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Relsqui comments on Love and Rationality: Less Wrongers on OKCupid - Less Wrong
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Concrete advice #2 and #3 seem uncontroversial to me, but I'm not sure how much they actually matter.
I've thought of the personspace concept myself, and it's a great line of thought.
4 sounds like good advice, but we quickly get into trouble again and raise some of my same objections (I'm going to be repeating myself a bit from my last post, but that's to figure out good ways to articulate things):
First, I want to acknowledge the accurate part about this advice: your goal is not to attract the average person in your target demographic on an online dating website. It's better to have a small group of people crazy about you, rather than having everyone lukewarm about you... as long as that small group contains enough people you want. Sometimes, it's best to pick out a niche. An important topic is how to narrow yourself to a niche where you can have an impact, but not such a narrow niche that you have no options and only go on date every couple years.
Yet even within your niche, you do need to worry about appearing interesting enough.
A profile is like a movie trailer. The purpose of the movie trailer is to hype the reasons why someone might want to see it. Yes, the trailer should be related to the movie, but it should have the highlights of the movie, rather than the boring parts. If you want to get a more complete look at the movie, you can read reviews and ask friends about it. But the purpose of the trailer is hype, not film criticism! Including a critique of the film in trailers would be more "honest," but it would just make trailers bloated and unengaging.
Furthermore, everyone knows that trailers are about hyping movies, just as everyone knows that first impressions are for putting one's best foot forward (except nerdy people who got fooled by the majority of homo hypocriticus).
Your profile should provide enough information to funnel in people you are potentially matched well with, but its purpose is not to give people a 360 degree view of who you are. It's to intrigue them enough to want to get a 360 degree view of you over all the other profiles competing for their attention.
I disagree with this quote:
Such ideas should be examined with scrutiny because they are (a) too theoretical, and (b) they fall prey to the bias of the fox calling the grapes he can't reach sour from Aesop's fable.
Actually, there are many guys, particularly nerdy guys, who have artificially-depressed social skills due to getting cut out of the social world at a young age, and who would be a lot more socially-skilled with a more friendly formative development. These guys will be interested in many women who will find them boring due to their lack of social skills and confidence, and these women would especially find online dating profiles of these guys boring.
Of course, those guys don't want to meet women who find them boring, but they would want to meet those women if those women would be interested in them.
Edit:
As Vladimir_M and I have discussed in the past, there is probably a large subset of males who have the traits to be datable for many women, but who just barely aren't exciting enough due to lacking relatively superficial behavioral qualities. These guys will get strictly dominated by men who are smoother on the first impression (such as online dating profiles), but who don't necessarily rank any higher on other aspects of women's preferences, and who might even be worse as long-term mates.
Part of the reason I support widespread study of influence and seduction is that I want to get rid of the big gaps that can exist between people in these areas. I want to see the nerdy guy getting learning how to get his foot in the door, rather than putting his foot in his mouth. I want to see more men meeting women's basic preferences for social skills, so that women aren't forced to immediately exclude them as mates. (Similarly, if more women met men's physical criteria, looks would become less important in how men select women, and men wouldn't have to exclude women as mates so often based on superficial qualities.)
Perhaps I made a mistake in addressing honesty and attractiveness separately, because you're not the first person to assume that my advice about honesty precludes attempting to make your profile seem attractive. As I read it, that quote doesn't mean that no one you want to meet would find your profile boring. That's ridiculous! It means no one you want to meet would find you boring, and I agree with that. It's just a roundabout way of saying "don't try to present yourself as someone other than who you are." I assumed that "show your best side" was understood; clearly it isn't.
"If" is the point. I'm optimizing for relationships, not dates. Signalling more social skills than you actually have isn't going to work out in the long run (except insofar as being able to signal competently is much of what they are).
I certainly agree with the idea that nerds with no social skills would be well-served to develop those skills. But then the point isn't making them appear more desireable; it's actually making them more desireable, which is beyond the scope of the post.
For some people, the main barrier to relationships is trouble getting dates, or trouble doing well on dates. The more dates these people go on, the better they will get at dating, at which point they'll be able to move on to actually attempting relationships.
As you say, being able to signal competently is a big part of social skills.
In my experience in real life, people who try to signal more social skills than they actually have tend to get seen through or make people feel uncomfortable almost immediately, or get believed on a permanent basis. While I think it's possible to hit somewhere in between, where people initially think you're cool and then later decide that you're a loser, doing so is hard, because signaling substantially more social skills than you actually have is hard.
I suspect that most of the time, the amount of social skills that someone can "fake" is about the level of social skills they could attain if they would practice a bit, get some good reactions from people, and believes in themselves. In some cases, merely one or two tries of a new social behavior with such positive results are enough to grant you that social skill.
It might be a bit easier to signal social skills you don't have in an online profile, I admit. But still, people can message with you, talk by instant messengers, or talk on the phone to get a better idea of where your social skills are at. Short of having a friend write for you, it's still hard to fake social skills in your responses.
