The Handsome Man-Ugly Woman Couple Syndrome

I was participating in a mobile conference which included question and answer periods, and I noticed an odd couple standing to my side. He was youngish and good-looking — most women would agree on his physical attractiveness — and his wife was a snout-nosed, inbred-looking, stringy-haired, big fat pig dressed in sweatshirt and ill-fitting jeans. In other words, the typical American woman. I assumed they were married because I saw their rings and she had her hand on a stroller with an infant tucked away in it.

What abomination is this! I thought. But then the reason became crystal clear after only a few moments watching and listening to them interact.

Speaker: Any questions?

Big Fat Pig: [nudging her hubby with her elbow] Honey, remember…

Handsome Husbandry: [tentatively raising his index and middle finger, and haltingly talking] I have a question… I have a…

Speaker: Yes?

Handsome Husbandry: [his question-asking hand lingering in mid-air, other hand stuffed in pocket] What did [X] bring to the event that caused [Y] to happen? It seems like.. it seems as if…

As he asked his question, he kept looking over at his wife — in fact, staring at his wife more than the speaker, although he was ostensibly addressing the speaker. One would be forgiven for having the impression that he was seeking constant real-time assurance from his wife that his question was acceptable for public discourse. Nervously shifting from one foot to the other, leaning into his wife, gazing downward when the speaker responded to him, his body language was so beta it was painful to watch. No, it was repulsive to behold, almost as repulsive as the visual effrontery of his wife’s blubbery carcass.

The wife, meanwhile, assumed the posture and countenance of the alpha male. (Never trust a power vacuum to be left unfilled by man or woman.) She looked straight ahead when her husband was simultaneously asking his question of the group leader and craning his neck to her for approval, and she never once softened her expression into a sympathetic, let alone loving, smile at him. (Some men go through life never knowing the exquisite pleasure of a woman’s appreciative gaze of admiration.) There was no unspoken, feminine job well done crease of the eyes on her porcine face. Just stone cold indifference, spiced with a hint of contempt.

Yep, like I said… CRYSTAL CLEAR.

It’s illuminating to compare our reactions to different mismatched couples. Think about what you say to yourself when you see the following pairings (remember that you have nothing to go on except what they look like):

Handsome man with beautiful woman

All is right in the world. You infer the man has alpha characteristics to complement his good looks, and he has cashed that in for a hot babe. You would be surprised, were you to talk to him, if he wasn’t charming and a bit arrogant. You do not doubt the woman’s judgment.

Ugly man with ugly woman

All is right, if depressing, in the world. You infer the ugly man has beta or even omega characteristics, and that an ugly woman was the best he could do. You assume the ugly woman resents him for having to settle, but knows she has no other options. Love between them is less about passion than it is about task delegation and avoidance of suicidal loneliness.

Ugly man with beautiful woman

Wow, he is shooting out of his league! But then, thinking on it a bit, you recall that you saw quite a few couples like this mismatched pair during the week. It’s less rare than popularly imagined. You may ask yourself “What does she see in him?”, and from that you infer the ugly man has compensating alpha attributes to snag such a hottie — maybe he’s wealthy, or slick, or funny, or a dominating asshole, or some combination of each. You assume this ugly man has options to be able to choose a beauty for a girlfriend.

Handsome man with ugly woman

Whoa, what is he thinking?! An uncommon sight, (occurrence less frequent than its polar opposite), you presume the handsome man has some debilitating personality flaw — maybe social awkwardness, or shyness, or micropenis — that prevents him from fornicating with his true potential. Unlike the mirror image couple of the ugly man with the beautiful woman, you do not give the ugly woman the benefit of the doubt in assessing why she was able to catch a handsome man. You simply conclude, reasonably, that the handsome man is not the alpha male on the inside that he looks like on the outside, and therefore the ugly woman is not really dating out of her league. There must be something wrong with him, you think.

***

The last mismatched pairing is the subject of this post because it so powerfully illustrates a fundamental tenet of game: a man’s looks are of limited utility as a measure of his alphaness and, hence, his attractiveness to women.

When we see couples out and about we usually resort to sizing them up based on immediately discernible criteria like looks and style. This judgmental shorthand works well on women for whom looks are their most salient sexual currency, but shows its limitations as a method of discerning a man’s dating market value, as exemplified by the couple in the story above.

