least to do with being macho or taking charge; those are fantastical and scurrilous distractions on your part. Truth be told, I’m not a PUA or an MRA or anything like that, at best I keep them in telescope range; though that is of no moment, either (see below).
…then no wonder they’re lying to you, know what I mean?
No, I don’t. This passage makes zero or less sense to me, and I think it rather pushes the boundary of a NoH thread on your part. Even if I hypthetically credit your fantasy about my behavior, it’s not sensible to expect anyone’s reaction to being called out for lying to be even more lying, unless you have a _very_ low — here, misogynist — opinion of that person.
But, really, my personal motivations mean nothing in the big picture, and neither do yours; and your presuming to know mine is a waste of both our times. The important question is, what is true about the world? independent of whether that truth is stated by a saint or sinner, an alien or a dog, in language polite or vulgar. And here is the truth I’m declaring, cleaned up for your sensibilities:
The prime/base/core/root cause of dysfunction in the American SMP is mis-representation of women’s true mechanisms of sexual desire, as spread by both culture at large and, largely self-servingly, by women themselves. Once this is agreed to, then the situation stands to be greatly improved simply by the better dissemination of correct information, without anyone needing to change or deny their own personal desires.
There, that’s it. Forget who might have said it, or why; pretend you found it carved on a tablet somewhere, and then debate the truth or falsehood of the statement by itself without distractions.
Oh, and lastly from your comment above:
At best you’ll find yourself at an impasse with feminists if you take that kind of argument to them.
Really, what can I add to this?
@uncalledfor, to be perfectly honest with you I felt that rhetoric was a big enough portion of your comment that it eclipsed whatever else you were trying to say.
The main reason I responded, actually, was because I’ve heard this kind of frustration so many times that I kind of have a decent idea of what it’s getting at. I get it – it’s the DJ Qualls of the world complaining that if only a girl told them the Truth about what women want when they were 12 and the world was their oyster, then then they would have become all-star linebackers instead of computer programmers. Figuratively speaking, of course.
Look, if this is about power, if the Truth as you see it would really allow men to gain power over women, then that pretty much seals the deal about women being honest – they’d never allow it. So that part wasn’t meant as a dig at you personally. It was a dig at the double bind that this rhetoric usually creates for women – implying to varying degrees that women wouldn’t like it if every man started giving them what they really lusted after.
dungone, I have to say I tend to agree with uncalledfor’s assessment of your rhetoric here (and earlier). Your passage that I quote comes pretty close to being an ad hom sneer. And as someone who has been hit with the bullshit ‘some of your arguments are like anti-feminists’ … therefore you must be an anti-feminist!!!‘ line of attack, I can empathize with uncalledfor’s frustration at your arguing against some group that you’ve lumped him in with instead of just directly taking issue with his actual argument.
WTF? Where did he say that??
@ballgame, how could you read “if the Truth as you see it” and see it as a factual claim as opposed to a propositional claim? Propositional claim: “IF what you meant by what you said, i.e. what is implied by what you said, is the same thing that was implied the vast majority of the time that I had seen similar claims made in the past, then it leads me to make a conclusion about the consequence of your statement, if it were true” I know that’s a big job for one little “if” but that’s what it’s there for, so that the correspondent has the option to say, “no, that’s not what I actually meant.” Which is why the whole damn issue here is the way his ideas were stated, which I clearly said was an issue of rhetoric. And why is it an issue of rhetoric? Because it’s awfully close to what feminists pick up on when they say that Nice Guys(tm) aren’t really all that nice. If Uncalledfor wants to feed the beast, fine, but if he wants to reconsider a better strategy, then let’s talk.
Who is it a sneer of? I’m a computer programmer so if anything, it was self-effacing; plus I like DJ Qualls. The passage you quoted described exactly the way many women will interpret Uncalledfor’s rhetoric. It’s how I’ve seen it interpreted. He leaves plenty of room for that interpretation, which is again what I was pointing out when I said that I saw a problem with his rhetoric.
Ultimately where I disagree with the rhetoric that was used is that it implied, down to a T, that a) men behave a certain way because they believe that it’s what women want and that b), if these men knew better, they could behave in a different way that women really wanted. You can put a charitable spin on it, but I merely pointed out the obvious faults. I am vehemently opposed to both a) and b). Men shouldn’t decide who they are based on what women want them to be. Men should just be themselves, without having to know anything about what women want in order to pursue those women in the correct manner. So there is no “truth” here that is relevant to the solution to the greater problem of female passivity.
Uncalledfor,
I’m not sure what you meant by “pretty lies” but unfortunately that has associations with Roissy/Heartiste….
I’ll let the feminists describe the misogyny, but from my point of view he is incredibly misandrist-ranking men as alpha’s, beta’s and omega’s and describing their only worth as how much vagina they get access to.
again, I don’t know what you meant by “pretty lies” but it is unfortunately like leaving “88″ in a discussion about race….
dungone: “Which is why the whole damn issue here is the way his ideas were stated”
No, the issue, as with all issues, is about the truth — the truth of how the world is and works. Restating from above, rhetoric, motivations, values, etc. are all completely secondary; what matters is the truth, aka reality, and reality is independent of who says it or how. Call me crazy, but that’s what I think.
Meanwhile, you can give truth short shrift and instead obsess over rhetoric, and imaginary motivations, to the nth degree if you like. Certainly I can’t stop you, and so I hope that whatever turns you on while floating your boat suffices to get you through the night. But for the sake of FC readers I think it’s worth making a few more points, following your own rhetoric:
a big job for one little “if” but that’s what it’s there for, so that the correspondent has the option to say, “no, that’s not what I actually meant.”
So you would have no problem with, for example, my saying “If by this dungone means, as seems likely the case, that he intends to frappe some live puppies and feed the results to orphans, then…”, since you always have the chance to respond with “No, my good man, that’s not what I meant at all.”? Sorry, not buying: some implications are just unwarranted to the point of slander, regardless of how much conditional batting bookends them.
men behave a certain way because …, if these men knew better, they could behave in a different way … Men shouldn’t decide who they are…
I see what you did there, equating men “behaving” some particular way with “deciding who they are”. Nonsense; and I’ll stop there to be polite.
Men should just be themselves, without having to know anything about what women want in order to pursue those women in the correct manner.
And how’s that workin’ out for you? or for anyone? Do you apply the same standard when someone is looking for a job, or a meal, or clean oxygen?
And why is it an issue of rhetoric? Because it’s awfully close to what feminists pick up on when they say that Nice Guys(tm) aren’t really all that nice.
Using “But how will feminists interpret this?” as any kind of guide strikes me an utterly bizarre metric. The “Nice Guys(tm)” canard is a particularly vicious and stupid one, and the people who indulge it have, IMO, conclusively demonstrated that they’re acting in bad faith (once again, I’ll stop there to be polite). Appeasing such people with any display of deference is, IMO, an intellectual and moral mistake. But, as above, if that’s how you want to spend your time on Earth then I certainly can’t stop you.
@Cactuar,
I’m skeptical of the whole “who can tell who’s going to be attracted to whom… there’s no system! You can’t predict it and that’s the beauty of it!” routine when it comes to this topic, because it only ever seems to be directed at men. Could you please remind me of the timeless, inexplicable mystique that is the primal forces of attraction the next I read or hear something lamenting the plight of fat women, older women, certain WOC, etc.? Because I might forget.