Let's say that these filters fail, and we end with an originally social unskilled guy who was able to act socially skilled online, on a date in real life with a woman. This scenario could plausibly happen, but I don't consider it very bothersome for several reasons:
Even if she ends up finding his social skills lacking and decide to not have a second date, the guy was still making an effort to improve himself, so it should be forgivable that his social skills seemed better than they actually are. Although it does waste a small amount of a woman's time to give a "practice date" to a guy who doesn't turn out to have the social chops she originally thought, I think it's even worse for women if socially challenged guys have no way of learning the ropes, because then women's options are limited to men who acquired social skills by default during their socialization (which filters out many guys who are introverted, shy, sensitive, nerdy, short, or who got bullied as children, a category of men that actually would make good long term mates if only they were bit more socially skilled and exciting).
Of course, it's understandable if individual women don't want to be giving dates to guys with a major mismatch in social skills from their first impression, but I think this worse case scenario is rare, because it's simply too hard for men to fake substantially greater social skills in ways that women can't detect, even online. Furthermore, given that women have more stringent personality and behavioral criteria than men, and typically expect the guy to take an unequal share in the burden of initiating, women are just going to deal with the fact that men have a longer learning curve for satisfying women's preferences, just as many men are just going to have to deal with their girlfriends taking longer to get ready.
I agree, and I'm not going to hold that against your post. However, it means we shouldn't say stuff like "no one you want to meet would find you boring" when it's not necessarily true, even online.
I contend that a lot of the time, for men at least, it wouldn't be too difficult to figure out a way to present themselves online that would turn off people who would otherwise be good matches for them. This could even be a matter of subtleties like signaling, photo choice, or even the order by which you list your interests/traits. Attraction based on discovering additional qualities about a person is not a commutative operation: order matters. Let's examine a guy who plays guitar and is also a programmer, and reveal these facts in different order. Guitar player + programmer = cool guy with a nerdy side. Programmer + guitar player = nerdy guy trying to be cool. The example may not be that stark (though it certainly could be); the point is that earlier traits revealed have massively higher weight, such that they can even determine whether later traits revealed are seen as positive or negative (in my example, find out that the cool guitar guy also has a nerdy side can actually boost his attractiveness). The significance for online dating is that many traits should be left off the main profile entirely, and saved for later revelations.
Think of it this way: there is a space of the plausible narratives that you could create for yourself, but not all of the points in that narrative-space are equally attractive, even if they are equally factually correct. For males especially, there could be large differences in attractiveness of their different self-narratives, because women are more selective about behavior and personality.
A thousand times yes.
If only the guys who had the fundamentals right (actual brains, competence, kindness, etc.) were better at operating the female hindbrain! Adding social skills to the male population is good for women.
To add my 0.02: from my perspective, a profile that describes technical/scientific interests is not a bad thing. In fact I definitely prefer it. I don't even put that in the "bad social skills" category.
What does seem to make me less likely to communicate with someone: defining yourself by what you're a fan of instead of by what you do, not having a career, too many indications of "softness" in personality, excessive self-deprecation. Even someone who'd be compatible with me on the fundamentals can come across badly.
So, is it your experience that men with the fundamentals right are often lacking at interacting with the female hindbrain? That is consistent with my observations, and I'd be interested to hear you expand on that perception.
Vladimir_M and I ended up concurring in the past that there is excessive polarization between men who appeal to women's hindbrains, and men who have good qualities in other areas (e.g. relating to long-term mate potential). We suggested that the relationship between masculinity/excitement and female attraction is a step function: there's a certain baseline level of those traits required, but adding more of those traits isn't always better.
In your case, your threshold sounds like:
Those guys are below your threshold for some dimension (which may be related to masculinity). I would hazard a guess that for you, once it's obvious that a guy isn't too soft, being less soft isn't always better, and that you don't like men who are too far on the other end of that dimension (whatever it is), either.
Unfortunately, large minorities of the male population fail these sorts of thresholds and are consequently undateable, even for women who aren't into hypermasculine men and are into nerdy and intelligent men. This is a bad thing for everyone (except the guys who currently have monopolies on women's hindbrains) , and the sad thing is how easily fixable it is.
With just a minor behavioral makeover, such a guy would stop falling foul of women's screens like yours (except perhaps the job one, which would take more time). Neither fanboyism, softness, or self-deprecation are core parts of anyone's personality. It's possible to fix all those things without being dishonest (unless holding in neurotic self-deprecation is "dishonest"), or changing the guy's values very much (unless "don't change yourself for anyone" or some other silly value like that has been internalized).
Sadly, women who want any excitement and masculinity in men are often forced to go for guys who are "overkill" in those categories. When women say stuff like "I want a badboy with a tender heart," or "I like nice guys, but not weak men," they aren't contradicting themselves: they are looking a complex combination of traits, which is consistent with women's greater behavioral selectivity.
I think you've basically got it right.
I do have the impression that men who have the fundamentals right aren't good with the female hindbrain, for the most part (there are exceptions, and there are compromises.)
My own perspective: I've had experience with guys who don't have the fundamentals, and that's horrible. Someone without human decency is the worst, but someone who isn't too bright also doesn't make for a great relationship. So that sort of thing is primary. Mandatory. I don't appreciate people who argue that women are somehow not serious when they say that they care about intellectual or moral values. I'm entirely serious.
