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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   Edited 2yr ago   5649 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for November 13, 2022

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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How are women attracted to men?

I have spent far too much time trying to build a mental model that is somewhat of an ensemble model of the Blue Pill, the Black Pill and the Red Pill.

But to be honest, the more I read, especially if its from the horses mouth, the more confused I get. For reasons that I cant say in polite company, I have concluded that just about anything women say on this matter can be more or less discarded.

For example, a lot of women claim that they might not like a guy initially but familiarity grows on them. So is the level of familiarity a variable I should add to my model on top of other variables like looks, height, wealth, status ? Because I am extrmely skeptical it is a variable at all and see little evidence of it. Maybe it passes through some kind of non linear activation function..

Or when they talk about "emotional connection", yesh wtf is that? Its probably an activation function not a variable.

I dont know... My absolute lack of contact with any humam female (literally didnt talk to a human female my age since i graduated college 8 months ago) is making me turn crazy.

Also reading GenZ women talk online I get the feeling that the human race is probably going to become like pandas soon, women dont seem to be attracted to men at all.

Or when they talk about "emotional connection", yesh wtf is that? Its probably an activation function not a variable.

Is everybody turning into a robot all of a sudden? Have you never been in love? Or the other way around, have you never met an objectively attractive woman that you just couldn't vibe with?

Sure, women are confusing, but this is the least confusing part.

Women, including GenZ women, love sex, just maybe not with you? Seems like the simplest explanation.

Unless your definition of "want sex more" means something like "wants sex with more partners" in which case you would be talking past most people on the subject.

The way OP expresses bewilderment at women's behavior might tempt to fire some jabs, but if you're seriously saying women have as strong a sex drive as men, you're being equally, if not more, silly.

It's a wonderful web of motte, bailey and strawmen.

Women's anatomy on testosterone is way hornier than women's anatomy off it, so it's safe to say men are hornier. This is of course, uncontroversial. Whenever anyone says this, there is a coalition of shouting to inform him that, "women love sex too, just not with you," as if the person had claimed, "women don't like to have sex."

OP seems to say, "women are not attracted to men," which is just absolutely insane. "Women are not as horny as men" is uncontroversial true, but OP makes claims way stronger than that.

I was also uneager to repeat the essays-back-and-forth downthread, by just stating in one sentence what took them paragraphs to write.

I have concluded that just about anything women say on this matter can be more or less discarded.

This is true about just about everything. People are really really bad at revealing what truly motivates them in any aspect of their life. Most people don’t know themselves (myself included). If they did know, then why would akrasia be a thing? Why would anyone fail a diet? Why would meditation be interesting at all?

Also reading GenZ women talk online I get the feeling that the human race is probably going to become like pandas soon, women dont seem to be attracted to men at all.

Ahem, personal miniscule sample size anecdata not surveys but...GenZ women are just as horny as their foremothers were at that age. If they don't seem so, it's because you aren't finding them in the right context, but that's been the case throughout history. Whatever happy nonsense they bring up in public, they get horny when they're presented with an opportunity to feel sexy with a man they find sexy.* I've had enough experiences of girls who went from frigid to freak, or girls who one partner described as uninterested and their next partner called insatiable. Get really blasted and watch Eyes Wide Shut; the whole movie is about the Tom Cruise character realizing that women are horny too. The giant high class orgy in a castle is a psychological metaphor/hallucination of a man who previously thought of women as frigid and withholding sex suddenly seeing that women will also want to fuck, that's why the journey into the night starts with him finding out about his wife merely having the passing desire to fuck some navy officer which blows his mind; he slowly realizes that women are sexually available all around him, but only to men who also realize the secret that women are sexually available. The masks provide a thin veneer of respectability separating their quotidian identities from their sexual selves, playing a sexy character, as Dan Savage has put it BDSM is playing cops and robbers with your pants off. After journeying through the implications of this realization, the protagonist then rebuilds his relationship with his wife on the basis of this realization.

For example, a lot of women claim that they might not like a guy initially but familiarity grows on them. So is the level of familiarity a variable I should add to my model on top of other variables like looks, height, wealth, status ?