If we rounded up all the guy A’s of the world next the guy B’s, for you and say all your girlfriends, you think we wouldn’t find certain traits more or less abundant in the B’s than the A’s? And that guys who find themselves A’s want to become more like B’s? Do you think this is wrong? A lot of women and gynocentric sympathizer men seem to.
@Agrajag,
A lot of men might accept dates from 90% of single women out there, because they really want to get some experience, be seen with a girl, etc. but they aren’t really attracted to the girls themselves. How can you tell the difference? I’m betting there’s going to be… sexual compatibility issues past the first few times, if he actually goes for someone on the bottom end of that 90%.
Mind you, I’m not a gynocentric feminist and I’m not passing too much judgment on these men for their motivations. I don’t like the objection that this is terrible because they’re “essentially saying any warm body will do”; not because there’s no truth to this, but this is a scene with rebound guys, birthday guys, 2 am hotties, etc., all stuff we all basically accept and where the same criticism can apply. You’d think that this mode of thought from the type of people who are the most starved for touch and affection would be the most forgivable, not the least. Many women like it the least because they see themselves as above guys this desperate and don’t want to be with them, and that’s fine, but perversely dressing this up as an ethical concern really rubs me the wrong way.
@dungone,
I don’t know. Sometimes I fear the men’s sphere is making dateless men’s situations sound worse than they really are, making us no different from scare-mongering politicos. I’ve been lonely and depressed, and the road from there to a normal social and sexual life was hard and an emotional rollercoaster but comparing it to TIGERS! is overwrought. We want to encourage these men, don’t we? (For one thing, along the journey you will find friends, allies, partners in crime, possibly the most rewarding part of all. In your tiger scenario, shouldn’t the guy have hunting wolves on his side by the end? Bah, /overdoing the analogy.)
Re: the definition of a date,
I think that a weekday coffee date can count as a date, yes, for a first or second date. Coffee date’s my standby, anyway. All this talk of quirky offbeat dates or “action dates” requires too much investment from me off the bat.
Is it weird that I’m oddly sympathetic to Minerva? She just reinforces that feminism often doesn’t translate well into real-life dating situations, for either gender. I don’t mind having to pay for those first couple of coffees or salads, and I associate her being too insistent on paying her own way as a sign that this isn’t going to go anywhere.
I do do something that I bet girls like Minerva would hate, though. There’s this gray zone between two people just spending time together and actual dating. She draws the line at before sex or relationship talk. Along the lines of what dungone said, I could also set it earlier at the point from which we shift from weekday dates to weekend night ones. Or verbal acknowledgement that what we’re doing is dating (i.e. no more plausible deniability), or even just a kiss. All these can work in different situations, but up until that point has been crossed, I resolve the right to see multiple women on things like coffee dates. It’s not that I’m reeling in the bitchez, when I did do this I was only seeing one other girl. It’s that being stuck in pre-relationship limbo sucks and the easiest way to get stuck there is by Sunk Cost Fallacy from having gone all in on one girl too quickly.
@pocketjacks, rest assured that the Tigers allegory was adopted from an 18th century story called The Lady Or The Tiger and was used by me to illustrate the dynamic between making an effort and the chances of getting rejected. If the story was about bunnies I would have used bunnies. It merely illustrates the ridiculousness of the gender role dynamic and women’s passive behavior.
I absolutely have no sympathy for that selfish lazy woman and her princess mindset. She oozes with toxic gender role enforcement for which there is no excuse. Honestly, she sounds brainwashed to me.
Even though I made a similar criticism about dungone’s post that tigers are too much, half in jest, “The Lady or the Tiger” is a well-known story and the comparison resonates in a way that others would not. It’s a good one.
@pocketjacks, I think the burden is on anyone seeking exclusivity. Assuming everyone is on the same script following the same rules is unreasonable today. Now while it might make sense as a form of selection, there are women who demand that men pay, and women who hate men trying to pay, and they both tend to blame the guy for not knowing what’s the right thing to do. Who has trained confusion into the men? Women who think differently from other women. Feminism is too seldomly trained on the correct target. Want clear, enthusiastic consent to be the standard? Stop telling men that is appropriate, and target the women who want the guy just “to know” and to take the physical steps without asking — and who will dump a guy who asks because he wasn’t man enough to do the right thing already.
One of the major flaws with feminism is that any biased worldview (biased in the sense of advocacy here) has trouble being objective when it is necessary to criticize the subject of its advocacy. When women contribute to their own problems, criticism is necessary. Feminism often seems to give women a free pass in order to blame men, even when men are behaving appropriately given their experiences with real-life women. That inconsistency is at the heart of many of my criticisms of feminism.
FTR, dungone, no. Your original statement …
… comes across strongly as not asking whether uncalledfor’s goal is for men having power over women, but instead just questioning whether his ‘plan’ would really achieve that goal. But the thing is, he never claimed he wanted that goal, so asking whether the claim would generate that result misleading implies that he did claim that was his goal.
It would be like me asking you, “Look, dungone, if your strategy would really generate winning lottery tickets, somebody would already be doing it.” You would be totally justified in taking exception to the idea that you claimed to have some plan for generating winning lottery tickets.
@ballgame, not that this isn’t a dead horse already, but I never said that I was asking whether Uncalledfor’s goal was as I had assumed. I made my assumption clearly and pointed it out as an assumption, which is enough, I think, to shield me from any accusations of putting words into anyone’s mouth. FWIW SWAB saw some of the same problems that I picked up on and pointed them out as well. I gave Uncalledfor every opportunity to correct me if I’m wrong about where he is got his ideas and what he really meant by them. So far, he didn’t take me up on that and has, instead, argued about the “truth” of his statements. It doesn’t matter – true or not – the framing and word choice is a losing cause for men and we shouldn’t make arguments in the same manner as people like Roissy/Heartiste. At any rate, even taking his statements at face value, I see them as highly problematic and, quite frankly, flat out wrong.
dungone: I gave Uncalledfor every opportunity to correct me if I’m wrong about where he is got his ideas and what he really meant by them.
I think that what I “really meant” is spelled out quite clearly in plain English. It is purely your insistence on changing the subject to hidden motivations that has caused this exchange to drag on so unproductively. (Are you by chance one of those PoMo extremists, who insist that there is no reality other than power relationships?)
So far, he didn’t take me up on that
Because my motivations are clearly irrelevant, as I’ve stated many times.
and has, instead, argued about the “truth” of his statements.
Actually not, we haven’t even gotten that far. I’ve put my statements out in print, clearly defined, and so far waited in vain for anyone to engage the actual substance instead of changing the subject to rhetoric.
It doesn’t matter – true or not – the framing and word choice is a losing cause for men and we shouldn’t make arguments in the same manner as people like Roissy/Heartiste.
“How many divisions has the Pope?”
At any rate, even taking his statements at face value, I see them as highly problematic and, quite frankly, flat out wrong.
Ah, at last the game’s afoot! Assuming you’re now willing to at least touch down momentarily on the field of reality, do tell: exactly which statement that I’ve made do you think is “flat out wrong”? Remember, we’re not talking about something you think is implied, but what’s actually written on the page. Your serve.
Thank you, Uncalledfor.
A conversation cannot get anywhere if someone is focused on alleged hidden motivations and not plain text.