But, on a totally different metric and with a totally different mechanism, masculinity also matters a lot. (I think this is true of most women, but I might be an outlier in just how much it's true for me.) Masculinity will make a bad match look tempting; the lack of it will make a good match look unappealing. I don't think it's necessarily bad that my hindbrain works like this -- on the off chance that I have "chemistry" with a guy who's also a good match, I'll enjoy the relationship much more than if I were Ms. Spock. It adds another dimension. The downside is that there's a chance I'll be attracted to assholes and idiots -- but I believe (somewhat hopefully) that being self-aware will prevent me from making those kinds of mistakes in practice. [Note that I am saying something different from "Women just want sex with assholes."]
I think you're probably also right about behavioral selectivity. Looks matter, but in a pretty coarse-grained way; there's "unappealing," a broad swath of "meh," and a tiny minority of "incredibly good-looking." Everything else is what you do.
SarahC said:
What do you think causes the common perception that women are not serious about caring about intellectual or moral values? Are you saying that it's extremely rare for women to say this unseriously, or that you just don't like being judged as non-serious on such a claim merely because a non-trivial percentage of women may make it incorrectly? What level of variation do you think occurs in the female population in this area.
Us guys, we see women saying that they want guys with intellectual and moral values, but then we often seeing women going for men who seem unlikely to exhibit those traits, and we get... confused. Since this kind of subject isn't politically correct to talk about, when a guy sees something like this happening, it will dominate his thinking and lead to hasty generalizations about what all women want (like your example of "women just want sex with assholes").
What do you think about women who are into Rhett Butler, and other "dark heroes" from romance novels? If that example is too fictional, how about, say, rappers?
Here's an interesting passage from feminist author Jackson Katz about the popularity of Eminem with women, and the message it sends to guys:
Moving on...
I think your preferences for are pretty typical for women with high intelligence: intelligent masculine guys who aren't douchebags.
I used to hate the idea of gender dynamics in dating. But then I gave them a try, and found that some of them are actually pretty fun. A lot of it is simply aesthetics on both visual and behavioral levels.
Imagine how self-aware you would be with about 30 less IQ points, and how well you'd make decisions about avoiding attractive assholish guys. That's what most women are probably like.
This confuses me, because it seems to imply that men need to believe that a simple personality heuristic can be applied to all or almost all women. Why is it an unacceptable answer that some women like one thing, and some like another? Or did you mean the same group of women in both cases?
By "gender dynamics" in this case do you mean doing the things that you're expected to do because of your gender? If so, yeah, some of them are pretty fun. And some of it is stuff we're hardwired to like; I won't argue with that. The trouble is just when we limit ourselves to broad heuristics about the whole population which gloss over the degree of individual variety, and then try to apply those on the individual scale.
In other cases, it could be that the most common things women in your culture say they want, and the guys who are getting the most attention, don't seem to match. Of course, there's no necessary contradiction, like you say.
In other cases, it's the same women saying one thing, and (seemingly) doing another.
There is a social desirability bias that will encourage women to signal preferences for positive traits like intelligence and values. In contrast, if you're a woman who likes meatheads, you've less likely to talk about it. Furthermore, when people misstate their preferences, it's more likely to be in the direction of positive traits than of negative traits.
For many white middle-class men, it's drummed into their heads from an early age that women universally prefer intelligent men with values such as "respectfulness." So when a guy sees evidence to the contrary, it makes him question anything he is told about what women want, even by women. Since it's not politically correct for either women or men to talk about women going for anything other than intelligence and values in men, when he sees women going for men without those traits, he may freak out and start making hasty generalizations.
That's not the most rational attitude, but it is understandable. The presence of some women misstating their preferences (or dating guys other than what they prefer) lowers the priors for men believing what other women say about their preferences. This is sad, but true.
And yes, it probably sucks for you when you are interacting with a guy, and his priors for how to interact with you are all screwed up by the ways that other women have trained him.
Basically yeah.
Sometimes, broad heuristics are all you have, at least to start with. "Women are misstating their preferences until proven otherwise" probably would be too broad and extreme. But a moderate degree of skepticism until proven otherwise might make sense.
Getting better reference classes can improve the heuristics used. For instance, you might know that some groups of women state their preferences more accurately than others. I propose that nerdy women are both more aware of their preferences, actually date guys who fulfill their preferences, and less likely to incorrectly state socially desirable preferences for signaling reasons. These women are also more likely to be into intelligent men with values, so on the question of those preferences, nerdy women's claims about their preferences are more trustworthy.
Gangestad et al. found that 90-95% of women fit into a gender-typical taxon based on their interests and traits, while 5-10% of women are a gender-atypical taxon (which also contains most of the queer women). 90-95% of women are wired one way; 5-10% are wired another way. As a result, there actually probably are many examples where it's reasonable to approach women with one set of heuristics by default unless you have special evidence that they are gender-atypical, which allows you to pull out some different heuristics.
It may be the case that the 5-10% of gender atypical women contain most of the nerdy women, and disproportionately state their preferences accurately.
