Game And IQ

I’ve argued (in this post and indirectly as a question in the Dating Market Value Test for Men) that raw smarts isn’t especially relevant to a man’s romantic success. A high IQ may help in the mate market, but probably won’t help nearly as much as nerds hope.

The best that can be said for having a quick wit as a man is that it’s associated with perceived charisma, which is sexually attractive to women. (And that’s how I see it in everyday life; the charming men have a silver tongue lubed by white matter to spare.)

Another net benefit of male high IQ may be a slightly increased desirability as a long-term relationship prospect. Women seeking long-term lovers will place greater emphasis on those male character traits that suggest a willingness to settle down and get to the job of providing for her future brood.

Mostly, though, high IQ is largely superfluous to pickup, beyond what it can do to elevate a man’s witty repartee.

Reader zdeno adds to the Heatristian judgment on male IQ and sexual success:

In my mental model of game and genetics, everyone is imbued with two qualities that are both mostly genetic: 1) Natural game, i.e. good looks, charm, athleticism, social acumen, and 2) Ability to consciously improve game through applied effort, i.e. intelligence, conscientiousness, openness to experience.

What percentage of people have the intellectual ability to actually read about and understand the evolutionary background of human female sexual behaviour? Or even just memorize routines?

Style, Mystery, TD and others like them had weak natural game, but could understand and apply theoretical game very well. Someone like gunwitch had strong natural game plus a reasonably above-average ability to apply new concepts.

FYI, old-timer PUA Gunwitch was arrested for domestic assault a couple years ago, if I recall correctly.

So on one hand, you have the anti-PUA’s who claim that game is generally ineffective, attractiveness is immutable, etc. They are idiots. But there are also a lot of new-agey, “all-of-your-limits-are-in-your-MIND” PUA’s who are equally unrealistic. A short, ugly, slow-witted man who dutifully studies game will never out-seduce a smarter, better-looking man who puts in the same amount of effort.

This is generally true (although I have seen instances of dumber men out-seducing smarter men, simply because the former didn’t get caught up in their heads, and had a street urchin’s facility with spontaneous badinage). But I agree with zdeno’s overall point that more IQ — UP TO A POINT — is better than less IQ in the realm of romance. I qualify my agreement because I’ve known too many men with stratospheric IQ who suffered from debilitating personality flaws, like social ineptitude, weirdness, creepiness, or jarring body language tics.

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Reader johnny caustic chimes in:

What is the _reason_ why humanity’s most brilliant writers couldn’t figure out what women are sexually attracted to over several millennia?

Well, to be fair, a lot of brilliant writers did in fact figure out what women want. The problem is that their insights keep being ignored by the generations that follow.

Because the markers of a man’s fitness have to be _difficult_to_fake_, so a woman isn’t easily fooled into falling for a less fit man. Evolution programmed women to respond to male behaviors that males don’t recognize as being special at all, because those are the most reliable indicators. Guys wind up thinking that women are primarily attracted to money or looks or expensive cars because they literally don’t perceive the very traits in men that are getting women wet.

Good point. This is why the concept of game is so difficult to grasp for so many; and, in fact, a lot of game principles — like body language, qualification, negs, and kino escalation — are a bit esoteric for the less-than-averagely smart man to comprehend. You can’t improve your attractiveness to women if you have no clue what women find attractive, and if in fact your male cluelessness is an extended phenotype of women’s inscrutable mate selection criteria.

Some claim that Game operates on a premise of flawed female detection. That is, Game exploits a bug in the female mate acquisition algorithm, leveraging the fact that women subconsciously resort to short-cuts and proxy cues to ascertain a man’s alpha bed cred. Now of course, male looks are hard to spoof (although looks can be improved with better framing, i.e., more stylish clothes), but many other male attractiveness traits are spoof-able. (Even wealth. There’s a known pickup trick in circulation involving the use of fake ATM receipts.) Game, under the Flawed Female Detection theory, is essentially a system for changing the optics of an average man to resemble that of an HSMV man with social status, charm, power, dominance, and (perhaps most crucially) ZERO FUCKS GIVEN outcome independence aka sexual market options.

So, a case can be made for the FFD theory, but an equally valid case can be made for the theory that women are perfectly attuned to what they want in men, just as men are, and that a significant part of what women want are men with the charming/asshole-y/jerkish/PUA behavior that Game attempts to deliver. This latter contra-FFD theory rejects the notion that jerkboy charisma is a cue for some other, nebulously related, male trait, and asserts instead that the jerkboy charisma ITSELF is a male attractiveness trait that women conspicuously desire.

This Fine-tuned Female Detection theory of female mate choice elegantly explains why it is not all that uncommon to see a man with no job or looks who somehow manages to hook up with scores of women through sheer confidence and swagger; the attitude he projects is a SELF-EVIDENTLY HOT COMMODITY, because women crave the love of men who act like they know women crave their love.