Women are all the same - Part V

In the previous four posts in the series, I went from personal anecdotes to scientific evidence gathered at speed dating events to prove my point that when it comes to sex and love, all women want the same (men) and hence behave like they're all one and the same.

Today, we will take a broader look and delve into anthropological evidence gathered in various cultures around the globe (click here for the scientific reference that I'll be drawing from).

Biologists like to compare people across different cultures for commonalities. Anything that humans share across the vast variety of environments that we populated is a strong hint at a genetic predisposition. And this is particularly true for tribes that no contact with Western civilization, such as the the Ache in Paraquay. 

Researchers found that in the "pre-contact era", love life in this tribe consisted of love marriages by female choice. They were classic serial monogamists, with women accumulating up to ten marriages over the course of a lifetime. And if you read any books on human evolution, you might know that this what most scientist believe life was like during the early tens of thousands of years of human evolution (you know, the time when the genes that influence our behavior today have been selected).

So what fancies women that have never read an issue of Cosmo or marveled at a movie staring Clooney or Pitt? Here is an interesting excerpt from an interview by one of the anthropologists who visited the tribe (referring to the pre-contact era):

Q: What kind of man could get many women, what kind did women love?
A: A man needed to be strong. ... Women don't like men who love to hit others. I mean a strong man. ... a small or a large man, but he had to be strong. ... A "good man" is a man whom women love."

It is clear. She doesn't like a weak man. No insecure guy (who needs to prove something in fights) or wuss, please. It doesn't matter what he looks like, but if he is desired by other women, that is just perfect. Sound familiar?

Here is another interesting case: China.

Why? China instantiated a marriage law in 1950 (revised in 1987) that "stipulates the criteria by which ... to chose mates: personal compatibility, political attitudes, and judgment of character."
Sounds good, doesn't it? It has the words written "romantic love" written all over it.
 "Criteria deemed inappropriate, in contrast, are wealth, good looks, sexual attractiveness, and family connections."

If you have ever been to China, you will have noticed that this law has far reaching implications. It is arguably the only country in the world where women do not seem to care about their looks (don't even bother telling me about the one exception you might have experienced). In the words of the researchers this is due to a "society where governmental structures and regulations support equality for women, suppress the glorification of female beauty ... and devalue the notion of wealth."

So, do Chinese men care less about female youth and beauty and select women for their smarts and charm? Do Chinese women care less about a man's status and more about his personality?

Not so, say the people who studied their actual mate choice. Chinese men were found to rate "good looks" as nearly all important in women, while Chinese girls preferred a man's job and income, class label, family and social connections and pretty much anything else higher than what he looked like. In the eyes of the researchers this "parallels the sex-differentiated rank-ordering of these characteristics reported for college students in the United States and, indeed, for samples of participants from around the world."

Are we really all the same? What about the level of education or socioeconomic class? Don't these things matter when it comes to selecting partners? It turns out they do. But not as you might have expected. When richer college kids are interviewed, the data points in one common direction: "an exaggeration of the expected sex differences". In other words, richer guys shoot for even more beautiful women while women with material resources want even higher status males.

Take a moment to think about what this means for our society. When feminism came along in the sixties, people believed that "the more sex-egalitarian our society becomes, and the more resources are held by women, the less interested women will be in status."
And the exact opposite is true!
Instead of enabling women to find "true love" by focusing on a man's character, they now feel even more gina tingling for the few men at the top of the sexual food chain while remaining ice cold for the common foot folks that once made the staple of their marriage market.

So, women all over the world agree: "the least physically attractive man [is] more acceptable than the most physically attractive man to have coffee with, to date, to have sex with, to marry ..., as long as he was depicted [of high social status]."
In other words, status is king.
The looks of a man are less than secondary. They do not matter. At all. And neither does his personality or zodiac sign. What women really care for is what he stands for (and as one night stands are concerned - researchers found that "requirements for status ... either remain the same or increase" when short term mating is concerned).

The divide between the genders when it comes to sexual preference is so deep and universal, that we all share disbelief as to how important these things are for the other sex: Men worry about their hair loss while women are bragging about their social status and desirability. It shows that time and again, there is only one good dating advice:
Don't listen to what people say, observe what they do.