@Uncalledfor, give me a break. Your original comment is about as vague as an unfinished bridge. There is nothing clear or in plain English about it other than the uncanny similarity to arguments proposed by misandric misogynists who make it quite clear what they mean by the things they say. You did not say what it is that you think women are lying about to men, that men are confused about, which would prompt men to behave differently, and what that new behavior would look like. Your argument is a huge jack in the box… and I can’t wait to see what the substance of it actually turns out to be.
Your insistence on telling me that there is a truth value to what you said is ridiculous, as on its face your argument is provably false for reasons which I have already stated. Even if there is a kernel of truth around which your premise is based, your assumptions and conclusions are highly problematic. You know, I don’t even care what the “truth” is, and I know that there is a great deal of dishonesty out there. I don’t care if 50% of women are so passive that they indulge in rape fantasies; I don’t need to know that or change my behavior accordingly – I need them to change theirs because there are simply some things which I won’t do. Period. So your argument is wrong. It’s not enough for men to simply find out “the truth.”
You keep trying to convince me that it’s irrelevant where you got your ideas of “pretty lies” from, all the while refusing to clarify what you meant by it, but I shall not be convinced. You can dig your heels in as much as you want about it but at this point, unless you disavow that you’re repeating the Roissy/Heartiste party line, then that’s what I say you’re repeating. You are, at this point, arguing about nothing. I’d rather go re-read Waiting For Godot.
dungone: ” and I can’t wait to see what the substance of it actually turns out to be.”
And at last your patience is rewarded. I’m going to ignore most of your more recent tangle of fallacies and try to tack back toward substance; this will also go some way in responding to SwaB’s remarks/objections above [this would be easier with comment numbering, hint hint]. First I’ll restate what I wrote above in response to Cactuar, broken in four easy pieces:
1. There is a great deal of mis-understanding in the SMP, one of the most consequential being men’s misunderstanding about the true nature of women’s sexual attraction mechanisms.
2. A lot of this misunderstanding stems from bad information, promulgated both by polite society/culture at large, and directly by women in person. Mis-informations of this type, which are both substantive and self-serving for the person telling them, make up the base category of “pretty lies”.
3. Cactuar asked [paraphrasing] what it is within women’s power to do, since they can’t necessarily change their feelings of attraction at will. My claim is that one thing women could do, without changing their feelings, is simply to have the truth about those feelings be told more often.
4. The result of systematically better information getting around would — I claim — be a great easing of pain and tension in the world, which I would regard as a good thing. Not a 100% solution, but a definite improvement. Values and opinions as to what is good, and why, may of course vary; I’ll go into that more below, incl. w.r.t. dungone’s stated perspective.
Now, I’m really quite surprised and disappointed to read these accusations, that simply using the term “pretty lies” amounts to presumptive proof that one is a flying Roissian misogynist. Within the sex & gender ‘sphere I believe it’s now quite a widespread term of art; for instance, you’d hear the term quite regularly on Susan Walsh’s blog, in first person (see here http://www.hookingupsmart.com/.....etty-lies/ for example), and I think you’d have to be mad to class her as any kind of misogynist.
For those just joining our program already in progress, it’s worth going back to square one and illustrate the term in finer detail. Flagship examples of the kinds of “pretty lies” that breed so much sorrow, and which could be eschewed with a simple act of will and self-awareness, are when a woman describes what she herself, or women in general, find(s) attractive with statements like “I’m really attracted to X in men” or “I’m really turned off by men who are Y”, and the resulting statement(s) is(are) both operationally untrue and decidedly self-serving. Here “self-serving” means that the values of X and/or Y are chosen to be socially acceptable, and to maintain or improve the woman’s positive image in the eyes of others or of herself, when the truth would be much less self-flattering.
Textbook cases would include X={“intelligence”, “kindness”} and Y={“self-centered”,”chauvinistic”}; the even minimally alert reader can fill in many more examples. These answers all fit the requirement of reflecting positively on the woman, in that they tend to make her seem deep, caring and respectful of herself. However — as I hope/trust I don’t have to re-argue this basic reality here — understood with (young, single) women as a whole in mind, these values of X and Y produce statements that are essentially wrong, and very destructively so. The plain fact of this time in history is that, for (young, single) women as a group (not 100% uniformly, NAWALT, but on average) kindness and intelligence in a man are much less likely to generate sexual attraction than are chauvinism and self-centeredness. These, then, are the exemplary pretty lies: self-serving and destructively faulty.
You don’t have to be a Roissian or any species of misogynist to believe a plain description of reality. You don’t have to be an ideologue of any kind. You just have to observe un-sentimentally what goes on around you, and read the (voluminous) reports of what others have seen.
Many people who are interested in business and finance probably despise either the writings of Paul Krugman in the NYTimes or the editorials in the Wall Street Journal (or possibly both), for ideological reasons. A little while back, though, some right-winger caused quite a tempest by simply asking, “If you look back over the past few years, whose description of events proved closer to reality, PK or the WSJ?” It’s a worthwhile exercise, to occasionally put aside values and ideology and simply ask, plainly, of these two warring camps, whose picture is recognizably closer to reality? You may despise the toxic misogyny of the Roissians and hold them as near-criminals in their bad intent; but you should also answer honestly: Between MRA/PUA’s and hard-core feminists, whose description of the world compares better with observable reality? when it comes to explaining female sexual desire behavior. Truth marches in no one’s service, but to avoid unpalatable truths from unpalatable messengers is to court the whirlwind.
Which brings us back to the question of values and motivations, which people here feel such a strong need to see that they’ll just make them up if not prevented. dungone suggests, quite traditionally, that the most likely motivation for getting better information is — simply and one-dimensionally — to exercise power, here men’s power over women. I would counter that that’s hardly an exhaustive list, and suggest two (arguably) even more basic goals, which would be sanity and comity. To put it bluntly, pretty lies form the walls of a maddening maze that young men must endure, where nothing is what it appears to be at first (if one is good-hearted enough to take the word of others seriously; the bad-hearted may thrive by contrast). The feminist-inflected American polite society presents men with an intellectually incoherent world, like the old Soviet Union, where the “de jure” description that authority espouses is manifestly at odds with the “de facto” reality of what they can see in front of them. This is the kind of world that drives people crazy and ruins their trust in authority and in one another. Changing the at-odds-with-reality undergirding practices is a big step in avoiding those effects, whatever your ideology.
Closer to home, dungone makes the boundaries of his own motivations clear:
“Men shouldn’t decide who they are based on what women want them to be. Men should just be themselves, without having to know anything about what women want in order to pursue those women in the correct manner.”
” I don’t care if 50% of women are so passive that they indulge in rape fantasies; I don’t need to know that or change my behavior accordingly – I need them to change theirs because there are simply some things which I won’t do.”
and I certainly admire his stand on principle, to be genuine and not a strategic exploiter or a callous manipulator. Better information, he maintains, would not change his actions and therefore not change his outcomes; so who needs it? As above, I maintain that while it might not do anything for his success, it might help his sanity — or that of someone like him — to have an unsentimental, informed perspective on the reality he faces, rather than walking blindly into the labyrinth.
Uncalledfor:
Cosign one hundred percent.
Hello again, FCers. a couple of quick points that have been overlooked. (First of all, Cactuar, thanks for being so honest and awesome.)
1. On OKCupid, if you rate someone 4 or 5 stars, I’m pretty sure it sends them a message letting them know. That’s likely one reason women do not rate men at 4 or above at the same frequency.
2. I’d like to respond to this point from the post.
Percentile is not the only objective measure of attractiveness. The median man, for example, may be objectively less attractive than the median woman.