The prevalence of different personality types in the population is very relevant here and you seem to be glossing over it. If the number of women attracted to your personality type is relatively low (and especially if it is low relative to the number of other men similar to you) it will still be an obstacle you need to overcome in finding a partner even if you believe that there are women out there who would be attracted to you. Internet dating has probably helped with this a bit by making it easier to find potential matches but it can't overcome seriously unfavourable relative numbers.
I'd compare this with employment. Every now and then, you see a media story about some company with a highly unusual internal culture that uses all sorts of unconventional practices in hiring, organization, and management. Yet unless you luckily stumble onto some such employer and happen to be an exceptionally good candidate by their standards, you would be well-advised to stick to the standard conventional advice on how to look and behave in job interviews and, subsequently, in the workplace. In fact, doing anything else would mean sabotaging your employment and career prospects, and expecting that your unconventional behavior will surely be rewarded with a dream job with an unconventional employer is a delusional pipe-dream.
The main flaw of this analogy, of course, is that the conventional wisdom on seeking and maintaining employment is largely correct, whereas the conventional wisdom on dating has fatal points of disconnect from reality. Also, while conforming to optimal workplace behavior is truly painful for many people, fixing the problems in one's approach to dating and relationships typically doesn't require any such painful and loathsome adjustment. (Even though people often rationalize their unwillingness to do it by convincing themselves in the opposite.)
Certainly! If he'd said "women who might like me tend to also like ..." I'd have understood. My confusion was because there was no such qualification, or anything else limiting the population under discussion beyond "women," but the commenter seemed to expect consistency within that population.
This is what I thought I was saying. :)
Dark heroes in romance novels generally aren't disrespectful or aggressive towards the heroine, and if they are domineering or deceptive towards the heroine, it's generally motivated by something that the hero at least believes is for the heroine's good, and often at the expense of the hero's own interests.
For example, if a fantasy-romance novel heroine gets put under a curse that makes her terribly lustful under the full moon, the heroine might lock her up to protect her... even if she secretly wants to have sex with him anyway, and he wants her as well. Or in an adventure-romance where the heroine is a trained assassin with genetic superpowers, the hero might trick her into getting left behind when he goes to kill the bad guy, to protect her... even if his powers aren't as powerful as hers, or he has no powers at all besides his secret agent training.
Even if the hero is a bad guy with a past, his actions toward the heroine never turn out to be actually evil or unprincipled, though they may be mistaken and tragic for one or both of them.
(To be fair, romance has a lot of subgenres, and my knowledge is limited to skimming the books my wife has left in the bathroom over the last 20 years or so, and a handful of conversations with her about the emotional and sexual significance of the various tropes in the genres she reads. It's possible that things are different in subgenres she doesn't read, like "contemporary"; she almost entirely prefers ones with fantasy, SF, adventure, and other "non-realistic" themes, since this lets her get two categories worth of entertainment at once. ;-) But I'd be a bit surprised if it's dramatically different.)
I think it's fair to say that a lot of romance fiction is powered by the idea of a frightening man, even if, as you say, he has a good reason. I admit that this conclusion is the result of realizing that I don't like the genre, and I think that's the reason.
The thing I don't understand in all these discussion is I know a fair number of men in long term-- and sometimes happy-- relationships. They aren't high-display of masculinity guys, and yet, somehow they've hooked up with someone. How did they manage it?
Gone with the Wind is a hard thing to argue from. It's an extraordinary book-- very popular, but never duplicated. One of the things that drives it is that Scarlett is much more motivated by survival and status than the average female lead.
I just realized-- it's actually an example of a relatively rare sort of women's fiction. Perfect guy shows up, but the woman is too busy to notice for most of the novel. The other examples I've got (Murder with Peacocks and Good in Bed), she's distracted by a bunch of things going on in her life, but not by being in love with the wrong guy. In a normal novel, she'd realize she's in love with him while he was still in love with her.
Also, it's interesting that I've never heard anyone say that it was implausible for Scarlett to be fixated on Ashley.
Part of what makes these discussions messy is that the fantasies that hook the hindbrain aren't necessarily what people want to live. There are a lot more men who like action movies than who'd like to be in violent fights.
How old are they? Most people get married eventually. Furthermore, the older people get, the more they switch over to long-term mating strategies.
If you're an average guy, eventually you're going to "get lucky" and run into a woman who is into you. As people get older, more and more women get tired of bad boys and switch over to their long-term mating strategies (and in some cases, are looking for men to support them).
So our average guy will find a mate. The question is, how many years go by while he is only dating sporadically, while women (on average) are off having fun with the more masculine and exciting guys? When he finally does find someone, how much choice does he actually have? What is her level of attractiveness (in various areas) compared to his? Is she the "one" who is "right" for him, or is she simply the one woman who has shown interest in him in the past few years?
It seems that during youth, most people do some combination of short-term mating and attempted-but-aborted serial long-term relationships, until eventually they find a good match. People test-drive each other. According to the model I'm outlining, women concentrate their test driving towards men at the top, while men's test driving of women is more evenly distributed (though of course, still skewed).
