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Notes -
Because women don’t have an accountant’s focus on “sexual market value?”
Maybe it’s because we’ve been discussing housing prices in another thread, but that term really bugs me. It’s imputing a model which most people wouldn’t even consider. Women aren’t estimating sexual supply/demand curves or tracing out their depreciation. I suspect the term only sticks around because of the number of disaffected men who would like to believe that women are calculating aliens from the planet Zygax.
If you’re asking why women—or any collective group—do something, you have to frame it as individual incentives. A average woman sees some trend and asks “do I like this?” or even “would that look good on me?” She may be right or wrong about the answer, and she may be able or unable to implement it effectively. That puts a lot of noise into any signal.
As an aside, I really doubt that men are evolved to detect “unnatural” things. Our earliest evidence of cosmetics is, what, the Egyptians? 5,000 years is not an evolutionary timescale. And surgery didn’t approach modern levels until, well, modern times.
The uncanny valley certainly seems to be innate, and probably explains why people dislike looking at people with extreme cosmetic surgery e.g. the Bogdanoffs.
I should have been more clear—no objection to the premise that we can and do detect “unnatural things.” What I find unlikely is that it’s “straight men” detecting things “like this,” i.e. sexual selection. I’d say it’s an extension of our general pattern-matching skills.
That clearing looks like an ambush, that bush looks like a tiger, that dude looks like a corpse.
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It makes me feel kind of uneasy using it, but I think it has explanatory and predictive power. An economist knows people don’t view the world the same way they do. However, in order to explain human behavior you need to dig deeper than a person did something because they like it. Sometimes you even need to uncover hidden subconscious motivations. Models and language that view things as an unattached outsider can help achieve truth-seeking goals.
The behavior still exists whether we explain it in politically incorrect terms or in platitudes and flowery language. A woman might say, “I don’t want to be in a relationship with that guy because he is fun but he smokes too much pot and doesn’t have career ambitions”. Saying his relationship market value is not high enough expresses the same sentiment.
I think the real reason SMV and the related terminology became so popular among disaffected men is because it provides a much more direct and actionable explanation for how they can attract women. Instead of things being vague and opaque the language puts things into blunt terms. Women rank their choice of possible mates by some value system and generally traits x/y/z (such as confidence, physical fitness, social skills) are highly valued in their ranking system. The things they value in initial attraction can differ from what they value in a long-term partner. This explains why some men get a lot of attention on dating apps and others get very little/none. If you want more attention then signal more of traits x/y/z.
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