Comfortably Numb

"I thought you would find that interesting" she says and shows me this article on sexless relationships in ELLE Magazine.

I take a short glimpse. There is a name that pops out: David M. Buss, PhD.

That David Buss? One of the (arguably) most eminent evolutionary psychologists? In ELLE magazine?!?

My guess about an article on sexless relationships in a woman's magazine would have been that it is all about blaming the guy.
You know, how he should be more considerate. Bring flowers and make time for romantic dinner dates. Put down the toilet seat. And there like.
Buss doesn't sit well with that.

And indeed, after skimming through the anecdotal intro (you can't coerce female readers into a fact-loaded article without giving something to hang their feelings on), the article did none of the above.

So who's to blame for the cold sheets in contemporary marital beds?

"Well, it's possible that sexual liberation is in some way to blame."

You don't say.

It gets even better:

"Monogamy becomes tougher if your single years conditioned you to expect different kinds of sex with different kinds of people. Newness, mystery, and novelty have always been an essential part of the turn-on; after a while, coming home to hubby, even if he's Mr. Right, may leave you cold."

Yes, that is an actual excerpt from ELLE magazine, written by a woman for women. Telling women that their sex problems are not just due to their careless hubbies, but too their own undoings in their autobiographical past. Something they need to blame themselves for. Something that cannot be undone.

By the way, ELLE defines as "sexless" a relationship with less than 10 times of intercourse a year (!). The frequency of such relationships is reportedly more than 10% (although I would add some to that given that people are not honest about things that make them look bad even in anonymous surveys).
So what is a man to take from all that?

"He told me, 'I'd rather be with you and never have sex for the rest of my life than not be with you.' " Five years on, she believes he's been true to his word ... He says he just wants to be with me; he loves me," she says. "Honestly, I'm kind of shocked by it," she says."

Yeah, betas don't get sex and the contempt for their willingness to stay celibate from their wives - all at the same time. So much to the role of love.

[There is something a man can do at this point other than run away (if he deems it worth it). We will discuss relationship game in one of the upcoming posts. Most Provider type of guys, however, will feel comfortable in their effortless role of following her demands. After all, it's what says she she wants, right?]

Well, if he's okay with it, why bother? Because it doesn't stop there. If a Provider fails so utterly in keeping his wife interested, the inevitable will happen: Cheating. And it won't be him (even if he wanted to, no woman in her right mind would a man like that get into her pants).

"Ironically, her husband wasn't the one who strayed. A month after they returned from their honeymoon she found herself entangled with a married man, feeling something she had all but given up on: turned on... It was really, really fun."

Given the last quote it is understandable that ELLE readers do not feel quite as depressed about their fate as you would expect them to. The article ends with another glimmer at the end of the tunnel: Flibanserin. Yeah, that's right. A drug to restore some libido. The message is clear: anything, literally anything, but a return of the clock to the well functioning system we had before the sexual liberation that is really to blame.

In the long run, truth always wins. So, I am not surprised that we are witnessing a transition of evo psych knowledge from obscure internet forums and blogs into the mainstream media (some more recent examples are currently being discussed over at Talleyrand's and roissy's). But what women seem to fail to see is that every time that happens there will be a few less men willing to tie the knot. You see, while nobody really cared about the staggering number of sexually unsuccessful guys given women's preferred choice of the few chosen, but now that there is an increasing number of frustrated ex-sluts failing to attract both the harem-keeping Adonises and Joe Average alike, things are about to change (see the excellent discussion at In Mala Fide).

The situation that sexual liberation created is one of two male populations that are unwilling to marry: The alphas who enjoy their freedom and variety.
And the betas who either become hypo-attractive given the experiences of women in their teens and twenties or who refuse to pay for something that had been given away so freely.

In the end, it is women who will suffer the most. Women are not satisfied with endless sex flings. They want a long term relationship (at least in addition), and they undermine their chances at that - on the personal and the societal level. Given all that, I find it amazing that an article like that does not end with a pledge to raise a "smarter" generation of girls but rather tells their mums to swallow pills (or to cheat, if you know how to read between the lines). Women should be aware that with all that knowledge coming out into public inspection we certainly will soon face a smarter generation of men.