@Uncalledfor,
That’s a false choice if I ever saw one, but it does vindicate all the previous assumptions that I’ve made about your stance.
@Bari,
That’s a good point, even though OkCupid doesn’t (intentionally) make it obvious who it was that gave you 4-5 stars. I recall getting a lot more 4-5 star ratings in my email until they implemented the paid-for feature where anybody can find out who rated them that way, at which point the number of 4-5 star ratings I’d receive dropped off a cliff. But they did this after their study came out. Plus, the thing is, why would you rate someone as a 2 or a 3 if you really thought of them as a 4-5? Or, why would you spend time browsing through profiles to let the 1′s, 2′s, and 3′s know how you feel but leave the 4′s and 5′s alone? Isn’t the point of this exercise to actually find your ideal mate? That kind of behavior sounds incredibly irrational and counter-productive. I have a feeling that of the women that do rate anyone, they’ll rate them as they see them – i.e. the pressure to remain passive might just get fewer women to rate anyone at all.
That doesn’t really make any sense. The median is the same as 50th percentile – it doesn’t matter what you call it. And actually, the fact that a woman at the 50th percentile might limit her dating options to men who are objectively above the 50th percentile, i.e. 80th-100th percentile – that is exactly what hypergamy is. You have a point in saying that men’s attractiveness could be much more skewed than women’s, but that may not mean that the median man is objectively less attractive than the median woman, it may just mean that the 99th percentile man is way more desirable than the 99th percentile woman. If you look at it in terms of wealth, for example, there are many more male billionaires than female ones. In fact, there are something like 55,000 millionaires in the United States – you could take all the supermodels, actresses, porn stars, pop singers, etc., and put them all together into a bunch, you’d still have fewer females than males in the upper-stratosphere levels of social status in our culture.
Thanks for stopping by, Bari. That’s a potentially significant piece of information, if true … can you (or anyone who may participate at OK Cupid) verify?
I know many people disagree with me, but I don’t think there is any such thing as ‘objective attractiveness.’ What you can say is that, objectively speaking, women (assuming the OKCupid results are representative of women’s feelings overall) rate average men as ‘sub-par’ … which is to say, they’re hypergamous.
I have mixed feelings about your comment, uncalledfor.
This is kind of a peripheral point, but FTR there are a number of feminists who regard Walsh as anti-feminist (she may even regard herself that way, I don’t know) and by extension misogynist. I think Futrelle and his gang look at her this way, and while I disagree with a lot of what Futrelle writes I wouldn’t characterize him as “mad.”
FWIW, I don’t think I agree with that assessment. I haven’t really read enough of her to be sure, and a lot of what she writes seems pretty thoughtful and thought-provoking. Characterizing her as a “misogynist” seems pretty harsh (and definitely ad hominem-y). But I wouldn’t agree that anyone who did view her that way was necessarily “mad.”
This is not a plain fact AFAICT. In particular, I don’t think that women overall find chauvinism and self-centeredness per se to be sexually attractive, they find social dominance to be attractive, and it just so happens that social dominance is strongly connected with being indifferent to the feelings of others in many cultural spheres, with the result that many socially dominant men happen to be selfish, chauvinistic jerks. To rise to the top in many social spheres — particularly where the scales of justice function imperfectly, if at all, and/or where being dominant requires actual physical violence — one often needs to be capable of exploitative behavior, sometimes extremely (i.e. murderously) exploitative behavior.
With regard to the OkCupid thing, IIRC:
1. It is now the case that if you rate someone 4 or 5 stars they get sent a message telling them you did so.
2. As of the time of the survey, what happened was they got sent a message saying *someone* had rated them 4 or 5 stars (with a list of 5 or so possible people). If they then went into the rating system the person in question would be among the first few pictures they got shown (this meant with a bit of effort you could often figure out who it had been). If they also rated the person 4 or 5 stars then both parties would be informed that the other (by name) had rated them highly.
“This is not a plain fact AFAICT. In particular, I don’t think that women overall find chauvinism and self-centeredness per se to be sexually attractive, they find social dominance to be attractive”
Sure, but you can’t say you find chauvinism and lack of empathy in men to be a turn-off, if you’re turned on by power-over social behavior, nothing to do with sexual behavior btw (which is very likely to include those two).
It’s like saying I hate excessive heat and light, but to walk on stars.
Thanks for writing the post, Ballgame! There is a system that allows you to rate people on OKCupid, and that definitely sends people messages. I thought it actually told you who rated you highly, but maybe not. I’m not sure if that system is what is being referred to in the OKCupid post, but I suspect it is. You’d have to write the OKTrends bloggers to be sure.
Ah, but what is “average” if there is no objective measure of attractiveness? If there’s no objective measure, sub-par is sub-par.
I’m not just picking nits. You’re using rank (percentile) as the objective measure of attractiveness. Then you’re comparing how women perceive men (sub-par) to what they objectively are (average). You do the same thing in the original post by talking about what leagues people “objectively” belong to–that is, what rank they have.
This is a subtle issue, but here’s how I see it. There are two (heteronormative) ways to look at this: either women are more selective, or fewer men are attractive. If there is no such thing as objective attractiveness, they mean the same thing. Otherwise, they don’t.
(We all agree that there is at least an inter-subjective measure of attractiveness. Otherwise the concepts of “median” and “percentile” would be meaningless, because there would be no single ordering.)
It’s very possible, in my opinion, that there is a meaningful objective measure of attractiveness, and that men are less attractive on average. Notice that I am suggesting a difference in the mean, as opposed to a difference in the variance. And even if the means are the same, the distributions are not necessarily normal, so the medians could be different.
(And of course, whatever the case may be, none of this is about blame. Blaming someone for when attraction happens is like trying to blame someone for the weather.)
Not as sure about this, but I also think that at the time (it’s certainly true now), when choosing ratings one was shown both photos and a section of the person’s profile (blurb, interests etc.) So the “attractiveness” rating is not necessarily based wholly on looks.
“Ah, but what is “average” if there is no objective measure of attractiveness? If there’s no objective measure, sub-par is sub-par.”
Well, then the assumption behind saying that average men are “sub-par”, is that women are objectively more attractive than men are, everything accounted for.
So, if it’s only a question of attraction, a bisexual person would always pick a woman instead of a man. And an average woman is “settling” when she goes for an average man.
Sorry, this just says that femaleness is more valued by individuals, on an attractive basis. And I don’t think this is true.
Femaleness is generally more valued, more protected, more cherished (by societies), but not necessarily more attractive to individuals.
Society has put in memes that create a perceived draught for men and a perceived abondance for women, because of who has to initiate, not out of a biological objective reality.
If you have to approach, you’ll find the other more attractive because of the fallacy of sunk cost. You have to invest, so you better like what you invest in. Women who stay passive have no such pressure to find advances desired.
no, people can obviously prefer one sex to the other. And don’t forget that I’m allowing for the possibility of extremely attractive men.
Just to make things a little clearer, let’s call this objective measure of attractiveness “fitness.”
Bari, I disagree with your points here.
No, what I’m saying is that guys lumped in the middle of the pack are objectively average guys (average in the vernacular sense, not the strict statistical sense, which would be slightly different), and that women as a group (once again, if OKCupid is representative) rate such average guys as moderately unattractive. I’m not making any claim at all about “objective attractiveness,” because I don’t think such a thing exists.