A guy grows on you because you learn more about him, it's not an independent variable it is just enhanced knowledge. This might improve your knowledge of his status, some forms of status are immediately legible while others become apparent only after exposure. A lot of valuable facts about you aren't immediately legible; your background, your hobbies, your personal care for those around you. If I met a woman at a dive bar where I was watching MMA, she wouldn't know from looking at me almost any of my personal traits beyond appearance because I don't talk a lot or make jokes anyone gets at a bar, she might even think I'm kind of slow or not particularly intelligent because my thoughts are unintelligible in a loud bar.

You also need to balance within your model likelihood of interest in/commitment to the woman involved. The FDS game is to get the highest status man you can get to commit. Women might get confused about balancing those, but that always plays into it. Familiarity tends to show that a guy is genuine and likely to stick around in a way that nothing else can.

So to give my answer to your question: what do women want?

Different things at different times. "I am large, I contain multitudes." Girls just want to have fun, offer them an adventure, a romance story. Our brains are built to run on narratives, give them space to write one, and the opportunity to feel like an archetype.

For reasons that I cant say in polite company...

Come on, this isn't polite company, at least give us a hint. Change names and dates to protect the innocent, but there's no reason to make a secret of your sex life here if you're going to trade on it.

I have spent far too much time trying to build a mental model that is somewhat of an ensemble model of the Blue Pill, the Black Pill and the Red Pill.

I'd be curious to hear what you've come up with. Genuinely.

I dont know... My absolute lack of contact with any humam female (literally didnt talk to a human female my age since i graduated college 8 months ago) is making me turn crazy.

This is a serious problem, nip it in the bud now before it hits a year and gets worse.

I'd be curious to hear what you've come up with. Genuinely.

I've come up with not much.

To summarize I would say that there is varying degrees of wheat and chaff in all 3 competing views of sexual relations. The wheat and chaff are as follows.

Red

  • Wheat - Status is important. Extremely important. Proxies of social status can be emulated and transmitted effectively if done right.

  • Chaff - Macho bullshit like "spinning plates", is of dubious value. Machismo is signal of weakness not strength.

  • Wheat ratio - 75%

Black

  • Wheat - Physical Attractiveness is probably the single most important variable.

  • Chaff - Anything to do with Penis size. Not acknowledging that its not all looks even if looks are 90%. Failure to explain the remaining 10% can throw the explanations way off base.

  • Wheat ratio - 75%

Blue

  • Wheat - Sometimes a girl likes you just because. Those reasons can be as mundane as the shape of your thumb. Being a "good person" TM doesn't hurt.

  • Chaff - That doesn't mean attraction is completely stochastic. Being a "good person" TM doesn't help either.

  • Wheat ratio - 15%

I'm not in the state of mind to write out a mathematical formula right now because the thought of syntax formatting in this comment is giving me a nightmare, but imagine a formula with 50 delta signs, many nested activation functions, and many piecewise functions. If I were given infinite time and money, I would turn this formula into a reality because I am not at all convinced that attraction is stochastic or chaotic enough that it can't be predicted at all, if anything, I think given the data, predicting it should be trivial, to the point that simple statistical/ML models would be enough had the data existed.

My gut instinct tells me a tree based model would be excellent at predicting attraction.

This is a serious problem, nip it in the bud now before it hits a year and gets worse.

Impossible. I WFH and am far far far too busy with gym, house errands, helping aging parents, side hustles, applying to grad schools, for anything that would require any significant time commitment.

Come on, this isn't polite company, at least give us a hint. Change names and dates to protect the innocent, but there's no reason to make a secret of your sex life here if you're going to trade on it.

I think there is a certain programming in the female mind that just makes it impossible for them to clearly lay out what they actually like in a partner. This is in contrast to most men where they can tell you exactly what makes a girl attractive.

The anecdotal literature on this is vast. What they say they want and what they take are often totally at odds [Henry]. It might be a case of fish being in water that what they want is so obvious that it needs not be said. For example in this book the author actually puts effort into making a list of all the things she wants from a guy. She later confesses that not only are items in the list contradictory, no such human probably exists to begin with.