Women are all the same - IV

The previous three posts of this series were all about some personal experiences backed by scientific data on an interesting, yet common illusion:

We do not decide on a particular partner because (s)he is special.

Which can even be taken one step further:

We do not fall in love with people for "who they are".

Instead, we find some people more sexually attractive than others, and try hard to make a good deal in getting the best we can. Over time we will get increasingly attached to the other person. And we then tell ourselves that there are many reasons other than sexual for why we decided on that particular partner.

The best proof of the above is the vast discrepancy between what we think we like in a partner and what we actually like. As one fascinating study on this subject finds:
"Participants’ ideal preferences, assessed before the speed-dating event, failed to predict what inspired their actual desire at the event."

In the words of the authors:

"Even regarding such a consequential aspect of mental life as romantic-partner preferences, people may lack introspective awareness of what influences their judgments and behavior."

This in itself is quite remarkable. Yet, there is an even greater upshot to this: Since we do not select mates on their "unique qualities", but simply try to max out our ability to get the most attractive partner, we are essentially all looking for the same (few hyperattractive) people. The only reason we find "matches" is that we compromise by accepting that our own attractiveness is limited.

Now, as reader Poetry of Flesh has noted, this all seems to suggest that: "not only women are all alike, but so are men". This is true in that we all want attractive partners. The crucial difference, though, is that for men there are far more attractive women than there are attractive men for women.

It follows from that that women really are much more the same than men in their sexual and romantic tastes.

Scientists have a word for that phenomenon. It is called mating skew:
"A few males meet with a great deal of success, whereas others have little or even no success."

Women go so far in agreeing on which few men are the bedroom-worthiest that they do not just ignore men are already "taken", but even prefer that option when given the choice. Scientists have word for that, too: mate poaching.

The overwhelming agreement among women as to who is hot or not comes at a high price. The competition is immense.

While the naive eye sees men approaching women in day and nighttime settings, the trained observer sees so much more. Women are fighting subtle fights over the few guys who stand tall above the uninteresting rest: Every body part that comes to close to the beauty ideal gets emphasized while the flawed parts get masterfully hidden. Clever tactical positioning is used to signal interest and availability. Body language speaks volumes about the hidden intentions. What cannot be said out loud is said in silence. The tension is so high, it can even turn into physical violence. The last couple of bar brawls I have witnessed were almost exclusively performed by frustrated females.

It is for that reason that there will never be an equivalent of the "seduction community" for women. For this to happen it would need a type of solidarity that is prohibited by the laws of the sexual market place. While the few men who have "a great deal of success" with women do not mind to give up a part of that to the men who struggle, few women are willing to "share a man" if they believe they hit the jackpot - the risk of losing the valuable asset is simply too high.

Women are all the same - Part III

The previous two posts in these series have caused quite a bit of stir and controversy (as expected). Most readers took issue with my suggestion that we have a cognitive bias for overestimating individuality and uniqueness. Others suggested that my personal experiences are marred by selection bias and other confounding factors.

Before hardening up my admittedly weak anecdotal evidence by getting more into the science that help shaping my opinion, I would like to avoid some more confusion.
Here are the two points I tried to make, in full clarity:

1) We tend to think that we are more unique in our preferences than we actually are
Note that I do not say that we are all the same (as some commenters took it). To quote myself:
"We all want to be special little snowflakes. And to some extent we are.  Of course, there is truth to our uniqueness. Yet, it is far more limited than we think."

2) Especially when it comes to mate choice, we are almost all the same (and women even more so than men)
In other words, we all agree on what is sexy.
And that has many surprising repercussions.

It is at this point that I need to make an important disclaimer. What I am referring to as mate choice is essentially sexual desire.

Women get most sexually aroused by alpha males (who fit the "Lover" bill), yet yearn for long term romance with more reliable "Provider" males. Discussions on the topic of mate choice often get muddled by this diametrical female emotional need of men. In other words, when women close their eyes and think about their "ideal man", they think of husband material and not the guys she hooks up with in her youth.

Likewise, men tend to be more selective when committing to a single female. While few single men would  abstain from flings with highly attractive, yet promiscuous females, nobody wants to marry a whore.

