Bad News For Smart Nerds

You aren’t going to win over the hot babes with your profound pontifications.

Studies show the most attractive women have the highest standards for men in most every category surveyed — except intelligence.

Via Do Gentlemen Really Prefer Blondes?: Bodies, Behavior, and Brains–The Science Behind Sex, Love, & Attraction:

The evolutonary psychologists recruited a rotating team of male and female interviewers who paired up and evaluated more than two hundred married participants in the Midwest. Each subject was judged for physical attractiveness and assessed in three separate sessions for the factors they valued and insisted on in choosing a mate. The prettiest women had the highest standards — they wanted and expected their partners to be masculine, fit, physically attractive, loving, educated, a few years older than themselves, and desirous of home and children, with a high income potential. Surprising to the researchers there was only one quality beautiful women did not insist on more than plainer women did: intelligence.

No surprise here that the hottest women have the highest overall standards. Hot chicks and high status men have the sexual market options available to them to plausibly hold very high standards for themselves. What is perhaps interesting to the game neophyte and the nerd proud of his electric ham’s horsepower is the finding that beautiful women don’t place much stock in a man’s intelligence. If you can score that CEO gig with a 90 IQ and a psychopathic personality, women will still love you just as hard.

This study comports with the Chateau Dating Market Value Test for men at the top of the blog front page, which has a section on male intelligence that only added a point for smarts that were somewhat above average, and deducted a point for smarts that were in the stratosphere (where personality defects start to manifest.) Women may say they want a smart guy, but in my observation of couples in which the girl was hot, the guy was more usually kind of a douchey middle of the road mental mediocrity. But he had the right attitude, and alpha attitude trumps smarts any day of the week.

This is not to say smarts won’t help a man with women. A very smart man uses his gift to seduce, but also to conceal or ameliorate the most obvious vestiges of his mental prowess. In other words, since most chicks are average intelligence, it is paramount for the master seducer to calm women’s fears of being mentally outclassed by a wide enough margin that discomfort arises. All else equal, women like smart men, but they’ll choose cocky mediocrities over cloying geniuses every time. Nerds who hope to bank shot their encyclopedic knowledge of male-centric hobbies into hot babe pussy are shit out of luck.

<nasally whine>

“But why does she go for IDIOTS? I’m a Mensa member!”

</nasally whine>

Back to the masturbatorium with you, nerdling!

The usual caveats apply to self-assessment studies like this one: what women say they want in a man and what they actually go for are often enough not the same thing. I tend to frown upon self-reported sex surveys because of this psychological anomaly; however, I do think the conclusions can hint at, and reveal the shady contours of, women’s innermost desires. But your best teacher is still real world, direct experience.

As for why women, and particularly hot women, don’t much emphasize men’s intelligence as an attractiveness trait… well, it’s hard to say for certain, but I’d stick with the fundamental premise that our sexual desire is fully ensconced in the same hindbrain we had way back in the ancestral environment, where aloof, socially savvy and dominant men pounded pussy “Quest for Fire”-style in front of teary-eyed slabworms who looked upon the proceedings with visions of missile technology to take out the alphas dancing in their heads. And then, of course, the alphas stole credit for the new tech invented by the beta nerds, and still got the women.

There’s a lesson there.