Let’s not!! Your suggestion doesn’t add any clarity that I can see, and you’re compounding one error (the notion that there’s such a thing as ‘objective attractiveness’) with another (the notion that guys who don’t get rated highly by lots of women are presumably ‘unfit’ … which tends to imply ‘defective’, which is an extremely judgmental and, um, ‘looks-ist’ way to view people).
what’ya all think of this:
http://deadspin.com/5914355/ho.....t-explains
Ballgame: what middle? If there’s no objective ordering, there’s no middle.
The “fitness” idea is to clarify that attractiveness can manifest itself in male or female form while still being a thing. There’s certainly nothing wrong with people (like me) who aren’t particularly attractive.
SWaB: What’s described in the article seems consistent with a non-Gaussian distribution for attractiveness. maybe log-normal?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L.....stribution
See the section on biology. It’s fun to think about this stuff, isn’t it?
@Bari
There is evidence for the attractive differential to be partly due to the initiator role. dungone has mentioned studies about speed dating that tested it.
Women who initiated rated their partners more highly than when they were the receptive partner. Regardless of other factors.
If you apply for a job, the employer wants you to convince them that you’re worth hiring. Thus you have an investment in being hired that they don’t have in hiring you, giving the employer the upperhand unless your skills or abilities are very sought after (in which case the reverse might occur, but that’s because you have objectively way more value to them than they to you). Employers who “court” employees, estimate that the employee has enormous value to them, or they would wait in their own office.
It’s not simply offer and demand, it’s all about the effort you HAVE to invest to get offers, or offers to your standards (companies who court employees tend to have incredibly high standards compared to others in the industry, and court extremely intelligent or talented people – the movie Antitrust, has the fictional Microsoft courting the protagonist).
If scripts say basically “sit on your ass looking pretty and you’ll get offers”, the effort isn’t that big. If it says “go across the room, cold-approach people, and maybe some will say yes or even deign to have a conversation with you”, the effort is something else.
It seems that the courting has become an analogy for class, where the working poor (men) are supposed to court, impress, and “win the favors”, of the aristocrats (women). And this exists partly because of the Victorian era (not sure what happened then, but it still exists now).
This also explains hatred of trans women (and relative indifference to trans men). Trans women (like me) want to usurp aristocracy, by “pretending to be women”. Trans men are just more people in the ghetto, no advantage there, just more competition.
You know how people hate that certain people who are not nice, cool, just, fair, get the good stuff, the money, the house, the trophy life partner (think Iron Man, but more of an asshole)? Well that’s the attitude they have towards trans women, too. They “stole” and didn’t “earn” the favors and privileges of womanhood, they “cheated”. And we hate cheaters.
If female privilege didn’t exist, and relationships and dating didn’t involve mostly “wooing the woman”, I can tell you people wouldn’t care about trans women. Wouldn’t demonize them as perverts, pedophiles and oh-so-not-female. Heck the radfems do it because they see it as THEIR turf. Old boy’s club are not as hermetic.
There’s an objective ordering of the subjective assessments, Bari.
I fail to see how it does any such thing.
There seems to be some assumptions here that the distributions of women’s and men’s attractiveness ought to map together, so that the people in the middle are appropriate for each other. That could be true, but it’s entirely possible that the actual distributions are not normal (i.e. Gaussian) for a variety of reasons, either due to the reality or the biases in the study. I think it’d be really interesting to not only see how individuals get rated, but how individuals rate other people, too. I suspect I’d rate people in a normally distributed way, but I know some people that for sure don’t do that (e.g. they’re not that discriminating or they’re extremely discriminating), and it’s not clear to me that the sum of how we rate people should come out Gaussian. To be fair to women, although it’s probably because they do tend to be passive and men active, most women make much more of an effort with their appearance than most men.
I’ve enjoyed thinking about the issues in this thread, but I’m not sure I’ve got enough objective data to reach any definitive conclusions.
There may be people here doing that, Mike, or it may be that this is what some think is implied by the OP. Speaking for myself, my interest here is less prescriptive than descriptive. If the graphs in the OP accurately describe how each gender is perceived by the other, that is an enormous female privilege, and can be plausibly linked to a number of gender asymmetries. It would not be hard to see how this difference in perceived attractiveness could contribute to differences in earnings, i.e. average men are compelled to work longer hours at riskier jobs so as to earn more money and achieve higher social status in order to be considered acceptable mates by women who otherwise would see them as ‘sub-par.’ A similar dynamic may also be at work in the phenomenon of men being disproportionally represented at the highest levels of social pyramids. I strongly suspect that some feminists instinctively bridle at acknowledging feminine hypergamy precisely because such talk leads to highly plausible alternative explanations for gender disparities that such feminists would like everyone to believe is caused by anti-female bias.
@Schala: I hear you and understand your point. I suspect the lines of causation work in both directions: the passivity you mentioned is likely the result of female sexual selection and a different shape of the distribution of genetic fitness among males, but I’m sure it also makes women more selective. It’s a feedback loop.
@Ballgame:
“There’s an objective ordering of the subjective assessments, Bari.”
not unless they’re the same, and then I’d say they’re actually intersubjective, and, as far as I’m concerned, objective.
Anyway, the main point is that there are two valid perspectives: less men are attractive, and women are more selective. Whether or not there is an objective ordering, those two perspectives are both valid.
I don’t want to upset people. just throwing that out there.
To play devil’s advocate here…it could also be considered an enormous (heteronormative) male privilege. There’s a much higher fraction of women we find attractive! Women, meanwhile, sit around griping how there aren’t enough attractive guys around…and suffer for it.
I think it’s all a lot more complicated than that, but thought I’d give you a feminist talking point to think about now rather than later.
“Ballgame, you don’t understand how horrible it is that every guy I meet seems so unattractive! It’s really a problem for me! How dare you call that a female privilege?”
No, Bari. You can objectively measure any number of subjective things: color preference, favorite sports team, religion, whatever. That doesn’t convert those things into objective things. I could do a poll and find out that people prefer blue to red, 59% to 41%. That doesn’t mean that ‘objectively’ blue is the superior color.
“To be fair to women, although it’s probably because they do tend to be passive and men active, most women make much more of an effort with their appearance than most men.”
Meh. Make-up and abusing it and going to the salon every other day…well that’s a sign of status for some. It’s also a sign of narcissism or insecurity if done oh-so-much.
To me it would be a red flag if you spend more than 2% of your awake time (roughly 20 minutes a day) for hygiene/beauty that isn’t a bath or shower. Making allowance for haircuts when you actually need a haircut.
Because it either signifies that you bought into the “I’m female, so I have to do this”, that you think you’re ugly without it, or that you’re shallow way beyond my criteria with looks (even your own). It very very rarely signifies people who are secure but just like to play with it genuinely, the kind that could take months off their routine to go in the jungle.
Men are discouraged from using any form of make-up unless it’s mandatory for their line of work (theater, TV, clown). If they’re extremely confident, they can wear some “just for kicks” in the playful way our hypothetical super secure woman might, but those are so rare, you might as well win the lottery. Men who choose to wear skirts openly while being straight as an arrow (thus wearing the full brunt of gender-policing with no excuse of “but I’m gay”), are more common. This is also a display of confidence, imo.
“To play devil’s advocate here…it could also be considered an enormous (heteronormative) male privilege. There’s a much higher fraction of women we find attractive! Women, meanwhile, sit around griping how there aren’t enough attractive guys around…and suffer for it.”
