The Reality Of Male Choice

Satoshi Kanazawa, a popularizer of evolutionary psychology before Psychology Today canned him for insufficiently footnoted and massaged crimethink, has frequently been fond of asserting that women exercise ALL the choice in the mating market. Men are just along for the ride, hoping to be one of the chosen. (Kanazawa’s absolutism on this matter is particularly galling, since he should know better. His claim is easily refuted. For example, I’ve had chubby chicks come onto me, and I’ve turned them down. Direct, stone cold rejection must feel a hundred times worse for women than it does for men.)

A certain breed of slutty tankgrrl feminist likes to claim the same thing; that women can have all the sex they want, whenever they want, and with whomever they want, and men have no say in the matter. A willful ignorance — or, more accurately, a clinical self-delusion — about the wall and men’s attractiveness standards is required to hold this position.

Then there are the beta and omega male trolls, a truly abhorrent species who occasionally squirt their tepid loserjizz in the comments of this blog when they announce — almost gleefully — that women rule, and men are hopeless horndogs who happily fuck fat and ugly chicks, making life difficult for the betas who have to deal with ego-pumped fatties.

They’re all wrong. Men do exercise choice in the dating market, and men with options — the men most desired by women — exercise the most choice of all, usually with extreme prejudice.

A simple program of getting out of the house and mingling in a social context should suffice as all the proof of male choice that you’ll need, but since a significant percentage of internet theorizers appear to be shut-ins or trollish cranks, it sometimes helps these wayward souls if a scientific study or two is posted to clear their muddled musings. In this study, evidence is given that men with more resources raise their mating standards.

Resources are a cardinal component of male mate value in the sexual exchange between men and women. Inspired by theories and research suggesting a link between mating and resource constructs as well as studies linking money and valuations of others, the current study tests the hypothesis that cues to resource availability may lead to higher mating standards for men, but not women. Participants were exposed to either stacks of paper, a small sum of money (104 Singapore dollars ∼USD$84), or a large sum of money (2600 Singapore dollars ∼USD$2100). Consistent with the hypothesis, after male – but not female – participants handled a large sum of money, they raised their minimum requirements for a date. [Physical attractiveness requirements drove this effect most significantly.] We discuss how the results are consistent with an evolutionary perspective on mating and how future research can further investigate environmentally contingent self-assessments and strategies.

The short and sweet of it: when men get more money, they start to screen for hotter chicks. That is, men with cash CHOOSE better looking girls.

I’ve no doubt similar studies that examined the relationship between social status, fame and game would find that men who acquired more of these positive traits would also begin raising their standards in what they will tolerate in a sex and love (but I repeat myself) partner.

It should be noted that studies like this demonstrating the reality of male mate choice do not imply that men exercise as much choice as women. That is false. Women are, by virtue of their more expensive and scarce reproductive life source, the more discriminating sex. It is absolutely true that a lot more men are willing to dump a lazy fuck in a fat chick than there are women willing to spread for a degenerate omega male.

But it’s simply a mistake to then extrapolate this relative leniency of male standards into evidence for a total lack of any male mating standards. Girls do experience rejection by men. The rejection may be more often indirect than direct (i.e. girls rarely approach, so when you don’t return their eye-play, or when you ignore their flirting, it subconsciously registers as the equivalent of a direct rejection to them), but it’s rejection nonetheless. Men with a thing or two going on will reject plenty of less attractive, older, sluttier and fatter women in their lifetimes.

The men having sex with all those fatties, fugs, sluts, single moms and cougars are not the high value, in-demand alphas that whiny beta trolls like to claim they are. It’s the loser males and the expedience cads — the men either most desperate for sexual intimacy or most uninterested in long-term commitment and a woman’s “special qualities” — who drop their standards to roll with a hippo for a night.

So the common trope that fat chicks are getting laid with no trouble is misleading; they’re getting laid, but it’s not with quality. And for women, quality is job one. Few women except the most deluded freaks feel good about themselves or confident in their sexual market value after enduring years of excessively short-term hookups with losers, or repeatedly failing to extract long-term commitment from the occasional dumpster diving winner. This is why it’s more common for ugly women to go years without sex; women, far more than men, prefer the life of celibacy to the life of being reminded of their low value by loser lovers.

For men, standards rise and fall with one’s relative status, social savvy, charisma, looks and resources. When any or all go up (looks being somewhat age-dependent), men tend to filter out less attractive women more aggressively, and pursue hotter chicks. When any or all go down, the opposite happens. A man’s options will dictate how ruthlessly he weeds out unacceptable women.

For women, standards are mostly set by conception, and cemented by birth after the hormonal chaos in the womb has been integrated. The looks a woman is born with will, with minor exceptions (for instance, sex ratios), determine her mating standards later in life, up until the age when her appearance begins to abandon her.

This is the one, intrinsic advantage that men have over women in the eternal and escalating reproductive arms race: a man has the opportunity to improve his lot in life, or improve his attributes, and mate up the attractiveness ladder. With this opportunity comes risk; a man can also find himself mating down the ladder. Women, by contrast, have no such opportunity. They are issued a short list of achievable standards at birth, and this list cannot be altered; it is only revoked at such time that she has exhausted the mate capital she was bequeathed before she even gained consciousness.