Women do not care about what a man looks like

In the whole of Germany, there is just one professor of psychology left who teaches and defends Freud's Psychoanalysis. The poor guy, last of his kind, is the target of frequent criticism and laughter from his academic colleagues. How come this "school" has lost most of its appeal to professional researchers of the mind? Did it not dominate psychology to the extent that it almost was synonymous with it for a while? One of my previous mentors once gave me an answer to both these questions with a bon mot that stuck to my mind:

"Freud's thinking became so successful because he gives us the illusion that we are complicated little beings. And nobody wants to be told that they are simple minded."

We are not just surprised each time somebody reveals our ways as steered by an invisible but primitive force, we outright hate it. And this is particularly true when it comes to our love life.

Yet, the force is too strong to deny. Society has come to terms with the fact that male taste in women is nothing but a base instinct craving signs of health and high fertility: youth, beauty, slim bodies, buxom breasts, and tight labia.

The one and only thing that men want from a woman is the prospect of healthy offspring.

Thus, magazines and billboards feature girl of this kind and not old post-menaupsal women in order to entice the male mind. If anything, we joke about this one dimensionality of the male mate preference.

For some reason, however, there is a lot of resistance each time someone points out that women are not any more complex either. Worse than that, by lacking a proper understanding of the one and only factor that women seek in a mate, both genders hurt themselves in the love seeking process: women find themselves in bed with guys "who are not even their type", while many men try to improve their attractiveness in the most ineffective ways.

The one and only thing that women want from a man is (the prospect of) high status.

Men and women alike want "sexy kids", but we have different strategies to achieve that. And for women, all that counts is a man's ability to influence things for the better. "Status" is something a man does. It is the magic of influence that allows some men to get more out of life, and women know that on an instinctual level.

But what does that mean on a practical level?

What a man looks like does not matter. All that matter is his appearance.

In other words, women do the exact opposite of men when it comes to select people for sex. Men care for the physical attributes of a women, women care for the non-physical attributes that men radiate in their behavior.

But what about things like muscularity and height (as some of you have noted dutifully)? Don't they count?

Well, yes and no.

Women prefer taller (and more muscular) men. That is true.
But that does not mean that they are attracted to a man's height!

The problem is that taller (and more muscular) men tend to get something from all of us that shorter men don't get: high social status. And it is this tight correlation between height and other people's respect that makes things confusing.

To find out whether women are attracted to a man's looks (such as height) or his social status, one thus needs to look at cases where the two are dissociated.

And the answer is appalling:
As a man, you can literally look like a gnome and score girls that make most men salivate.

What about the opposite? Just go to a club and compare the insecure guys, liquid courage in front of chest to the few men who actually talk with women. Does their tallness matter?

Women are not attracted to tall men. They are attracted to high status males. It just happens to be that their chances of a guys being of high status are disproportionately increased if the guy is tall. Thus, if women are robbed of the means of evaluating a man's high status (by checking his body language and response to shit tests), they will default to anything that correlates with these things. This is why showing photographs of guys is such a poor way to evaluate female mate preference.

As a guy, you can train yourself by trying to see the world through a woman's eyes. Judging each person's status, as communicated by body language, at any moment in time will give you the power of perfect predictability of which men are seen as attractive by female consensus. It will reveal to you what it is in you that women respond to positively as well. For women, realizing the above is not quite as hard as for men, but still helpful when seeking an interesting man.  
Mankind's success and doom relies on how well we understand our own motives and actions. Gnotis auton!