As a result, men who aren't flashy rides get disproportionately overlooked or cut out of the developmental test-driving stage, until with time women's average preferences shift and they want something more dependable. I've heard men express frustration with this situation and ask, "if the kitten didn't want me, do I want the cat?"
Sex differences in attraction is also important. For men, looks are relatively more important in attraction, while for women, behavior/personality is relatively more important. If you are a guy dating people you find attractive, they can still turn out to be good long-term mates for you. But for women, the guys you find most attractive during youth may have personality traits that exclude them from making good long-term mates. Of course, there is variation in women on this trait: for some, their ideal short-term mate and ideal long-term mate are the same guy. On average, the people who young women are sexually excited about are less likely to make good long-term mates than the people young men are excited about.
Given that there are so many subgenres of romance, I suspect we are talking about different ones. In the small sample of my wife's books that I've read, the hero is never described as frightening to the heroine. Typically, he takes the form of an annoying rival who the heroine believes is overconfident or arrogant, someone whose goals are (superficially and initially) at odds with those of the heroine. (It then usually turns out that one or both characters have been operating on the basis of a mistaken impression about the other's goals or character.)
But I have never seen fear described as a heroine's reaction to anything except the villain, or her feelings for the hero. (Or more precisely, her anticipation of the problematic consequences of allowing her feelings for him to develop and be acted upon.)
Fear of the hero himself, or his actions, though? To my recollection, never happens in these genres.
From the "Perception Lab" at St Andrews:
Older women tend to prefer more feminine faces. Women in the infertile part of their fertility cycle tend to prefer more feminine faces. Women rating themselves as less attractive tend to prefer more feminine faces.
By the way, I don't mean to imply that your guy friends in particular are in stable relationships because of these tendencies - I can think of many other reasons beyond the differing attractiveness of their faces, or their demeanour.
This deserves emphasis. Our instincts are not interested in our happiness. There is no reason to presume that those we are most attracted to will be the same as those who will be the most satisfying either in the long or short term. (Although it is certainly strong evidence to be considered as well as a direct contributor to that satisfaction.)
Are these mostly older guys or more precisely guys in LTRs with older women?
The increase over the last 4 decades in female personal income has made the "beta good provider" male strategy less successful.
Also, some (e.g., the Man Who Is Thursday) say that the increase in female promiscuity has had a similar effect because (the thinking goes) once a woman has had sex with 1 or 2 extremely exciting men, she is less likely to settle for a LTR with a much less exciting one (and as long as she does not demand any sort of commitment from them, a woman using a "modern" sexual strategy will probably have sex with 1 or 2 extremely exciting men).
Although I have a relatively small circle of friends, even I have a friend of a friend, now in her 60s, who only ever had sex with one man (the father of her kids to which she is still married) and she was quite beautiful, grew up in the proverbial big city (Manhattan) and has and had no notable social handicaps.
IIRC, a study a couple of years back that said that the male hero raped the female heroine in about half of a large sample of romance novels they looked at. Can't remember how they chose their sample.
That is disrespectful. It's asserting that the hero knows better than the heroine what's good for her, and is entitled to act on her behalf. In my mind that's a much, much more dangerous meme than outright acting maliciously.
The phrase 'dangerous meme' jumped out at me. I agree that it is disrespectful and I personally make an effort to prevent people that try from having any part of my life. I actually have to bite my tongue at times so that I don't point out to young adults "You don't have to take that. You can choose your own boundaries, with consideration of your options and likely outcomes." (That put me in a particularly interesting situation when I was a teacher!)
But going from 'undesirable behavior' to 'dangerous meme', well, strikes me as dangerous. It seems like a move from discussing behavioral preferences to considering the very fact that the behavioural pattern appeals to some people or plays a role in their literature of choice is wrong.
I find the kinds of romance novels in question decidedly unappealing. Not just because they are aimed at women but because they are aimed at a different subset of women than those with whom I most empathise with. But I do know that there people who actually appreciate or are attracted to these same behaviours that I find obnoxious. Judging the very meme just because I personally don't prefer the behaviour would seem presumptive.
You're leaving out the part where I said that the hero's actions could be mistaken and/or tragic: i.e., in actual romance novels it's quite often the case that the hero only thinks he knows better than the heroine, that she fights his actions every step of the way, and/or the actions lead to bad results.
I'm also a bit confused as to how you can say that either of the specific examples I gave qualify as "disrespectful". If somebody throws themselves in front of a bullet for you, is that being disrespectful because they think they know what's better for you?
I think women want guys with values, in principle, and are tempted by guys without values, in practice, because they like "masculine" or "alpha" behavior. It doesn't mean that the desire to date a good person isn't a real desire. If someone desires to get work done, but also procrastinates, would you say she doesn't "really" want to get work done?
I think women would prefer a good person who hits the right masculinity/dominance buttons than a bad person. (Read or watch Gone With The Wind again -- Rhett is actually the male character with the most integrity and smarts.)
I think you're entirely right that men who are pretty awful people can be very attractive to women. But I think that's because they have certain social skills that they've developed and relied on. And anyone can learn social skills. There's not a one-to-one relationship between horribleness and attractiveness to women -- you never hear about women being hot for Jeffrey Dahmer. Rappers swagger, make it obvious that women can't resist them, and they're typically in great shape. They're popular for completely predictable reasons.