This is why most people have a tendency to assume the best about ugly men who pair up with beautiful women, and assume the worst about handsome men with ugly women. There is an instinctive, deeply primitive understanding chugging away behind the prefrontal cortex in every one of us that women sexually respond to a suite of male attractiveness traits, of which looks are only one desirable male quality. It is therefore not inconceivable to most non-brainwashed observers that an ugly man might have other characteristics that appeal to a beautiful woman on his arms, or that a handsome man might be crippled with weakness and self-doubt that constrains his ability to attract no better than a big fat pigwoman.

Contrast that instant appraisal we all have of the men in mismatched pairings with how we think about the women in such relationships. A beautiful woman with an ugly man does not have beta characteristics; she is simply drawn to other attractive attributes in him which we are not as privy to as his looks. (E.g., He must be a rich/famous/funny/charming dude!) An ugly woman with a handsome man does not have positive compensating alpha female attributes; she is simply settling for a beta who happens to look good. (E.g., What’s wrong with him?)

In the mismatched couple I witnessed, it was clear that whatever good will or tokens of desire that the handsome man had inspired in his pigwoman were completely squandered by his beta behavior. It was easy to see by her loathsome demeanor that his looks no longer held — if they ever did beyond the first couple of dates — any sway over her feelings for him. But being the big fat pigwoman she is, she knew she could not do better.

And that is why the generational increase in human beauty is a slow, painstaking process, punctuated by tragic reversals to a sloping brow norm (see: Appalachia, Detroit). Handsome betas are polluting the gene pool with pigwoman blood.

Maxim #59: We tend to defer to looks as a judgment of a man’s sexual market value because that is what is most easily observable given situational and time constraints, but a man’s looks are only one male attractiveness trait among many that account for his desirability to women.

Corollary to Maxim #59: A woman’s sexual market value is more accurately judged solely by instant appraisal of her looks.

The next time you see a handsome man with an ugly woman, before you scratch your head in confusion remind yourself that you are not seeing the whole picture. A beta male’s soul is not always judged by his cover.

Then parade your hot girlfriend in front of him and his pigwoman. Hopefully, it will ignite a spark of manly fortitude, and his sack will grow three sizes that day.

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Why Men Don’t Need To Worry So Much About Their Looks

The online dating site OkCupid’s crack team of SWPLs analyzed user data and made some interesting discoveries about men’s and women’s looks and how their attractiveness, or lack thereof, affects their profile response rate.

First, they posted two graphs which show how men and women rank the physical attractiveness of the opposite sex based on profile photos.

The first graph is a superimposed comparison of male appraisals of female attractiveness and the actual messages men sent to women:

Men have a very realistic appraisal system of women’s looks that clashes with their less realistic self-appraisal system of their chances to get the hottest babes. As you can see from the graph, men accurately rate most fertile-age women as mediocre lookers, with smaller contingents of the very ugly and very beautiful. This assessment accords with reality. But then, men send most of their messages to the hottest 20% of women.

As we will see, men are more forgiving than women in their ranking of the opposite sex’s looks, but they are less forgiving in their message send rate.

As with women, by their actions ye shall know them.

The graph might convince some that men have an entitlement complex as entrenched and powerful as women do, but that would be a misleading conclusion to the data. Men value looks above almost everything else in women, and this is particularly true when men have little to go on except online profiles. The photo looms large in online dating. Since women’s looks are so incredibly important to men’s happiness as regards their sex and love lives, men’s decisions to shoot for the moon on the one female variable that really matters in an environment that is conducive to mass approaches, (something which would not be feasible in a real world context), makes perfect sense as a courtship strategy. There is little risk that a man who follows this online strategy will refuse to later date down if the first wave of messages he sent to the 9s and 10s doesn’t pan out.

It’s all about investment cost. It costs men very little in time or effort to send a message to one hundred 9s on OkCupid, so the fact that they do so is less proof of their self-entitlement than it is of their rational utility maximization.

It’s more insightful to say that men have less an entitlement complex (as the term is understood when applied to female behavior) than that they have a tactical complex.