In simpler words, I think we are asking women a question they are not equipped to answer because firstly the answers are not socially/cultarally acceptable. And secondly I genuinely do think the female mind is incapable of answering the question. Given that the most accurate answer is provided by just about THE MOST male-brained woman to have ever existed (she's a rationalist, you might have heard of her recently).

I think it requires a level of decoupling and DEEP DEEP introspection that most women are just not equipped with.

Emphasis added:

I think there is a certain programming in the female mind that just makes it impossible for them to clearly lay out what they actually like in a partner.

…

For example in this book the author actually puts effort into making a list of all the things she wants from a guy. She later confesses that not only are items in the list contradictory, no such human probably exists to begin with.

In defense of the opposite sex, this is not just a problem that women have. The Madonna-Whore Complex is something a non-negligible number of men have.

Free, endless streaming pornography I suspect has exacerbated things. Videos of two, flawed human beings cohabitating, compromising and working through the occasional petty disagreements are probably not popular.

In defense of the opposite sex, this is not just a problem that women have. The Madonna-Whore Complex is something a non-negligible number of men have.

Honestly this whole thread is redpilling me on TheMotte as a space of intelligent, self-reflective men. The 2005-Dane-Cook-Bit level of "Men are simple! Right bros?" being preached is hilarious. So many men think they know what they want, until they get it. Men all "want a virgin who is a whore", but when they get her they wonder where she learned it. I've seen so many men get overwhelmed by getting the woman who acts the way they've always said they want, I'm shocked this is still even an open debate if you have any experience in life.

This may have been a clever plot in the somewhat victorian early 20th century where this story is from, but nowadays most boys grow up being taught this “secret” as gospel, and the orgies don’t materialize. Except for gay boys obviously (spot the difference…) . If anything, women’s sexual desire is massively overestimated nowadays. As an example, FDS has a purely materialistic point of view, I don’t see any space for female desire in there.

...the orgies don’t materialize.

But they have materialized. They're all around us, if he can't see them I guess it's two movies on one screen? Arguing that sex isn't available, that women don't want to have sex, feels so strange to me, like arguing that America is impoverished.

women’s sexual desire is massively overestimated nowadays.

Tiresias the seer who lived as both man and woman, when asked by Hera and Zeus whether men or women enjoyed sex more, said that "Of ten parts a man enjoys one only." Chanakya in India tells us that women have "Four times the shyness...and eight times the sexual desire." It isn't just nowadays. Women have been thought of as coyly hiding a ravenous sexual apettite since antiquity

Buddhists teach that there are three kinds of knowledge. There's rote knowledge, memorization, the ability to repeat a fact: Brasilia is the capital of Brazil. There's understanding the causes of a fact: Brasilia is the capital of Brazil because it was founded to be a city of the future in the mid-20th century, to pull the government of Brazil away from the existing primate cities of Rio and Sao Paulo. Then there's understanding a concept at a deep level, where you look at the world differently knowing what that fact means for the world you live in: walking down a street in Brasilia and looking around and seeing the world around you in terms of the history of Brazil, the economic tensions and choices that lead to what the city looks like today.

Consider that these men may not believe what they say they believe about women. They understand it at the first level, as a fact that they parrot, or maybe even at the second level of talking about multiple orgasms or a woman's sexual prime or whatever. But they don't look at a woman and see someone who wants to fuck them, they think they have to trick them or convince them or cajole them, they view it transactionally. And that's the totally wrong framing, it's not a transaction, it's a mutual benefit, we both want to be there.

I dont know if you are taking those ancient tales seriously but FtM trans people almost unanimously confirm that the sex drive with increased levels of testosterone is orders of magnitude more than what they had.

So those ancient stories probably do contain some wisdom, that is applicable in some contexts, in the general case they are way off.

I do take ancient traditions on the human condition seriously, much more seriously than I do mad science experiments involving pumping a woman's body full of test and seeing what happens. A trans man still has female anatomy, pumping it full of exogenous hormones doesn't make it male anatomy. That's before we even get into the impact dysphoria, however framed, has on psychology and sexual desire.

So, yeah, critique citing mythology and symbolism all you want, but hard science doesn't have an answer here.