Meh, men find most women attractive and yet have to work to date an equivalently attractive woman, who’s had to do nothing. While the women find few men attractive but have a ton throwing themselves at them if they go to the right venues.
Female privilege, definitely.
I have ton of cow milk, but I’d sooo like goat milk vs I’d like to have milk, but have nothing…
That ‘talking point’ is not completely theoretical, Mike. I feel like I hear echoes of it when, for example, Clarisse Thorn talks about women’s ‘emotional escalation work’ or ‘relationship escalation work’ being analogous to the one-sided risks that men bear in the relationship initiation phase. The situation is exactly what you would expect if women are, indeed, hypergamous: women facing extra risks trying to get men to commit because the men they are engaging are disproportionately ‘alphas’ and often have little reason to commit and thus limit their options.
Schala, I don’t know if you noticed this discussion over at Feministe. Some commenters appear to be saying that if you’re anti-makeup, you’re transphobic.
ballgame:
No, but it does mean that objectively blue is the most preferred colour – and given that attraction is basically about preference, not “superiority”, I would think that would be objective enough?
Sure, RF, as long as we don’t get confused and start thinking ‘blues’ are inherently ‘preferable.’
That is exactly what I’ve been trying to say! ‘Eye of the beholder’ and all that! It’s not an ‘inherent’ thing.
I’ll cede the point about objective attractiveness for now. I’m only making the case for it because I believe that everyone on this comment thread actually does recognize that, to some degree, attractiveness is an objective thing–that is, that there is something people are attracted to–, and that trying to turn it into a social construct will confuse the issue.
But, alright, let’s pretend there’s no such thing as objective attractiveness. Then what does the word “attractive” mean? It means precisely that others are attracted to you.
So “women are more selective” means **exactly** the same thing as “less men are attractive.”
Why are we so determined to use the first phrase and not the second?
Maybe I’m being too coy. I think we’re using the first because we want to shame women for their choices, if they’re really choices, or belittle their experiences. If we use the second exclusively, maybe we want to shame men for playing too many video games or whatever.
Here’s the thing. I think we all agree that what’s being discussed is real, and that denying it causes some degree of suffering in the world. It becomes a much easier pill to swallow if we are able to see it from a few different perspectives and don’t try to womp people over the head with it. It would be nice if everyone understood what was being discussed here and could at least disagree intelligently. I’ve found that many people are quite angry about issues that arise around this issue, despite the fact that they haven’t given it any thought and have very little understanding of it.
If it’s true, I’d say everyone involved deserves compassion. maybe even the professional athletes. just my 2 cents.
“So “women are more selective” means **exactly** the same thing as “less men are attractive.””
Nah it means women are mostly passive. Women have options. Having more options makes you more selective.
Femaleness is not this objectively more attractive thing. The scripts about initiation just make it so artificially.
You’ll note that men are often shamed into “doing something”, and that they’re “not on par with women”. But women are never shamed into “doing something” to change a situation.
Men are eternal adolescents who like porn and videogames, don’t you see how horrible this is for women? Men should just man up and initiate and pay dates and marry those women! That’s the message we hear a lot.
Men who opt out, who say fuck it about the provider role. They’ll provide for themselves, less costly. And society doesn’t try to change women, or to change gender norms to fix the issue. It tries to shame men so its a non-issue. Not gonna work.
Bari, I appreciate the civil way you’re making your points. But I still disagree with many of the things you say.
Well, no. Saying “less men are attractive” implies that it’s an inherent characteristic, when in fact it will often be the case that one of those supposedly ‘less attractive’ men will actually be more attractive to some women (just as in the above example, red is actually the preferred color for 41% of the people). Saying “women are more selective” avoids this obvious confusion.
Again, no. I don’t think there’s anything “shameful” about being more selective. I mean really, aren’t people more likely to shame women for not being selective (i.e. for being ‘sluts’)? And I don’t understand at all how this terminology “belittles their experiences.” What it does make clear, though, is that if you’re an average man, the dating environment you’re dealing with is radically different than the environment that an average woman deals with, and it does so in a way that avoids the implication that there’s ‘something wrong’ with being an average guy.
Well, strictly speaking, it’s the phenomenon itself that causes a degree of suffering in the world — maybe more than a degree, depending on how far-reaching of an impact one thinks it might have — though I agree that denying the issue compounds the problem.
Agreed, though I don’t think anyone here has tried to “womp” anyone over the head with it.
I feel like that’s exactly what we’re doing.
Well, everyone deserves compassion about different things, but let’s not pretend that this particular phenomenon affects everyone equally. I think the average man would gladly exchange his situation for whatever ‘problems’ this dynamic creates for the average male professional athlete.
To respond to one other point you raised much earlier, Bari:
There might be something to that, but if it contributes anything to the OKCupid ratings, it would only be a marginal contribution. If it was a major contribution, one would expect a huge bulge of men in the middle, when in fact the largest bulge of men is in the far left. (My version of the OKCupid charts are, in fact, significantly less severe than the actual charts, as I was going from memory and mainly wanted to just illustrate the principle. I might revise those charts to be more accurate if I get the time.)
@ballgame, yeah, it’s not as theoretical as I suggest, unfortunately. The truth is we’re all biased to some extent and it’s easy to see our own problems and hard to be objective about the situation at large. I find that if I can imagine things from the feminist perspective, I’m better able to find the cognitive dissonances in their positions, which might be the only hope to change biases. Just making a valid point or explaining an alternative viewpoint is usually not enough.
A couple of other comments on the above discussion.
We can be objective about things like symmetry, height, body mass index, skin quality (e.g. free of acne, scars, etc.), etc. Generally healthy people who score in certain ranges of the above list are scored as attractive, but it’s a correlation not a tight relationship. There’s certainly a lot of personal preference assuming a person looks healthy. It’s always interesting to talk to people who think the women I find hot are not that attractive to them, and some of the women they find hot don’t do much for me. We’d all agree that they’re attractive at some level, but not our preference. I’d say there’s a case to be made for both objectivity and subjectivity, but people need to be a lot more careful in their discussion. If you can measure it with an algorithm, you can be objective, but attractiveness is intrinsically a subjective value. We can measure things that correlate with attractiveness, but we can’t predict with certainty how every individual will respond to those qualities.
And let me suggest people need to think beyond initial attractiveness based on looks or a superficial online profile. There may well be thresholds of attractiveness that are important, but other more subtle qualities are much more important in the long run. I’ve had a few stunningly beautiful girlfriends who had fundamental flaws that made long-term relationships just not worth it — not even close (too insecure, irresponsible, unethical, etc., things that take a while to discover). We all know of women being attracted to guys who are not good for the long run, too — assholes, bad boys, etc. Attractiveness is the important parameter for a sex partner, but not sufficient for a relationship, and I find it ironic that women who claim to be about the relationship more often are pickier on attractiveness issues, while the less picky men are slower to commit to relationships (as the stereotypes go anyway). I know the feminist response to that one already and don’t quite buy it…
Are you really saying the word “attractive” is confusing? You realize your argument is completely universal and applies every time the word is used. If you told me to search for your friend and told me they were the most attractive person at the bar, do you think I’d be confused? Would I be less confused if you said, “Search for the person you think most people would be drawn to”?