Now let’s take a look at the superimposed graph of female appraisals of male attractiveness and female message sent rate:

This is where things get interesting. The first surprise that jumps out in this graph is how harsh women are in their assessment of men’s looks. According to women’s perspectives, 80% of men fall on the ugly side of the physical attractiveness spectrum. This is way out of line with a reality where nearly every human trait is distributed normally. Clearly, women have a skewed entitlement complex much larger than men’s in how they judge the attractiveness of the opposite sex.

Yet look around you and you’ll see much more than 20% of men either hooking up or in relationships of varying strength with women. How can this be if women think 80% of men are ugly? Well, it can only be if women don’t put as much emphasis on men’s looks. And the second line in the above graph is evidence that men’s looks simply aren’t as important to women as women’s looks are to men. Women’s message distribution more accurately reflects their ranking of men’s looks than does men’s message distribution reflect their ranking of women’s looks.

That is, women may be saying one thing — men are mostly ugly — but they are doing the opposite — sending messages to lots of ugly men.

Do we really need more proof that men should never listen to what women say they find attractive and instead should WATCH what kinds of men women fall for? If you are a stickler for reams of scientific evidence, there was a NewYorkBetaTimes article not too long ago about a study that essentially confirmed for all men who know the score that what women claim they respond to sexually and what actually causes their vaginas to tingle is COMPLETELY DISCONNECTED.

That one study alone probably affirmed more about the core concepts of game than any other. That is, affirmed for those who disbelieve the field experience of millions of men.

Back to the second graph: there is a big difference between men and women in the number of messages each sends to the more physically attractive members of the opposite sex. OkCupid doesn’t delve very deeply into the implications, but we here at the Chateau will, and by doing so a crucial component of female mate preference is revealed:

Women are messaging less attractive men (according to women’s own assessments) because the suite of male attractiveness traits that women viscerally respond to includes much more than male physical attractiveness.

Women are looking at and judging the ENTIRE PROFILE of men on OkCupid and sending messages based on a more holistic appreciation of attractive male qualities. And what we can see based on female message sent rates is that plenty of ugly men — as perceived by women — are bringing other, compensating, attractiveness characteristics to the table that women find desirable in a mate.*

This conclusion is perfectly aligned with evolutionary psychology theory.

Moral of the post: Men, work on your looks, get yourself looking as good as possible, but don’t worry so much if you’re not among the best looking men in the room. A lack of good looks is simply not the deal breaker for men that it is for women in the sexual marketplace.

*It should be noted that a secondary motivation for women messaging lots of “ugly” men on OkCupid has to do with women’s greater craving for ego assuaging, which is much easier to obtain in the online environment. Most men can handle a fair amount of rejection from hotties without crumbling into a puddle of self-doubt, and they don’t need a lot of compensating attention from less desirable women to make them feel better. Women, in contrast, cannot handle even a little bit of rejection from very attractive men, and they do get a thrill from receiving lots of “safe” internet attention from hordes of lickspittle betas. Yet another reason why online game is pointless for the huge majority of unenlightened men, but a cornucopia of cooch for those few men who know how to game the system.

It should be stressed that this is a SECONDARY motivation, as the graphs are showing women who are actively messaging these “ugly” men, (which indicates a desire to establish contact beyond that afforded by the quickie ego stroke), instead of waiting around for betas to message them. This is a critical distinction from the sort of attention that a hottie will get when her inbox floods with 50 boring unsolicited emails every hour.

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Does Game Work Less Well On Masculine Women?

A reader left a link to a very interesting study of digit ratio and how it affects women’s mating and nesting behavior.

The current study assessed digit ratio (2D:4D) and mate guarding in 101 dating couples. Low 2D:4D men (indicating higher prenatal testosterone exposure) were more likely to state that they threatened male competitors and used more threats and physical aggression toward their female partners. Men were particularly likely to use threats and physical aggression toward partners who cheated in the current relationship. In addition, women resisted mate guarding by men with high 2D:4D, particularly when women cheated on their partner. High 2D:4D women were more possessive toward their partner. This is consistent with ideas regarding the effects of sexual selection on mate guarding.

Digit ratio studies seem to come out every week now, with similar conclusions that the amount of testosterone or estrogen we are exposed to in our mothers’ wombs has real world consequences for how we act as adults when searching for a mate and settling into relationships. It is strange but true that you can tell quite a bit about a person’s character — barring exceptions, of course — by simply eyeballing the ratio between his or her ring finger and index finger. Cultural conditioning, my ass.