So you might think that my focus on attractiveness is misleading (at least for those who are more interested in long term dating than one night stand).  Yet, (somewhat surprisingly) despite everything mentioned above  - our long term mate choices are not entirely independent of our short term mate preference.

In other words, while (the vast majority) of men are unwilling to fully commit to highly attractive girls if they deem them too promiscuous, they will not marry unattractive girls either. It is more like: men want attractive women.
And if they are too commit, they will sub-select the ones that do not completely destroy their hopes of raising their own (rather than another man's child).
And then there are other factors, too, of course. Smart men know that it takes more than sex to have a family and thus women get screened for their companionship prospects in addition to what I described above. This is where men start to think about how a woman's intelligence, education and political opinions match his own.
But, be as it may, attraction needs to be there in the first place.

How about the opposite sex? One could argue that women do select two non-overlapping populations for short term mating and long term relationships indeed.
The former consists of the few alpha males, who are desirable not despite but because they are desired by many other women. emotionally cold and inaccessible, risk taking and aloof in nature. They are shitty husbands but great lovers.
The latter are the more reliable men who are less prone to live out the male drive to serial promiscuity - either because they drank the societal Kool Aid or simply because they lack the options. These men are stable, responsible and kind. They are great husbands and more often than not boring lovers.

And indeed, some women follow along these lines and differentiate men in this way. They marry ("settle for") men they are not strongly physically attracted to after a youth full of alpha flings. After all, a woman can easily quench her thirst for premium sperm by having a "girl's night out" while her nice, reliable, unsuspecting husband is busy amassing what it needs to "provide".
Yet, the ultimate female fantasy is to unite Lover and Provide in one partner. Romance for women is to win the Lover and gain him as a Provider. This is the stuff that chick flicks are made of. This is why women chase bad boys even if they are not in the mood for one night stands. There is always the hope that this could "turn into something more".
So, for women, too, when it comes to long term partners, attraction needs to be there in the first place.

The result of the above may be surprising to some:

When it comes to actually choosing a mate your guess about your own preferences is way off.
(The study I link to is a citation classic, and absolutely worth a read. It puts an end to all discussions on "what women want in a man" based on introspection. Actions simply speak louder than words.)

As a result, researchers find that even in speed dating events, where people arguably look for long term partners rather than one night stands, sexual attractiveness is king: Men want sexy women while women look for high status males. To quote some of the (highly significant and often reproduced) key findings:
"Many traits had surprisingly little effect on people’s desirability ... including education and income, previous marriages, having children, concordant desires for future children, religious compatibility, appetites with respect to casual sex, and having similar habits with regard to smoking and drinking"

What this all means is that what we mean by "love grows" is getting used to the flaws and mismatches between our wish list and our partner's actual traits because they are sexually attractive rater than the other way round.

There is one more important repercussion.

While we might all have different "wish lists" for long term partners, we arguably agree much more on who is "hot or not". As a result we all rival for the same few attractive/desirable partners.

The tremendous difference between the genders is that men are attracted by looks (low BMI accounts for almost a third of the variance in female desirability!), and beauty is ubiquitous.

Women, however, are attracted by high social status, and there can only be one at the top. Thus, women seem to be "more selective" than men. So selective they truly all want the same. Or, to to tie it back to the original headline: "When it comes to choosing men, they are all the same".

It follows from that "there are few sexually attractive individuals and lots and lots of compromise".

You might not like seeing yourself, or your partner this way, but telling yourself that you found love because it is "such a good match" is denying the truth that you simply are out of options. Things tend to get murky if a more attractive person becomes available (men tend to divorce their wives for younger women. n'est-ce pas?). And what is attractive or not is much less in the eye of the beholder than scientifically quantifiable:

A Revolution in Paradise

On my most recent trip across the Atlantic, I was flipping through the free newspapers provided by the flirtatious flight attendants when the following train of thoughts started rushing through my mind.

The Economist had a front page piece on "woman power", commemorating the fact that women are about to become the majority of the American work force (they already are in several other Western countries).

