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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   25800 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 17, 2025

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One thing you quickly realized is that most of the women the soccer players and reality TV stars cheated with were much uglier than their wives and girlfriends, often objectively ugly, even. Sexiness isn’t really the point, male sexuality isn’t picky; many men seem to care about relative looks (say, a 7 vs a 10) only because having a hotter girlfriend makes them feel better and confers upon them more status and value as a man, when it comes to sex alone their standards are minimal at best, it’s mainly about convenience.

The Coolidge effect is an incredibly powerful force. As at least one commenter pointed out before me, if you're looking to get your rocks off, having an affair (thereby exposing yourself to scandal, divorce, losing half of your assets, child support payments etc.) is vastly less "convenient" than just having sex with your wife.

I was thinking about this the other day, and I'm wondering if there might be some kind of perceptual component to the Coolidge effect. That is, it's not merely that sexual novelty is an important component of the male sex drive, but that the male brain so wants us to "be fruitful and multiply" that our brains are wired in such a way that they will literally make women appear more attractive to us than they "really" are prior to us having sex with them. La petite mort/post-nut clarity seems to be such a universal male experience, there must be something to it. (Probably the timescale is longer for women, which is why the end of limerence seems to come after weeks or months rather than minutes/hours.)

I don't know how you'd get this past an IRB board, but it'd be fascinating to do a study like this. Get a bunch of men and women who don't know each other in a speed-dating event. The men are asked to rate women's attractiveness on a scale of 1-10 (we could couple this with objective data like hooking them up to a heart rate monitor, measuring how damp their palms are, penile tumescence etc.). Some of the men will have sex with some of the women. Then, at least a day after their first sexual encounter, ask the men to rate the attractiveness of the women they've had sex with on a scale of 1-10. I would predict that the average rating would shift down by about a point, corresponding with decreased physiological excitement.

It's kind of creepy to think that, if I find a woman attractive, I might be partly hallucinating that.

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