You're probably right that some women gravitate to assholish men because they're just not thinking (just like some men gravitate to women who have nothing going for them but their beauty.) But it's unfair for a man to assume that every woman is going to do that, and I'd find it sad if a man compromised his more serious principles just to pick up the less self-aware women. You can make yourself more attractive without becoming a person you'd hate.
I think this hypothesis makes a lot of sense: masculinity is the main cause of attraction, and bad values just tag on along for the ride. This hypothesis is entirely plausible to me, but I have to wonder whether it's the whole story. For some the nastier forms, I'm not sure that masculinity and bad values are always separable; they are intertwined.
There could be several different paths by which different types of women are attracted to assholes; you've certainly named one of them.
Not necessarily, but it could be the case.
It's one specific scene that I'm thinking of: the quasi-rape scene.
You might be surprised! Famous serial killers are very popular with women and have groupies. Female serial killers don't have male groupies. Now, women with these preferences are probably pretty rare; women attracted to shy nerds are probably more common (2% of women are into shyness), but there are a lot more shy nerds than women into them, whereas serial killers are a scarce resource for women who are into them.
More hilariously, I have an article on my hard drive about Western women attracted to Osama bin Laden written after 9/11 (I'll write it up sometime, but it's behind a paywall.)
This behavior might initially seem like some sort of weird fluke, but looking at female attraction to Eminem, who raps about doing some of the things that serial killers are in for, these preferences could be conceptualized along the same continuum: serial killers are hypermasculine ultra-assholes.
See also the Draco In Leather Pants (TVTropes) phenomenon, where fangirls turn villains into objects of desire (there are some hilarious example pages at the bottom).
Fantasy is different from reality, of course. These women may have different desires in real life. Even if they have similar desires, they know better than to try to act them out, consistent with your model. The point is that such psychology seems like a watered-down, fantasy-only version of the psychology of serial killer groupies, who act out these same sorts of desires in reality.
Although there are categorical distinctions between women who lust after Eminem or dress Draco Malfoy up in leather pants, and women who go for serial killers, all these women may be the same continuum on other variables. Serial killer groupies are just at the far right of the bell curve of women attracted to assholes.
They swagger, but I'm not sure their swagger is always distinguishable from their misogyny. I hypothesize that being misogynistic in the context of swagger reads as attractive masculinity to some women in some subcultures. I guess the question is what sorts of female fans these rappers would gain or lose if they weren't so misogynistic. I do think your hypothesis explains many or even most cases of female attraction to these guys; I just don't think it's the whole story. There are swaggering masculine guys who aren't misogynistic; why no go for them instead?
Agreed.
That's the conclusion of my experience. Though part of the way that I do this is by trying to have the same mystique or bad boys and aesthetic appeal, just without actually being an asshole. For instance, the way I dress is partly inspired by villains in movies... though I've stopped short of wearing leather pants.
I've had some success while dressed as Darth Sideous... but I've got my suspicions that was despite not because. ;)
Can you give some examples of the sort of villains you are considering here?
It's very odd that a lot of women find Snape attractive. Where does he fit into the theory?
SarahC:
Not a one-to-one relationship, to be sure, but stories like this strongly suggest some positive statistical relation: "No shortage of women who dream of snaring a husband on Death Row: experts ponder why deadliest criminals get so many proposals." The article references an academic book that dedicates a chapter to the phenomenon.
Jeffrey Dahmer might have been a bit too creepy even for the serial killer groupie population, but I wouldn't be surprised if he got an occasional love letter too.
Dammit, V_M, you ninja'd me by posting that article before I could post my analysis.
I think there's a bit more to it than just women overlooking a lack of values because of other attractive factors like confidence. There's some evidence that men with the 'dark triad' personality traits are more successful with women.
mattnewport:
Here's the research paper on which the article you link was based:
http://www.mysmu.edu/faculty/normanli/JonasonLiWebsterSchmitt2009.pdf
I had to google him, I also googled his name and sexy and found this. :(
He gets 28,800 hits for jeffrey dahmer sexy. Out of 275000 hits. So a sexy ratio of 0.1. I'm not sure if this is high or low for a public male figure, a lot of it will be incidental mentions.
Steve Buscemi gets a ratio of 0.03, brad pitt get 0.13. Harold shipman (another serial killer but not so handsome or gruesome) gets 0.06.
I'm not sure of my methodology, I suspect that I might do better looking for the phrase in quotes.
Dead elephant gets a ratio of 0.59.
A lot of parents find it sad when their kids find out that santa claus isn't real.
I wonder how much this is due to the American Jock vs Geek mentality. Geeks see masculine behaviour as out group so eschew it? The conflict isn't so bad in Europe (it doesn't carry on into University in the same way). That is not to say that European geeks are naturally intensely masculine, simply that it might be easier for them to adopt masculine behaviours, because they aren't having to act like the enemy.
This dichotomy doesn't seem prevalent in all American culture, entrepreneurs seem quite happy with to straddle the line. How much of your experience is with people inside academia?
