Picky Men

The alt-internet is a strange land where you can find people who appear to have lived in a hermetically sealed Tyvek bubble since birth, and have escaped all interaction with reality. A recent example of this reality-cushioned subspecies is the obligate sperg — male or female — who believes, with absolutely no supporting evidence beside the whispers her hamster breathes into her brain ear, that men exercise no discretion when choosing a mate.

You’ll see this type litter comment sections of blogs whenever the discussion turns, however tangentially, to the horrifying and bowel-shaking notion that men actually prefer to bang and commit to prettier women at the expense of uglier women, and that this preference likely contributed to the evolution of beauty in women, particularly the women of certain races. On the Ugly Truth scale, mentioning that in medicated company is the equivalent of casually noting the vast (and increasingly puzzling, based on current performance) overrepresentation in elite institutions of 2% of the population.

But as anyone who has lived a day in his life knows, men are choosy. (I’m looking at you, Satoshi Kanazawa.) Go to a bar or a nightclub and AMAZE YOURSELF at the sight of so many men gunning for the attention of best in show, and how that best in show as judged by men are, PECULIARLY, often the same three girls. And then notice to your UTTER STUPEFACTION how so many men ignore the overtures of the less attractive girls, even at closing time when, legend has it, men become sex-hungry dogs incapable of controlling their impulses.

No, men are not dogs. Men are discerning dogs. Yes, men like to hump, but they do so with an eye for quality. Male choosiness is real, and while it’s not the equivalent of female choosiness in breadth or intensity, it exists, and it has likely shaped who we are today, and how our women look today. Intriguingly, there have been environments in the distant past when the sex ratio was so skewed by premature male deaths that the few lucky men left alive had a bounty of mate options that would seem incomprehensible to most men alive today, save for the über famous or obscenely wealthy. And since men, almost to the exclusion of all other considerations, prefer sex with hotter women to sex with plainer women, it’s a small logical leap to infer that, given favorable sexual market conditions, men will choose to fuck more often, and more vigorously, the prettiest of women from among all the women. And from that, men will choose to invest their resources in those prettier women, ensuring that their children have a survival advantage over the children of uglier women.

Rinse with sperm and repeat for a thousand years, and you’ve got a race of women who look as if they’ve been touched by the chisel of God.

And the male impulse toward polygyny needn’t be dismissed out of hand for this to work. Simply impose environmental constraints on the amount of resources any one man can amass and thus distribute among multiple women, and he will be nudged in the direction of favoring with his cooperation and sexual gift only those women who most stiffen his splitter. Even a small nudge in this direction can produce massive long-term generational change in the looks of women. An alpha male in possession of a few extra furs and stores of winter grain, who services, say, four women, will plow harder, and plow more often, the best looking of his harem. Over time, and patterned similarly among other men like him, this targeted ardor will lead to differentials in reproductive fitness between the women.

But enough of the theorizing. You don’t need computational geneticists to prove to you what your own eyes can see any night in a crowded bar. So get the hell out of your lala land, internet sperg, and join the human race. You might learn a thing or two.