If you prefer ancient traditions to any actual modern evidence, you could go read the bit in the Book of the City of the Ladies where de Pizan discusses the idea that women are more lusty than men, and points out (in more polite terms) that there are no female-serving whorehouses. As her basic premise remains true today, cross-culturally, etc, it seems like she's in the right and Tiresias is in the wrong.

Sex for het men is of course available, but not freely so, and in a limited amount. It doesn't nearly cover the demand, like it does for gay men.

The hierarchy of human couplings by amount of sex exchanged goes: gay men (high demand, high supply) > het couples (high demand from men, low supply from women) > lesbians (low demand, low supply).

Plus the well-known experiment of taking an attractive person and propositioning members of the opposite sex gives wildly differing results.

Tiresias the seer who lived as both man and woman, when asked by Hera and Zeus whether men or women enjoyed sex more, said that "Of ten parts a man enjoys one only."

What other useful knowledge have you gathered from your study of mythology? Aside from fictional evidence, Tiresias has real-life counterparts, and trans men report vastly increased levels of sexual desire when taking male levels of testosterone.

They understand it at the first level, as a fact that they parrot, or maybe even at the second level of talking about multiple orgasms or a woman's sexual prime or whatever. But they don't look at a woman and see someone who wants to fuck them, they think they have to trick them or convince them or cajole them, they view it transactionally.

That sounds like bullshit my man, like that movie where michael caine is drunk fake Sherlock, where he explains how he solves crimes "others see, whereas I see and observe".

Plenty of gullible men spend years waiting for women to show the same kind of sexual interest they feel and express.

What other useful knowledge have you gathered from your study of mythology?

Tons. Certainly more interesting, to me, than pumping a woman full of testosterone and asking her how she feels.

It fundamentally doesn't matter that lots of men aren't getting laid, or that lots of men want to have sex but can't, that doesn't really impact my little point of mysticism, any more than the existence of people who can't shoot a basketball disproves the existence of basketball. A minority of men is getting laid all the time, it ain't because all these women are just cosmically confused that I'm going to start spending money on them any second now. The whole point of the metaphor within the movie is that it's an exclusive club of men who "get it," who know that there is no second password. When you get it, you get it, and then you can get it.

OK I'm sure you drown in pussy, that proves nothing, I don't see any argument that supports your thesis.

You've gotten a number of good answers, but one that I think is overlooked is that women prefer men who conform to their in-group. With few exceptions, religious people get married at much higher rates than the religiously unaffiliated, particularly in faiths that explicitly value marriage and children (Mormons, Hindus, Jews, and Protestants--minus Historically Black Protestants--top the list behind the link). Congregations are often quite good at pushing low-status males and low-status females into one another's company, and browbeating high status males into monogamy and responsible fatherhood. This can result in mismatches of various kinds, of course, but that's a concern mostly if you're going to refuse to make any compromises in your life. Some people can afford to be that demanding of others, but in my experience, most people can't.

My absolute lack of contact with any humam female (literally didnt talk to a human female my age since i graduated college 8 months ago) is making me turn crazy.

Join a club. Join a church, better yet. It seems like I'm always pointing out that congregations like the Universalist Unitarians do exist; you can be an atheist and still have religion, these days, though the politics might bother you. If that doesn't appeal to you, you might consider that the same attitudes that make group worship unappealing to you, make you unappealing to a large percentage of women, who tend to be much more sensitive to social standing.

Also reading GenZ women talk online I get the feeling that the human race is probably going to become like pandas soon, women dont seem to be attracted to men at all.

Check the stats on church attendance, you'll see why you're right. Society has relentless messaging on the centrality of your sexual tastes to your identity, and on never compromising anything for the sake of a romantic relationship. This is a recipe for disaster because male and female sexual preferences barely overlap at all. This is an exaggeration, of course, but... not much of an exaggeration, I suspect. (Yes, yes, not all men are sex addicts, many women desire and enjoy sex, etc. but population-level differences are readily apparent).

tl;dr if you want to find a romantic partner, worry less about what you want and more about what they are likely to want.

It seems like I'm always pointing out that congregations like the Universalist Unitarians do exist; you can be an atheist and still have religion,

The problem there is that you might think about it, and then you see a photo of the local UU group and if it were just one person with a bad physiognomy, maybe. But the whole thing looks completely nuts. I've been to sex addicts anonymous meetups and the people there are less weird.