Studies like this one are anathema to feminists (for the obvious reasons), but they should give practitioners of the crimson art of game pause, too. For if digit ratio alters women’s behavior toward men and her fidelity within relationships, then game will have to adapt to those realities.

Examine, for instance, the second conclusion in that study abstract above. Women resist mate guarding by high digit ratio (i.e., feminized) men; in layman’s terms, women give feminine men more shit when those men act possessively. More masculine men, therefore, can better get away with possessively jealous behavior. A well-versed student at Le Château Institute for Advanced Poon Studies would slyly remark that it makes perfect sense when you consider that women would be more likely to want to step out on a feminized beta male to get impregnated during the ovulation part of her cycle by an alpha male. A very jealous beta boyfriend would throw an annoying monkey wrench in her subconscious plans.

Also note that the female resistance to mate guarding by the male is *stronger* when she has already cheated. Gentlemen, if you have discovered cheating by your girlfriend or wife, kick her out immedaitely after throwing her shit on the sidewalk. Ignore her desperate entreaties to the contrary; it is already too late to save your relationship or marriage.

In addition, the study found that high digit ratio (i.e., highly feminine) women are more possessive of their boyfriends. Why would this be so? Presumably, feminine women would have more options on the dating market, so they would have less reason to be possessive within a relationship. But you have to look at both sides of the couple equation. Feminine women likely partner with masculine men — sexual polarity is the most potent attractant in the known universe, besting even black hole gravitational pull — and these are the kind of men who have more opportunity to cheat when the cheatin’s good.

Similarly, it would not surprise me to learn that feminine betas often wind up with masculine women who take charge of the development of the relationship. The problem that presents itself to these betas is that masculine women are going to find it harder to keep strange cock out of their panties when the ovulation bell rings.

What does this have to do with game? Well, we know that feminine men will have a harder time keeping their women in line, and feminine women will be easier to game into strict relationship fidelity. Possessiveness often gets a bad rap in the cultural mainstream, but ask yourself this: Would you rather deal with an overly attentive girlfriend easily aroused to jealousy, or a stand-offish “girlfriend” with a wandering eye? Which girl will give you better, and more frequent, sex?

From experience, I can tell you that girlfriend possessiveness, while annoying at times and dangerously apt to blossom into full-blown stalker-itis if improperly managed, is far more amenable to game and psychological ploys designed to minimize its worst aspects than girlfriend aloofness.

A masculine, aloof girlfriend is the beta boyfriend’s second worst nightmare (his first is involuntary celibacy). This type of girl will chew him up and spit him out, twice on Sundays, and this goes double for betas without a clue. A beta with tight game — which, by definition, will bump him into lesser alpha territory — can keep a masculine, low digit ratio girlfriend’s faithless instincts in check, but it will cost him regular peace of mind. He may decide she is worth the aggravation if she’s hot enough.

Alpha males have to deal with possessive, feminine girlfriends more than beta males do, so their perspective on that specific manifestation of female behavior may be skewed toward less tolerance for it. This is why you will often hear natural players complaining bitterly about clingy girlfriends who cramp their alleycat style, the gender opposite of masculine women who seethe with contempt for their clingy, beta boyfriends.

As a follower of the tenets of game, you have to take two critical presumptions into account when you venture into the field.

1. As a man, do you tend to the less aggressive or more aggressive end of the male behavior spectrum? Your digit ratio will give you a clue as to which way you lean. If more aggressive (lower ratio), you may want to shoot for women with lower ratios as well, since they will be less possessive of your time and attention, freeing you up to fool around. If you are less aggressive by temperament, you will want to screen for feminine women with higher digit ratios, as these types of women will be more easily gamed into loyal relationship material.

2. Are you looking for a fling or a girlfriend? If the former, target low digit ratio girls. If the latter, go with high digit ratio girls.

Returning to the title of this post, I surmise that masculine, low digit ratio women are harder to game because they are less possessive and more prone to cheat than feminine women. A lack of possessiveness means that a whole suite of game strategies that deal specifically with arousing jealousy and instilling a fear of loss will not work as well on women who don’t get jealous very easily by nature. Similarly, game tactics which inspire love, and, hence, loyalty, in women will be less effective on masculine women with stronger drives to cheat and slut it up.