My experience is either inside academia or way the hell outside (people who didn't go to college.) I never met an entrepreneur.
My experience with meeting Europeans is that smart people do have less of a geeky self-image than they do in the US (I've known Italian women mathematicians who look and carry themselves like movie stars) but that just about everyone in Europe is less into gorilla-type masculinity than men in the US. So I think your point is probably more relevant on the female end -- European female geeks are more conventionally feminine because they don't see a dichotomy. (I've also noticed that about Asian female geeks -- that is, raised in Asian countries, not Asian-American.)
SarahC:
That is true, for the most part. Where I come from, the electrical engineering students' club at the local university is a popular location for nightlife and rock concerts that attracts masses of people as a party hangout. Something like that is practically unimaginable in North America, but it's not at all unusual in Europe.
That's a mighty strong assertion to make about an entire contient that contains countries as different as, say, Canada and Nicaragua, or Alabama and San Francisco.
Whoa.
I've also heard that in China, self-effacing and conscientious students can be the most popular. For the US, that's unimaginable.
These pieces of data suggest that the polarization of men towards "geek / nice guy" and "masculine bad boy" in the US is at least partly cultural, and it could be fought by other cultural forces.
That is the argument that David Anderegg makes in Nerds. While I disagree with Anderegg in some cases (e.g. dismissing the notion of Asperger's Syndrome), he has some excellent literary analysis of some of the tropes in American literature that influence how we think about masculinity.
Anderegg argues that in the 19th century, a dichotomy developed between "men of action" and "men of reflection" in American thought. This dualism presented the man of action as positive and masculine, while the "man of reflection" was the "effete intellectual" or clergyman, associated with femininity and homosexuality. He argues that our modern concept of "nerd" is the descendant of the "man of reflection" and "effete intellectual" stereotypes. Read that entire chapter I linked to. Here are some of Anderegg's examples:
Ichabod Crane in Washington Irving's story was a classic example of "nerd vs jock," where the nerd is portrayed in many negative and stereotypical ways
Superman becoming incognito and undatable to Lois merely by being mild-mannered and wearing glasses
He argues that ancient Greeks didn't have such a dichotomy between brain vs. brawn/looks: heroes were typically intelligent, good-looking, and capable, while villains tended to be both ugly and stupid.
Ralph Waldo Emerson's notion of the American scholar
Emerson's speech is fascinating and complex, but it definitely sets up the dichotomy between men of action and men of reflection. Here are some troubling excerpts (emphases mine):
[...]
[...]
[...]
Emerson makes a lot of good points, such as about avoiding past orthodoxies. But as Anderegg points out, his attitude is very close to "throw away books from the past, and write your own," which is anti-intellectual and fails to reflect how thinkers can stand on the shoulders of giants. There is no dichotomy between studying works of the past, and original thinking.
He displays a great ambivalence towards scholars of his time. He romanticizes "Man Thinking," but links scholars to Europe, femininity, homosexuality (via the word "mincing"), religion, unoriginality, laziness, timidity, and disease (e.g. "infected with Hamlet's unhappiness"). No doubt there were and are many scholars who deserve those labels, but his dichotomy is much too stark:
This is important, not just for the specifics, but to remember that some pattern of behavior which seems absolutely innate may actually be culturally localized.
So, are there geeky people in Europe? If so, what are they doing instead of science and engineering?
I love this phrase. It reminds me of this exchange, which happened out loud:
"You drive like a guerilla." "... what?" "Not the ape. The kind with a beret."
This is true. Gorilla-type masculinity is not what I had in mind when talking about masculinity (being European and all). I was thinking about being into sports/cars/heavy metal (going back to your nice/anti-nice dichotomy) or just generally being confident and self-assured.
If that is what you want, then I can see why it conflicts with some of the fundamentals (kindness, competence). Gorilla masculinity seems to be about getting what you want through physical intimidation. If that is the hammer that you have used the most through your life, then everything will look like a nail.
If you typically try to convince people with competent argument or being kind, then you are less likely to reach for the physical intimidation toolkit of gorilla masculinity.
ETA: I wonder why there is a difference in masculinity in Europe. I'd make up some just-so-story about the more physically aggressive men having been killed in the two world wars, unless it is purely memetic.
I consider competent argument to be far more representative of gorilla masculinity than whatever the other category is. Viewing conversations in certain communities (for example, MENSA mailing lists) I've seen patterns that look remarkably like what I would expect from gorrilas - guys trying to dominate each other with verbal sparring while girls are competing via asserting moral control and creating social alliances with other women and undermining the status of targets. Depending on your physical self confidence the physical forms of intimidation can seem gentle and benign in comparison.
Right, there's something to that.
And I don't like people who intimidate people by force. If there's a direct conflict, I'm going to go with the person who's kind and competent.
(Also, I'm starting to hate my "nice/anti-nice" dichotomy -- in retrospect that post made no sense.)
SarahC:
That's a mighty strong assertion to make about an entire continent that contains countries as different as, say, Sweden and Albania, or Moldova and Switzerland. Also, I'm certain that the sample of Europeans you've seen is unrepresentative in all sorts of relevant ways even of their own countries, let alone the entire continent.
