The true value of peacocking — wearing or attaching something to yourself that makes you stand out in a crowd of men — is that it provokes women to test you for your alpha male boner fides.
You won’t get far with women if you aren’t being shit tested (unless your mate status is so conspicuous that the need for needling is obviated). You need those tests to demonstrate your higher value to curious women. So stoking women’s curiosity and their envy of a man who can steal audience attention from them is step one towards the bedroom.
What women are wired to seek in a potential mate is an unfakeable signal of fitness.
The problem of dishonest mutants seemed intractable until Amotz Zahavi suggested a solution: the ‘handicap principle’. The handicap principle suggested that some signals might be too costly for a signaler to fake. For instance, certain mate attraction signals might only be produced by males that are of sufficiently high quality, because the costs to lower quality males of displaying these signals would be prohibitive.
Malefeminism.exe
Parallel concepts had arisen independently in economics, where ‘conspicuous consumption’ and ‘extravagant wastefulness’ were suggested to reliably signal wealth among humans. For the handicap principle, in particular, the long train of the peacock seemed to provide a plausible example, given the expense of growing and displaying such a costly structure for its bearer. Yet, the question remained whether the handicap principle could solve other cases of conflicts-of-interest between signalers and recipients; and if not, whether there might be other solutions for signal reliability.
As men and women have competing reproductive goals, an intersex evolutionary arms race is almost guaranteed in any sexually reproducing species. Thus, men have evolved an ability or disposition to fake signals of alpha maleness, and they are successful often enough at duping women over the millennia that the fakery continues to be a feature of the modren sexual market.
Solutions for signal reliability
Recent work has indicated that the handicap principle is not the only possible explanation for the reliability of animal signals and, in fact, several mechanisms — not all of which require excessive production costs — may guarantee that signals continue to be informative over evolutionary time. Indeed, when signalers and recipients are highly related to one another, or when they have minimal conflicting interest, then signals may be cost free,
Another curse of Diversity™: the added expense of signaling mate value to the opposite sex. Maybe this explains why the sexual market of racially/ethnically diversified societies becomes more r-selected over time.
with certain types of ‘pooling equilibria’ emerging in which some signalers of different types employ the same cost-free signal. And even when signalers and recipients have strong conflicts of interest, theoretical models indicate that honesty itself need not be costly: all that is required is that each instance of lying that deviates from the honest equilibrium be met with high costs. Mechanisms for reliability in conflict situations, therefore, typically hinge on the fact that recipients of signals have their own evolutionary interests, so if signals do become unreliable, then it will no longer pay recipients to attend to them.
A big part of the PUA literature is focused on anti-AMOG tactics, which you will need to have if you intend to provoke female (and therefore competitor alpha male) interest with gaudy signaling (peacocking). If you can’t back up your peacocking with a ZFG attitude, you WILL get BTFO by women and men alike.
(Think of the newb PUAlet dressed in a royal purple jacket who gets pressed on his sartorial choice by a hottie and immediately turns red-faced, stammering a weak rationalization for an adventurous style that obviously belies the lack of an adventurous personality.)
So the real value in peacocking is that it opens a path to demonstrating grace under pressure. That pressure can come in many forms (typically via sarcastic comments from women or belittling comments from AMOGs). There’s really no point to peacocking — in fact, it can be counter-productive — unless you intend to convert it into charisma currency, ie a proof of concept, a show of alpha male cred.
For instance, I sometimes wear a goofy [X] at the [Xplace], and a few times girls have approached me to comment on [X], to which I have usually replied “I’m glad you like it!” or “you have good taste” if the girl was transparently sarcastic, putting her back on her heels defending herself and/or trying to correct my intentional misinterpretation (and therefore investing herself in my approval). If she was more mean-spirited about it, I’d say “don’t be jealous”. If she was being flirty, I might opt for an equally flirtatious reply: “I bet you say that to all the guys wearing [X]”. If (exceedingly rarely) another man makes a snide remark, I ignore him or quip “I didn’t ask for your fashion advice”. Usually, though, when I get AMOGed it’s in the spirit of frattish good fun, and I laugh along and neg the dude on his “queer eye for the straight guy”.
I don’t always peacock, but when I do it’s Dos Sexist. I have a purpose in mind, which is to trigger women out of their humdrum lives and step into the ring with a Groove Perforator. I expect the backtalk, and so I’m prepared for it, immune to the flustering which catches anxious men off-guard, which means that my “faked” signal of mate value is effective and, in a deeply meta sense, authentic.
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