The biggest issue IMO is mismatched attraction. For example, you might be type X and like women of type A, whereas type A women predominantly prefer men of type Y, while type X is more popular with type B women. Your options are:

  • adjust your demands and tell yourself that "type B is fine too", whatever that type B is

  • keep looking for that type A outlier that prefers type X. Might take a very long time and you must always be on the lookout, since they will be snatched off the dating market

  • turn yourself into type Y and live a life of constant deception

If all these types are confusing you, you need an experienced wingman who can tell which women are attracted to you and point them out, as well as estimate your chances with women you are attracted to.

The most important thing to remember is that not all women are the same. Much like how not all men are the same. A guy who is extremely attractive to one women could be repulsive to another.

That said, vast majority of women are attracted to physically attractive men. E.g strong jawline, muscles, height. There are exceptions but generally women are attracted to stereotypically attractive men even if they say they're not. Maybe they just don't have a good grasp of just how tall tall actually is or how bulky a muscled guy is, I don't know, but being conventionally attractive is huge.

The rest is very variable. Sense of humour, good conversation, "good vibes", an exciting sense of danger, the details all vary woman to woman.

The one very consistent thing that women are attracted to is physical appearance. If you want to have sex, or even just an easier time making both male and female friends, go to the gym.

I recommend https://putanumonit.com/ too he has some good blogs that I think will click with you.

The best answer I can give:

They want to know that you are a good target for a relationship, and that you won't rape and murder them.

It is basically impossible to know these things about someone without already being in a relationship for a while/ getting within muderin' range.

The only way to figure it out is to ask the dude "Hey, are you put together and not fucking c r a z y?", which has some obvious problems with it.

So, what they do instead is poll the target using lizard brain bullshit viz. their position on the relationship/murder compass, which amounts to looking for high confidence and high sociability.

The red pill dudes are right about Chad, but disqualify themselves from Chadhood by being very poorly socialized.

You do it subconsciously all the time, unless you are an autist like me and had to train yourself to notice that style of bullshit.

It's why scamming is the real oldest profession; if you have high confidence and high sociability while also being an asshole (but secret!), you can go far.

I think it's variable, but you can usually trust individuals to know something about themselves.

It's like asking people "why do you like your job?" (and asking them where their boss might hear). You are going to get a huge range of answers. A lot of times they might be lying to sound good, maybe they just want the money but they make up something about how solving programming problems is fun. Sometimes they might give you something super specific that is too hard to generalize, "I like working with Sally". Other times they'll throw their hands up and say "your guess is as good as mine".

If you are looking for love try to be the best version of yourself, make male in person friends first (it's both easier than finding love, and can help your chances when meeting women), and try to stop overthinking the issue. Humans have been successfully reproducing for quite a while, and without as much analysis.

Women are primarily attracted to men that other women are attracted to. Your best bet is replicating the record company paying young women screeching in excitement for the Beatles to land in America (before anyone had their records in America, or radio broadcast)***, but on social media, without obvious tells that you're paying for it.

***This account was apparently inaccurate, and exists as only a pop culture legend. Particular other instances of paid or otherwise incentivized enthusiastic 'actors' to appear as fans may be real.

I knew a guy in my frat who did this. It actually worked pretty well for a while, we all thought these super hot blondes who went to state schools in Ohio kept commenting on his posts that they "missed him" on all the posts about going to conferences and shit.

He even posted, then took down and apologized for, a photo of his penis cumming on a girl's face "#sheknowsimpostingthis." And some of the dumber brothers were briefly like, wow respect!

That was his downfall, however, as someone recognized the dick from pornography and began taking the whole fugazi mess apart. Pretty soon we knew all the posts about conferences were stock photos from Oxford or Harvard's website, all the blondes didn't exist; not long after he was expelled for living in the college club offices over the summer, and filling the rooms with jugs of urine.

Today I guess the play would be to hire onlyfans types to do it, right? Then they're "real".

Speaking as a gay man this is extremely accurate. Once you start noticing that most gay guys are competing for whoever they all think is the hottest guy around you can't stop noticing it. I've noticed if I'm with another guy who likes me, but isn't hotter than me, I get way more attention from other guys than when I'm out by myself. Alternately, when I'm out with a guy hotter than me, he gets all the attention and I get none. This is basically Rene Girard's concept of memetic desire in play.