The commentaries on the subject were surprisingly bearable, if not mildly interesting. Apparently, even within feminist circles it now gets noted that the original strive for gender-equalization conflicted with the reality of gender specificities. So far so good. What I had not fully realized is that this notion has flipped into a rather common movement of female supremacy, with women using "biological findings" to support the notion that some "feminine" qualities make them better suited for high profile positions.

The main economics course at the university I attended started with a professor stating (only half jokingly) that you could either make it to the several hours of lectures every week, or save the money on textbooks and subscribe to the Economist. It's a no b.s. news magazine. And that is because when money is on the table, even the biggest ideologue becomes rather rational real quick. Not surprisingly then, the commentary regarding female supremacy more than devastated that argument.

Given the strengths of the phenomena we are dealing with, I have no doubt that a hundred years from now, there will be little understanding for our society's struggle with the obvious:

Men and Women are different. 
Our natural gender roles are largely complimentary. There is no better or worse. 


(before you object - read on; I will deal with the issues you probably have in mind down the line)

It is fascinating to see that women increasingly realize that the original ideology of feminism isn't their actual cup of tea. Instead of following along with the feminist codex, women have decided to go cherry picking. The modern woman wants all the plus sides of "emancipation", such as her own income and free reign over her sex life. What she doesn't want is clothes that don't make her look and feel sexy, man hate and some other things that got promoted by the first generation of feminists.

And as a result of that - FANFARE! - feminists start thinking and writing like realist/masculinist/roissysphere/MRA/MGTOW bloggers!

Take these excerpts I got an article on "what went wrong" with feminism from The Telegraph (the other newspaper I read that day):

 "It started with Girl Power and has sunk into mindless hedonism. ... has sexual equality backfired?"

Sound familiar?

Yes, women have cherry picked their  "new rights" . To quote:

"In previous generations many women had to repress their physical needs and experiences in order to fall in with social conventions, and feminism was needed to release them from the cage of chastity,"

That was then. Women fought that successfully. Now we have:

"A generation of young girls is interpreting liberation as the right to ...  no-strings sex, celebrating one-night stands as notches on their designer handbags. For them, STDs are almost a badge of honour, eating disorders commonplace and men who talk of love and commitment are sneered at for "going soppy".

That is British for "silly"/"sentimental". Take that beta males!

Women now slut around happily  (with guys who are not "going soppy). Until they reach the late twenties and panik for husbandry that is. Women want money to buy stuff and are willing to work hard for it. Women want the studs and are willing to work hard for that, including eating disorders and plastic surgery.

So, young women want the no-commitment hotties. Lots of them. And they don't want any of that other crap that the old school feminists had in mind. But, of course, what the feminist author takes away from seeing what we all see, is a deep concern for "The Return of Sexism" - and thereby entirely drops the ball.

The point she is missing when contemplating modern slutism is the same point that feminism missed as a whole:

How does all of this affect men?

As I wrote above, the gender roles were there for a reason. The system worked. Each side brought something in, and got something out of the deal that is any social interaction.

One could argue that the deal was always biased in favor of women (as masterly done in the must read Dr. Farrell's "The Myth of Male Power"): Men in the role of bread givers were forced to work harder, fight more and die earlier. They also have no biological certainty in their offspring and therefore run the risk of investing all their resources (materially and emotionally) into another man's child - an evolutionary suicide. Men were as powerless as women (or had it even worse).

The fact that there was a "Rebellion in Paradise" - not by the weaker (male) side, but by the side that felt the most sexually repressed is telling about the powers of biological drive.

To be fair - women were sexually repressed and reliant on men for resources. And they did away with that dark side to their gender role.

But nobody did away with the dark side of the male gender role. Men are still expected to pay for dates (and children, and even their ex-wives), which results in men still choosing more profitable jobs and stress related disease. Women now are the majority of the work force while men are still the majority of the armed forces. The list is long.

And now women even did away with the sentimental men (until their late twenties that is). But the problem is not that they voluntarily subject themselves to sexism.
The problem is that they thereby cut off another slice of the ancient gender deal. As Lupo put it so eloquently:
"In ye olden days of yore, the post-30 woman would actually have given you the best years of her life: the pre-30 years. Instead, they generally give the best years of their life to the dong-carousel, and take it out on the poor saps who date them later in life."