Why Are Men With Dark Triad Personalities So Irresistible To Women?

It’s a scientific fact that women are attracted to men with the suite of personality traits known as the “dark triad”: Narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy; aka the stuff of which jerks, assholes and badboys are made.

Any man who’s lived a day in his life knows that chicks dig jerks, but now we have the imprimatur of science to confirm what we can all see with our own eyes. The connection to game should be obvious. Many game concepts are essentially retrofitted Dark Triad traits and associated behaviors, allowing the practitioner of the charismatic arts to capture for himself some of the cryptic allure that men naturally blessed with badboy personality possess.

Explanations for the appeal to women of the male Dark Triad have been discussed before, within the hallowed halls of Le Chateau, but usually from esoteric evolutionary theory. Perhaps there are other, more immediate and practical, reasons why men who score high in the Dark Triad do so well with women? Let’s look at the definitions for each of the three relevant traits:

Narcissism

Narcissism is an egotistical preoccupation with self. Because of all their experience with maintaining their self image, people who score high for narcissism will often appear charming but their narcissism will later lead to extreme difficulty in developing close relationships.

Narcissistic men will be better at building an attractive identity, crafting an alluring image, dressing themselves for maximum impact, and comporting themselves with the utmost self-regard. Women love all these characteristics in men, even if these traits are not societally beneficial in numbers exceeding a tiny percentage of men. A man who is full of himself is a man who is full of women’s love.

Machiavellianism

Machiavellianism is a tendency to be manipulative and deceitful. It usually stems from a lack of respect or disillusionment for others.

You cannot properly seduce women if you harbor illusions about their nature. A Machiavellian Man, owing to his willingness to engage in personally, and oftentimes mutually, advantageous deceits, is a skilled hand in the subtle feints of flirting. No seduction will take full flight without recourse to innuendo and barely concealed intent. The tacitly adversarial quality of seduction emanates from the fundamental premise that the reproductive goals of men and women are at odds, and the Machiavellian is the man best equipped to leverage that sweet antagonism to his ends.

Psychopathy

Psychopathy reflects shallow emotional responses. The relative lack of emotions results in high stress tolerance, low empathy, little guilt and leads them to seek extremely stimulating activities, resulting in impusivity and a disposition towards interpersonal conflict.

The darkest of the three traits. It’s a short neural skip from mostly benign, promiscuous psychopath to Hannibal Lector. What is it about psychopaths that women can’t get thoughts of them out of their heads? Besides their evocation of high status shamans and warriors of EEA yore, psychopaths bring one big advantage to the mating arena that quickly propels them to the top — fearlessness. That dead zone in their prefrontal gray matter means that psychopaths don’t feel much when women reject them. No hurt, no guilt, no shame, no doubt, no anger, no nothing. Imagine the power at your fingertips if you had the ice cold stones to approach thousands of women nonstop without suffering even the slightest ding to your emotional state from any rejections. Imagine that, coupled with this exotic imperviousness, you impulsively hit on any woman who piqued your interest. I don’t think you’ll need a calculator to figure out how fast your notch count would rise given these personality priors. Chicks dig a go-getter.

While the average self-deprecating beta male will find it nearly impossible to reconfigure his emotions and thought patterns to match that of the natural born narcissist, Machiavellian, and psychopath, he has now at his disposal tools and concepts — which fly under the banner of “game” — to inch himself closer to Dark Triad triumph. A small adjustment here, a studied mimickry there, and that invisible boring beta male is suddenly finding that the veldt of vagina open to his predations has expanded in every direction.

The above quotes were taken from the online Dark Triad Personality Test, which you can try for yourselves here. If you think you have an unusually low score, don’t fret; participants are likely self-selected narcissists boosting the scoring curve. After all, who but a narcissist would be happy to take this test?