My experience confirms this hypothesis. Think of masculine women as quasi-men. How well does game work on men? Not very well. It stands to reason that game will have less impact on women who have the psychology of men.

Luckily, most men prefer the company of more feminine women, particularly for LTRs. If she’s a fling, then it doesn’t much matter if she craves random cock once a month, or likes to scratch her belly while watching football.

This is not to say that game is useless on masculine women. In fact, many early game tactics work better on women with oversized clits. A masculine woman is probably a pro at brushing off betas, and it’s a good bet she has the broad but shallow ego of a man. As a result, negs will work particularly well on her kind, and the happy surprise of being on the receiving end of brazenly cocky game will catapult her straight past the comfort zone and into your bed.

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Dominance Plays

I was at a club peering down at the dance floor from a bird’s-eye view on a second story walkway. Laser lights painted the room and I tried to avoid direct retinal shots. Whenever you see balconies and laser lights, and the floor is thumping underneath your feet, you’ll know you have entered a portal to another world — the Douchebag Zone.

A large man bulldozed through the crowd. As he passed me, he put his hand on my lower back, grazing the upper butt cheek, to guide me, roughly, out of his way, as he grunted “coming through” in that tone that suggests he really doesn’t care if you’ll pardon his intrusion. Instinctively, I jammed his arm away with a quick swipe of my elbow. He turned around mid-stride and our eyes locked in steely gazes, but nothing came of it. Too many people were in the way for confrontation to develop.

I’m certain that had I been most any other man, I would not have thought twice about a d-bag pushing his way through the crowd and physically nudging me aside with contact on a vulnerable part of my body. But game has changed me. Intricate knowledge of human social dynamics has made me acutely aware of other men’s alpha body language. Where most either blissfully ignore or are unaware of dominance plays by competitor males, my burden curses me with heightened perception of the smallest slights (and the tiniest flirtations). A touch here, a shove there, a distracted look when I’m talking… every mannerism and status signal is a cue that an alpha dominance maneuver is in motion, and I need to make moves to avoid being victimized by the subtle pull of rank.

Some of you are confident that awareness is better than ignorance. But are you sure? If happiness is the measure of a life well-lived, who is happier? The mindlessly naive or the savvily vigilant?

Ultimately, we all want (in the loosest definition of the word) to secure the best mate(s) possible in our short time on this earth. Awareness of reality helps us achieve that goal much better than contented ignorance. But it comes at a cost.

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Women’s Shifting Perceptions Of Male Looks

A critical sex difference is in how men and women perceive the looks of the opposite sex. A woman’s beauty is a powerfully visceral stimulant of men’s desire, and tends to remain so until their beauty begins the fade in earnest by the early-mid 30s. Men’s looks, in contrast, provide a more muted stimulation of women’s desire — less visceral and more aesthetic compared to the hungering stimulation female beauty causes men to feel — and this stimulation of female desire tends to manifest in two ways.

1. Women can be drawn to men’s looks upon first sight, just as men are by women’s looks, but unlike men, women can (and will) nearly instantly lose the thrall they feel in the presence of a good-looking man should his behavior and conversation come across as unattractively beta. Betaness can kill the advantage of good looks dead.

The same is *not* the case when the sexes are reversed; that is, a beautiful, bitchy women will still make men feel horny, even as the bitchy attitude discourages men from treating such women kindly.

Maxim #67: When women are confronted by a man with low status behavior that is incongruent with his high status looks, they will never resolve the incongruity to the benefit of his status; women will always resolve the incongruity to the detriment of his looks.

2. Women will gradually perceive a man’s looks getting better over time if he possesses other attractiveness traits (e.g., charm, fame, social savvy) or if the woman in question has fallen in love with him. “Time”, in this context, can be as long as years or as short as a few minutes. A man running tight game *will* be perceived as better looking by women. A man in a relationship who is loved by his girlfriend or wife will also enjoy the benefit of positively altered female perception of his looks.

Again, the same phenomenon does not exist when the sexes are reversed; an ugly woman, no matter how charming, wealthy, famous, kind or personable, will *not* be perceived as better looking by men. A similar dynamic operates within relationships; in fact, a woman in a long term relationship can actually become *less* attractive to her lover as his desire for variety begins to outcompete his feelings of love and loyalty.

