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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   38427 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 27, 2023

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He was reading a book on the subway. He knew the definition of the term feminism. He moved (even with a smile) when he stood in the way of someone at the bread shelf at Kiwi. He apologized for interrupting someone.

This is a list of things that women have told you were the things that charmed them.

I hope you can agree that a person may worry she'd be thought of as superficial were she to admit (to herself or others) that her thought process was "He was jacked and dressed like he's rich".

As described by Robin Hanson in Elephant In The Brain, what we think are our motives are rarely our actual motives. Add on to this the social opprobrium that may come from admitting certain motives to others, and self-reported testimony on this topic becomes highly suspect.

This is true. However, at least some non-trivial fraction of attractive women must be into stuff besides exceptional height/BMI/status/money, since I pretty regularly see men who are average in those things with attractive women. Some women, for example, are into mature daddy figure type men even if they are not physically attractive or exceptional in terms of social status or money.

I don't believe that to be the case for a non-trivial amount of people. Sure, you can justify what you have as being what you want. Or you can make the best out of the situation you felt you found yourself in and settle for someone. But if you give people the anonymous choice between a 9 vs a 6, accounting for an 'objective' height/bmi/status/money, and all else being equal, and neither 9 or 6 will know if they are not chosen so you are not hurting any feelings, people will go for the 9.

I think there are cases where people will intentionally lower their standards due to their own circumstance and insecurities. But if you told them that they could have a 9 that loved all the things they hate about themselves, or a 6 that does the same, I'd say, yeah, we are talking trivial amounts of people who go for 6.

I am not sure about that. Just off the top of my head, I can think of three very conventionally attractive women (pretty face, shapely body with nice breasts and/or backside, skinny) who, for an extended period of time, went out with physically average guys who did not have exceptional levels of money or status. None of them were foreigners looking for citizenship, either. I find it hard to believe that these women could not have easily found men with higher looks/money/status to date for an extended period of time.

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