I know your reply is a joke but I think if such a model were to be crafted, preselection would have a lot of weight as a variable.

I tried wording it as a humorous direct response more than pure joke, and apparently I bought into an unfounded rumor regarding the beatles landing, but you've put it better than I could in terms of preselection being a strong attractive factor (at least initially).

I have this theory that it's evolutionarily important that no one knows what women want—including women—because then it could be exploited and optimized for.

Why would that be a problem?

Wouldnt optimization benefit the sole point of sexual selection? Continued procreation?

Or is there some long term short term tradeoff. All in all interesting theory but I dont think evolution is that smart.

Goodheart's law. You would optomize for the cheapest way to appear to have what women want, which may have little to no overlap with what they want/need, but would confuse their ability to detect the real deal.

Yeah, it's kind of glib, but I think there's something there.

It's not like women are shy about saying what women want, but it seems clear that they're wrong about that. So we need to explain this somehow. I can think of at least a few explanations, and one of them is that they don't actually know what they want.

This could be beneficial because who really wants to know what women want? Men. We already know that women are at least willing to pretend to tell the truth about what they want (of course they could be lying, etc.), but what if they actually knew and told men the Truth? And what if that Truth made it clear that a lot of men aren't wanted by women? That might be bad for civilization.

It might be better for civilization that men and women are both in a constant state of confusion about women's desires, and instead of everything being out in the open and clear, men are forced to try a variety of things to win women's favor. There are too many variables to control for, so no one can ever make any progress on the problem, and so it goes on being a mystery.

I think they know what they want but their filters are like the proverbial fish trying to describe water, and they don't realize that their statements are only true for guys who pass. When a woman describes her ideal mate it's so obvious it goes without saying that he would be attractive to her peers, she's describing characteristics she wants in addition to that, not the exclusive list of things she wants.

That makes a terrifying amount of sense

I don't understand it any more than you do. I fell in love precisely once and it had nothing to do with money, status, or looks (he had none at the time, though he did have intelligence and wit.) I married a principled, honest man who I can be entirely myself with. Even when he's talking about something I don't care about (football mostly), I'm interested in what he's saying because it's him saying it.

Also reading GenZ women talk online I get the feeling that the human race is probably going to become like pandas soon, women dont seem to be attracted to men at all.

Well... don't underestimate how much extremely online people are different from your average, ordinary person. I wouldn't worry about this too much. Odds are that there will be plenty of zoomer women who are interested in pursuing relationships with men.

But as to your general question, it's hard. People have been asking "what do women want?" for literally hundreds (probably thousands) of years, I don't think there will ever be a definitive answer. My intuition is that the answer would be a set of different criteria, which different groups of women (based on culture, age, personality variance, etc) all value differently. But I really don't know.

None of those things are a challenge if we were to model the process naively atleast. Its not quantum mechanics.

Im of the opinion that if a sufficiently large dataset with enough variables about both partners were to be created. The question could be answered overnight in less than 100 lines of python code.

If it were actually that easy, then why hasn't it been done yet? The fact that it hasn't happened suggests that it is not in fact that easy.

Because what attracts women is not a good research question relative to all other questions that can be asked. The kind of dataset that would be required to model the target would be far too labor and time intensive to create for dubious benefit to any real research question.

It should be like Man_{n} features, Woman_{n} features, man and woman n are couples.

So then, it's not actually that easy.

Yeah, I said it would be easy had such a dataset existed. Easy in the sense that you won't need much advanced math to find the answer.

Sure, but I think that the phrasing there is kind of hand waving away the hard part. It's like saying "it would be easy to walk over there if there wasn't a wall blocking the way". Technically true, but the phrase "it would be easy" tends to connote a certain sense that the problem is easier than it actually is.

The better we became at compiling such a dataset, the more restricted we became in how honest we can be about what we actually seek for in a mate, both with a dispassionate survey taker and even with ourselves. Social desirability bias towards not appearing shallow is so great as to make this sort of survey a non-starter in my view.

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