There is one caveat: early in a relationship, when the feelings of love are strongest (3 months to 2 years, depending on his basal oxytocin levels), a man will be so infused with a dopamine high that his woman will seem more beautiful to him than when they started dating fornicating. Although — and this cannot be stressed enough — NEVER will she seem more beautiful than when he FIRST laid eyes on her. That initial blast of lust is impossible to duplicate.

The above observation of the female inclination to perceive a lover’s looks in more favorable terms explains the time-tested wisdom that a woman in love thinks her man better looking than he is. I believe this change in perception is so powerful that it actually reflects a neural rewiring of a woman’s brain circuitry when gazing upon the visage of a man she loves. Similar radical alterations in female perception happen when a woman is pleasantly surprised by a charismatic man who is successfully seducing her despite his unimpressive looks.

Stingray wrote:

I knew a guy in high school who had severe burn scars covering more than half his face.  Dated one of the most popular girls in school for a long time and was liked by all the other girls as well.  Everyone who knew him said that after knowing him for only a short time, the scars were invisible.  They simply became part of who he was and went completely unnoticed.   Attitude is everything.  Looks may slow down those initial reactions, but if you move beyond that and maintain a confident frame, they will not hinder you much.

Scar game.

A man’s physical flaws are like disappearing ink — exposure to a woman’s love, or even her interest, will cause them to fade away.

And here is some real world experimental evidence that manly confidence influences women’s perceptions.

According to a university study, women can still identify a physically  attractive man just by reading his profile.

It found good-looking men were able  to convey their confidence and attractiveness in their written self-description – and that women volunteers were able to recognise their beauty without being shown the lonely heart’s accompanying photograph. […]

‘Our data suggests that attractive individuals wrote texts (profiles) that  conveyed confidence, and it was perhaps this confidence which primarily  signalled quality to the women.’

The associate professor added that ‘such confidence may arise from attractive  people’s general sense of their high mate-value’.

Take home lesson: If you’re an ugly man, you can influence women to perceive you as more physically attractive than you are by projecting the confident demeanor of an attractive man. A low status man can influence female perception by projecting the attitude and body language of a high status man. This is the crux of game.

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Study Proves The Validity Of Game

A reader (a Ph.D. scientist, for those of you who yearn to believe only d-bags read about and practice game) writes:

…it is a delight to understand what motivates women and how to make sense of various factors and my previous dating life.   Your continuing incisive reporting has helped my understanding tremendously.

He attached a link to a study confirming YET ANOTHER essential game concept — that men’s attractiveness to women, at least in the early rounds of meeting, is based as much on, and perhaps more on (if you expand the criteria list to include all modifiable male attractiveness traits), their attitude and sociosexual-related personality dimensions (i.e., their game) as on their looks. Taking the usual caveats about speed dating studies into consideration (which the authors discuss), you really should read the entire paper, because there is so much in there that confirms just about every Chateau maxim in the whole.

men’s sociosexuality was attractive to women and showed incremental validity over and above men’s physical attractiveness (see Table 3)…

Interestingly, there is evidence that all these [male attractiveness attributes] can be accurately judged in short periods of time…

However, only sociosexuality added incremental predictive power over and above physical attributes in the current study. Unexpected was that sociosexuality emerged as a relative powerful predictor of men’s popularity to women, particularly because women largely expressed a long-term mating interest. A possible explanation is that male sociosexuality indicates a history of successful mating experience or mating skills that are attractive to women.

Sociosexuality is basically a psychological term that, in this context, defines the personality and temperamental characteristics of a man who has game, and encompasses such time-tested game concepts as preselection, confidence, assertiveness, cockiness and, well, pretty much everything listed in the 16 Commandments of Poon at the top of this blog.

Game is notoriously difficult to measure scientifically in the field, so sociosexuality serves as a comparable substitute for measuring the traits that are common in men who are good with women. Think of sociosexuality as more of an indrect indicator of overall game proficiency, rather than as a measurement of familiarity with specific game tactics.

The takeaway lesson of this study is a powerful one: women, sluts and saints alike, are really attracted to men with high sociosexuality, otherwise known as game/charisma/chemistry.