The word “attractive” means something like “having or relating to the power to attract.” There is nothing in the word that requires that attraction be objective, nor is an “objective ordering of subjective assessments,” by which I’m assuming you mean an average of the subjective assessments, any more obvious regardless of how you phrase it: the slight confusion as to whether “2.5 stars” means every women rated a man 2.5 stars on average, as opposed to uniformly, occurs no matter which phrase is used.
Ballgame, I’m surprised. Of course we don’t know what the data would look like if this were a proper experiment. Honestly, the vocabulary used to discuss attraction is a little subtle, but this issue is not subtle at all. This wasn’t a proper experiment, we don’t know what the data would look like if it was, and the data is therefore totally worthless and without any scientific merit whatsoever. Even without the flaws pointed out above, you probably couldn’t pick a worse sample.
The fact is that most of us on this thread have an intuition about the way the world works, but so far I haven’t seen a shred of supporting evidence. We could all be wrong, you know.
Claiming that the OKCupid data is “totally worthless and without any scientific merit whatsoever” is fatuous, Bari. It is almost impossible to conduct airtight clinically-pure scientific investigations into cultural matters that we are able to conduct in the laboratory on inanimate materials. The barriers to such pristine experiments on human subjects are legion: time, money, ethics, and inter-subjectivity are some of the most important obstacles and will often make such tests a practical impossibility.
Instead, the overwhelming majority of sociological studies rely on imperfect instruments. In this context, the OKCupid data is actually fairly strong. The number of participants was huge, relatively speaking; the data is very recent; and there is little reason to think that intersubjectivity played a significant role in affecting the results. (By intersubjectivity, I mean test subjects being aware that they’re being tested and significant numbers of them changing their responses so as to affect the test’s results. Your mentioning of the ’4-5 ratings revealed to the recipient’ issue would be an example of an intersubjectivity issue, but as noted if this had a major impact we’d see a swelling in the middle of the graph, not the left side where most men were disproportionately rated.)
It is valid to have discussions about the ways the OKCupid data may distort the way women in the overall culture view potential dates, but you still need to make the argument (i.e. present logic and evidence as to why it might distort reality this way or that); you can’t just hand-wave it away like you’re trying to do here.
I’m glad you raised this point, Bari. Actually, my argument is very definitely not universal. I generally don’t object to people saying, “He’s hot” when they really mean, “I find him hot.” Hell, I do it myself. It’s not ideal, though, and does often become problematic when the assessment is negative. “Looks-ism” is very much an under-recognized problem.
My objection to attributing attractiveness to the recipient of another person’s desire is greatest in discussions like these where we’re talking about gender dynamics, and where these attributions imply that attractiveness (or lack thereof) are a part of the desire-receiver’s (or non-receiver’s) identity.
@Bari, the OkCupid data is circumstantial, as is most sociological data, but in order to disprove it you would actually have to present us with some other evidence which contradicts the OkCupid results.
An objective ordering of subjective assessments is not a single number which indicates the average score for one man, the average men, or all men, or anything of the sort. It’s an ordering, meaning that it’s a distribution of averages. The above paragraph comes off as nonsensical/irrelevant because of that. We are talking about 80% of men being rated as below average. We are not talking about whether or not there is some subjective controversy among women about an individual men. Those are completely different and unrelated statistics.
The best prognosis I can come up with, supposing that your point was somehow important, is that an average woman has at least 50% of men available to her while the average man has but a miniscule number of women to pick from – yet he has to seek them out and initiate while she can just sit back and expect men to put in an effort on her behalf. You’re basically telling us that finding a needle in a haystack is a fine state of affairs for men while women have their cake and eat it too. How else would you view it?
Bari:
Much of the discussion about whether or not unattractiveness exists has already been had in the RP version of this thread; I think it would be a good idea to read it through before reiterating anything that has already been said.
For the record, I think that “unattractive” and “not preferred by others” are exactly the same thing; in fact, I fail to see how attractiveness or unattractiveness could possibly be anything but based on the judgments of others.
This means that it could certainly be socially constructed (in fact, given how much the ideals have changed over time and how different they are in different cultures, it almost certainly has a very large socially constructed component). But that does not matter, if someone is not considered attractive by anybody at all, it does not matter if the same person would have been considered a prize catch 500 years ago.
Hey Ballgame, I wrote a long reply and just deleted it since I think we’re spinning our wheels a bit at this point. Thanks for the thoughtful post and responses
“But that does not matter, if someone is not considered attractive by anybody at all, it does not matter if the same person would have been considered a prize catch 500 years ago.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2mmv1S_G2j0
made me think of this scene from Sin City
Sin City … always a fave among feminists!
I dug up this link….
http://www.youthlib.com/genera....._your.html
Sin City actually seems more like a “White Knight’s” wet dream. Lots of men sacrificing themselves for women who were hurt by other men.
And how do we make sure that the women’s curve is actually not representing the true average attractiveness of men present on OKCupid?
How do the gay men rate them? Could be an indicator.
SWAB:
An interesting thing to that essay is that while he rejects Miller’s version of “White Knighting” it’s only because he taints all men with the feminist version of original sin. Vilians, are, after all, all men. If he was to embrace even the very limited positive depictions of masculinity in Miller’s work (and I fully admit that Miller has a very constrained and, in a few ways, toxic vision) then he feels that would not help him conduct his eternal self-critique for being a man. In short there are no good men as far as women and feminism are concerned and so its ridiculous to try to live your life by the precepts of any positive male archetype.
Because to him “sexism” only goes one way.
I will also mention that while it’s good to teach kids -as much as you can – to defend themselves, the person you linked to basically thinks kids don’t need adults to protect them.
When one takes an ideology that far, I begin to wonder about one’s sanity.
“And how do we make sure that the women’s curve is actually not representing the true average attractiveness of men present on OKCupid?
How do the gay men rate them? Could be an indicator.”
Not really, since gay men do not have any one standard of attractiveness for men, any more than women do. and I am not sure that even when oyu look at the disparate kinds of men that gay men find attractive, that it would be congruent with the disparate kinds of men that oowmen find attractive.
Rocket Frog has it right when he says “…I fail to see how attractiveness or unattractiveness could possibly be anything but based on the judgments of others.”
“Attractive” and “attract” have an argument structure. “Attract” is transitive; that menas there has to be one argument doing the attracting andone receiving it. Someone is attractive if they attract someone, and that opnly happens when they succeed in attracting that someone; that attractiveness is all in the eye of the attractee.
75% of women say they won’t date an unemployed man:
http://news.yahoo.com/75-perce.....58283.html
And…
“On the other hand, the prospect of dating an unemployed woman was not a problem for nearly two-thirds of men. In fact, 19 percent of men said they had no reservations and 46 percent of men said they were positive they would date an unemployed woman. “
To be fair to women, this isn’t a lie, it’s more of a “lie by omission”.
In other words, women don’t tell you that when they say they want a smart, kind, nice man… that their definition of “man” is pretty restricted.
Their definition of “man” excludes anyone who isn’t proactively making all the decisions, taking all the risks, and doing all the assertive moves and taking all the rejection.
In other words, women conveniently leave out that their preference for kindness is a tertiary factor. It’s lying by omission, not an actual outright lie.
They leave out that:
-> Between a kind man who is unassertive, doesn’t make romantic moves and waits for the woman to give him permission and a sign
and
-> An asshole sociopath who boldly shows interest in her, makes all the moves, and confidently makes all of the steps in the male dating script
…She will generally pick the asshole.
The error that puatards perform is to say that women “like assholes”. But that’s objectively untrue, and there’s no data to confirm this, quite the opposite.
All else equal, if a kind, empathetic, smart man was assertive, made all the moves, took all the risks and took all the rejection -> He would get laid far more than the asshole.
The reason things get conflated in the real world is because it’s very hard for someone to be both things at once. Rejection SUCKS, it’s hard, it’s painful… Most men find that the best way to deal with taking all the pain and risk of rejection and making the moves —> is to simply view women as non-humans.
In other words, becoming a misogynist is usually the easiest way to master assertiveness… Which is why assholes get laid more. It’s not that being an asshole is attractive… It’s that adopting an asshole persona is an easier way of overcoming caring about rejection or timidity.
Being kind and caring and empathetic towards women, while at the same time not feeling rejection is a level of personal development fitting a buddhist monk, which is why it’s so rare.
Feminists refuse to put any blame upon women, but women are at fault as a group for the rise of “assholes”. Because women force men to either:
A) Master the ability to drown in rejection (refer to Dungone’s tiger analogy)
or
B) Be celibate for life
While it is possible for a man to both master rejection AND still care about and respect women, it’s a quite large feat. Things would be made so much easier, and there would be a lot less misoginy around if women lowered their preference for the man to do everything.
I would be so bold to say that even if women increased their effort to 20% (not even 50/50, just 20%), that misogyny around the world would drop massively.
But women are facing a massive dillema here. Female passivity helps them raise the asking price, so if they let go of even a bit of it, their market shares will drop. But if they keep up female passivity, misogyny rises.
They can demand that men evolve all night long, but there’s a limit to the amount of enlightened men that can exist in the population. A man who both views women as humans, has the empathy of a nice guy, compassion of a brother for his sister, AND can at the same time make all the assertive moves that a caveman performed on a cavewoman?
I’m sorry if I have to say it’s unrealistic to expect a large part of the male population to reach such a high level of spiritual evolvement – all the while not asking the female population to evolve even one single bit.
Feminists (of the Marcotte type) are basically saying “Today’s men need to evolve into 25th century men, but don’t dare ask women to evolve even a bit over 5th century women when it comes to mating”
“While it is possible for a man to both master rejection AND still care about and respect women, it’s a quite large feat.”
I agree. But I think this has less to do with what women expect of men and more to do with how women reject men. Young women today are remarkably cruel in how they reject men. And I don’t even think you have to experience this rejection firsthand to be affected by it. If little Johnny sees women all around him being unnecessarily cruel to his friends, then he’s probably not going to have a very high opinion of women.
In fact, he’ll probably hate them.
[...] What Is Feminine Hypergamy? (NoH): My explanation of what “feminine hypergamy” is when discussed in gender discourse, and the [...]
Lemmee see if I’ve got this straight… after tossing aside dictionary and textbook definitions, two graphs from OkCupid have you convinced you’ve finally discovered the true meaning of Christmas?
I don’t see what the point is of trying to redefine some possible evidence of women’s aesthetic myopia (for lack of a better term) as Hypergamy 2.0 (or 3.0).
It’s the phenomenon — the devaluing of average men — which is important, not the label that’s slapped on it, MB. (I notice you make no argument against the existence of the phenomenon.) In this case, it’s understandable why “hypergamy” has been selected as the term of reference, but nonetheless its ‘official’ definition is just a little off, as my post explains.
[…] commenter at Feminist Critics, Aleknovy, had some interesting points about this phenomenon in this comment. (His wording is a bit ‘undiplomatic,’ but clearly that’s not an issue for you, […]
I can see that I am not going to give out any grand new revelations here on hypergamy and passivity. Though I haven’t read every comment, I can say that in this case it demonstrates the relationship between passivity and hypergamy.
On OKCupid, rating someone as a 3 or higher would cause a “like” to be notified to the user. Women were simply so passive that they did not even want anonymous likes to be sent to men. This is a form of hypergamy, since the women did not want to give attention to average men. They do reply to and date average men (according to OKCupid), but they require that the average men take the risk of rejection. The men message or like them, and the women do not “like” them back.
This all makes absolute sense if you believe hypergamy is a behavior that comes about from the female sexual passivity privilege. Average women are able to simply remain passive and it serves to discourage and weed out average men who are not socially dominant, which is priced at a premium; being able to lead a relationship is the male gender role and despite all protests to the latter, women are only into gender equality when it suits them. This ultimately prevents women from becoming actors in their lives, which they don’t always mind to losing since the majority of the loss will be in stress that is forced onto the male. However, it does foster feelings of helplessness when the behavior backfires, usually with below average women who are unable to physically attract men or women who have unrealistically high standards. It also causes counterproductive but honest male reactions to this behavior, such as devaluing women in order to compensate for rejection.
Another interesting study that OKCupid did was determine how your rating applied to your hit rate. In this case, women who were average but had statistically more significant outliers had more “likes.” This was a male response to hypergamy. The theory was that women who were deemed particularly attractive to a subset of men were also more approachable (the men risked rejection more often) if they were perceived to be less attractive to other men. Men would essentially gauge a woman’s ability to be hypergamous; it backfires on average (the women get MORE messages) but is worth the risk as the woman has higher value to the individual male than another “average” female.
Interesting comment, Ryan. I think some of your points are intriguing, but in places you ‘argue past the evidence.’ For example:
This appears to be purely speculative on your part, and I’m extremely skeptical that you’re correct about this. If a ‘like’ is anonymous, why would a passive woman be uneasy about having sent one? It doesn’t make sense.
interesting video by Barbarossa where he mentions Phylis Schlafly and how she mentions that because of hypergamy, equal pay would leave many women w/o husbands…
http://www.mgtow.com/video/the.....ur-friend/
I see your point, ballgame. I am not always clear in my arguments. I am trying to explain my own experience, and the experience of many men, esp. as it pertains to online dating, where women actively refuse to send likes to men that they ‘would date’. They are anonymous in the sense that you don’t use your name, give out contact information, or have to actually return favor in any way, such as messaging back.
To me, the most logical explanations are that women don’t want to attract attention to themselves because of the anxiety, social awkwardness, or ego bruise it may cause, because they already get enough attention, or because they do not want to stray from the female gender role as it is a form of power. This is all speculative and probably a combination of these.
Anecdotally, I can say that my cousins/friends date women who are higher quality, with better education and career prospects, who are more outgoing, more physically attractive, and simply nicer, than I can by meeting women through online dating. Further, the women who actively send likes to me are much lower quality than the women that I send likes, and get responses back from. It is hypergamy in action. Lower quality women can not practice it, but they still drastically overvalue themselves.
Moving into RP territory here: I feel the need to share my experience with OKCupid as it related to these statistics because I went a long time without knowing other men’s experience and how to handle the constant ego bruises that I would get from sparse attention from unattractive women and barely any validation from women I was actually attracted to. Before this, it led me to believe for a decade of my life that I would never date a woman I was physically attracted to, and my standards (not just physical) had already been significantly lower than the women I saw my friends and family with. Further, no one seemed willing to help me, and Feminist friends seemed to shame me for not being able to compete. It was perverse.
If I am off base by commenting in this manner here, then let me know, as I know the goal of this site is to give honest criticism of particular Feminist writings. I do not always write about personal experience, but I feel that writing personally can have an ameliorating effect for myself, particularly against those dismissive bloggers who think that lonely men who are mad at the culture simply need to get laid. As you can tell, I am still frustrated by this whole topic.