This is about as close to scientific proof of the effectiveness of overarching game proficiency to mating success as I’ve yet seen in the literature. To be sure, there are plenty of studies confirming the efficacy of specific and narrowly-defined game tactics, but not many that have found a positive correlation between men who embody game as a personality trait and their success with women. This is why I think the study’s authors were a bit surprised by their results pointing to sociosexuality as a major player in male attractiveness.

What other stone cold but soft on the inside Heartiste truths are buttressed by this study?

– Older men have higher sexual market value, while older women have lower SMV. This is reflected in their choosiness. Older men are like aged single malt scotch; they command a higher price. Older women are like milk; they hit their expiration fast and no one wants them:

As Figure 1 shows, men’s choosiness increased and women’s choosiness decreased with increasing age. […] The higher choosiness of women that is ubiquitous in studies of young adults decreased and even tended to reverse for older women.

– The 463 bullet point checklist that women carry in their heads when they meet a man is true and relevant:

[…] females based their choices on more criteria than men did…

– Women had best be hot or they aren’t getting much attention from men with choices:

[F]or women only facial attractiveness [increased the frequency of matches]…

– The higher your sexual market value, the choosier you are (and this goes for men as well as women, although, surprisingly, it seems to be more true for men at the very right tail of the SMV curve, possibly because very high mate value males are rarer than very high mate value females):

As expected, many of the attributes that made individuals attractive were negatively related to the frequency of choices (see Table 3), and thus positively related to choosiness (Hypothesis 2a).

– Being a niceguy is a tingle killer (or, at best, a non-tingle generator), as is having nerdy or beta traits like shyness and conscientiousness. (In contrast, shyness in women is not a bad thing for them.):

The expected negative effect of shyness was also confirmed but reached significance only for men. As expected by Hypothesis 1a, agreeableness had no effect on being chosen by either sex.

– Women are the choosier sex, but men exercise choice as well:

On average, male participants were chosen by 3.6 females (32% of their 11.2 dating partners), female participants were chosen by 4.1 males (37% of their dating partners).

– Men are more interested in short term mating opportunities than are women:

Confirming hypothesis H4b, the sex by interest interaction was due to the fact that men reported more short-term interest than women… and this effect was due to a higher variance of short-term interest in men than in women.

– The icy hell of LJBF banishment is real, beta orbiting and sycophancy will not get you sex, pushing for sex sooner rather than later is a better pickup strategy, and acting like a beta provider who wants a relationship will have no effect on women’s interest in you for either sex or LTRs:

As Table 4 indicates, Hypothesis 4d was fully confirmed. Women had a preference for having sex with men who pursued more a short-term mating tactics but did not tend to develop a romantic relationship with them, whereas the long-term interest of men did not influence women’s mating or relating.

– Game, and other attraction triggers, work on all kinds of women, even women who are very dissimilar to you:

Together, these findings suggest that similarity effects are weak in studies of brief real dating interactions.

– Men really do prefer to invest more in women who aren’t slutty:

Conversely, men had a preference for relating with women who pursued more a long-term mating tactics but did not tend to have sex with them…

Ignoramuses (paging Amanda Marcotte) who think evolutionary psychology doesn’t tell us anything useful about male-female mating and relationship dynamics will blow an aortic valve if they stumble across this post.

Our analyses were based on numerous evolutionarily informed hypotheses. Most of these hypotheses were confirmed and were consistent with earlier dating studies, lending further support to evolutionary accounts of human dating, mating and relating.

I can just hear the wailing and see the rending of garments of all the anti-game haters and feminists reading this study. May your suffering burden you this holiday season with the cursed tidings of a full-blown mental breakdown!

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Proof Found For Rationalization Hamster?

A new study shows that people will rationalize their shitty situations if they think that they’re stuck with them. (See also: sour grapes.)

People who feel like they’re stuck with a rule or restriction are more likely to be content with it than people who think that the rule isn’t definite. The authors of a new study, which will be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, say this conclusion may help explain everything from unrequited love to the uprisings of the Arab Spring.

Psychological studies have found two contradictory results about how people respond to rules. Some research has found that, when there are new restrictions, you rationalize them; your brain comes up with a way to believe the restriction is a good idea. But other research has found that people react negatively against new restrictions, wanting the restricted thing more than ever.

Kristin Laurin of the University of Waterloo thought the difference might be absoluteness — how much the restriction is set in stone. “If it’s a restriction that I can’t really do anything about, then there’s really no point in hitting my head against the wall and trying to fight against it,” she says. “I’m better off if I just give up. But if there’s a chance I can beat it, then it makes sense for my brain to make me want the restricted thing even more, to motivate me to fight” Laurin wrote the new paper with Aaron Kay and Gavan Fitzsimons of Duke University.

So does this prove the existence of the infamous female rationalization hamster? Well, almost. The study was gender-inspecific, so what it tells us is that people in general will rationalize their powerlessness so as to assuage their tender egos in the face of unchangeable circumstances. We will have to continue to rely on experimental reports from the field and incisive observations into the womanly condition from Chateau proprietors for evidence of a particularly mighty breed of female-specific hamster. There is strong anecdotal data that such a female-particular breed exists; it is now up to scientists with the balls to snicker at feminist shrieking to bravely test the hypothesis.

When a rule, a restriction, or a circumstance is fixed and inalterable, our tendency is to act like we are perfectly OK with our lack of choice or station in life. In contrast, when we feel like we have a real shot to change our circumstances, we are less likely to resign ourselves to fate, and less likely to pretend as if we wanted our crappy lot in life all along. So if you want to see the hamster spin wildly, make sure the little bugger has no hope of escape from his wheeled hellmatrix. He’ll spin, spin until he loses all touch with reality.

I think we’ve seen plenty of examples of self-gratifying spinning in the comments on this blog, not to mention just about anywhere in the informational universe where feminists congregate to kvetch. And the spinning is not just limited to feminists. Most losers in the mating game have experienced the crush of 5 Gs in their hamster wheels. I find these kinds of people fall into two camps: the pity whores (woe is me, i’m a loser, there’s nothing i can do about it, so stop trying to help people like me, you’re only leading us astray with your advice), and the delusion zombies (i’m not a loser, i have everything i need in life, single cougarhood, five cats and a niceguy beta orbiter are exactly what i’ve always wanted).

To bring this study closer to the mission statement of this blog, what does it imply about love?

And how does this relate to unrequited love? It confirms people’s intuitive sense that leading someone can just make them fall for you more deeply, Laurin says. “If this person is telling me no, but I perceive that as not totally absolute, if I still think I have a shot, that’s just going to strengthen my desire and my feeling, that’s going to make me think I need to fight to win the person over,” she says. “If instead I believe no, I definitely don’t have a shot with this person, then I might rationalize it and decide that I don’t like them that much anyway.”

Bulls-eye. An elegant confirmation of push-pull game theory. Drawing a woman in, then pushing her away by, for example, disqualifying yourself or her, will switch the courtship dynamic around so that she is in the role of the chaser, instead of the typical female role of the chased. A woman who isn’t sure you really like her because your actions are calculated to deliver an ambiguous message, is more likely to press the seduction forward than she would with either a fulsomely unambiguous man or a completely uninterested man.

If you flirt with a woman, raise her buying temperature, but then show no interest at all in her for the remainder of the night, she will rationalize her rejection by telling herself she never really wanted you.

There are many real-world examples of women rationalizing their rejection or low sexual market value. Below, I list some of the more common ones.

“I’m not interested in guys who like anorexic women.” 
“Men my age won’t date me? I prefer younger men anyway.” 
“Men are intimidated by my intelligence/career/education.” 
“Men don’t like opinionated women.” 
“Women reach their sexual peak at 35!” 
“I get all the love I need from my child.” 
“I was looking for a one night stand, too.” 
“No man is good enough for me and my child.” 
“Men are afraid of commitment.” 
“Now that I’m older I choose my men more carefully.” 
“Men refuse to grow up and settle down.” 
“Men who date younger girls can’t handle women their age.” 
“I’ve grown into my beauty.” 
“Real men appreciate my curves.” 
“A confident man loves a woman with experience.” 
“I’m not dating because I need me-time.” 
“He stopped calling because he got scared.” 

And, of course, the all-time favorite rationalization of the castaway driftwood of womankind:

“There are no good men left.” 

Some may ask why I so confidently assert that the female rationalization hamster is stronger and speedier than the male rationalization hamster. The answer is simple. Since women are the more biologically valuable sex, they have a lot more ego to lose — and hence to spin into hamsterrific delusion — by being rejected or downgraded to the invisible fringes of the mating market.

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