Of course, if by this you mean the specific patterns of behavior characteristic of certain sorts of American men, then the claim is trivially true.
I would also hazard to guess that the degree of hardness (err... make that not-softness) that appeals varies on a 28 day cycle. ('Guess' in as much as studies and my own observations of the general population may of course not apply to individual cases. Indeed, there are some obvious potential reasons why they wouldn't.)
Good guess. They've done this study, and you're 100% right. We watched a bit of a film discussing it in my anthro class. (I didn't note whose study it was, but the film is called "Why Sex?" and you could probably find out from there.)
They used a program where you could slide smoothly between a very feminine face and a very masculine one, and asked women to find someone along that scale who looked ideal for a short-term fling, and someone else for a long-term relationship. The difference between the two follows the pattern that you'd expect--more masculine and virile-looking for the short term, softer and more kind-looking for the long term--but both answers slid further towards the masculine end of the scale when the subject was currently ovulating.
I've heard about people who find talking extremely anxiety-provoking, while communicating by writing is easy and comfortable for them. I expect someone like that would have the sort of social skills mismatch you're describing. They aren't faking the skills on-line, they have a disability making it hard to use them in person.
I have a (fading, but still present) hang-up about phone conversations. They're harder for me than either in-person communication or text. You don't have the time to think things through that you do on IM, but you also don't get facial cues to help you. So my phone conversations are almost always short, and of the form "Hi, I'm at the train station."
I'll agree and add that as well as anxiety another limiting factor for in person socialisation is time. Processing in real time, and particularly in real time in a group context, is the hardest part of the socialising task. They can make the perfect response, just 5 seconds too late.
I've noticed that I'm like this in some situations but not others. Specifically, I feel like I have plenty of time in social situations to work through potential word choices and optimize for my specific listener, but trying to think of arguments in a debate feels like walking through molasses.
Realizing that gave me a lot more sympathy for people who can rule an intellectual conversation but are terrible at predicting how their listeners will interpret what they say in social contexts. I hadn't quite internalized the idea that it might just be really hard.
That's a good point. By contrast arguments (or at least rational reasoning - rhetoric fits a different category) come seemingly pre-formed from my intuition for free. Social political reasoning takes actual effort. That isn't to say I can't do it in real time, just that I like to make sure ahead of time that I am in a good state for socialising in order to get the most from it. In the ideal case that means I have spent an hour in the gym earlier in the day, are reasonably well rested and possibly consumed some aniracetam, modafinil or at least caffeine. I find those all raise the level of social ability that comes free from my intuition without (potentially time-delaying) effort.
One way I like to look at differences in abilities in general is not so much the absolute level of competencies but in which order they decay under negative influence such as sleep deprivation, stress or chemical interference. In my case it seems to be:
"Everything else" -> consciousness -> rational argument -> life itself.
Although I haven't tested the last one. I apologize ahead of time if after I die zombie-wedrifid reanimates and starts explaining why it is rational to "let him eat your brains".
Voted up because degradation under adverse circumstances is an important concept.
I'm finding keeping up with your enormous responses exhausting; at this point it has exceeded my interest in/priority assigned to what's being discussed. Sorry.
Why are you apologizing? I wouldn't want anyone I reply to feel that they must respond, or even read my comment. Take the length and detail of my responses as a compliment to the interesting issues your original post raised. It's good for me to get these thoughts into writing, and I'm sure someone will find them interesting. Perhaps the next time these topics come around, I'll be able to organize my thoughts more succinctly.
I was thinking of doing a comment listing some studies of sex differences in preferences, and why we should have pretty dismal priors about the generalizability of certain sorts of dating advice between genders, but maybe I'll only post it if I get requests from you or others.
To signal courtesy and lack of ill will, despite my retreat from the conversation. :)
To be fair, you did talk about a balance between attractiveness and honesty. But when you put so much more of an emphasis on honesty over impression management, I couldn't tell how you thought that people should find that balance, and I felt motivated to add some caveats.
Ah... but who are you?
A lot of conventional advice on dating references notions of identity and selfhood, such as the famous "just be yourself." The problem with such advice is that identity is itself a hard problem. As a result, for many people figuring out their identities (and who isn't?), identity isn't a very useful concept for figuring out how to behave socially. Actually, that notion may be backwards: learning social behavior is far more useful for figuring out one's identity.
These conventional notions of self are a lot more simplistic and static than how contemporary philosophy and psychology think about the self.
In The Self as a center of narrative gravity, Daniel Dennet argues:
[...]
By Dennett's account, the self is simply the average of one's current narratives (i.e. "narrative center of gravity"), and those narratives can change. It's difficult to see how Dennett's concept of the self could be prescriptive. "Don't present yourself as someone other than who you are" would then reduce to "don't present a narrative of yourself that is something other than your current narrative center of gravity."
But why not? As Dennett shows, sometimes you can reconceptualize a narrative of yourself to be substantially different from a previous narrative, yet there is no basis to say that either of those narratives are "untrue." Even by conceptualizing a new narrative of yourself, you shift your narrative center of gravity. If you think about your identity differently, you change your identity. I would hazard a guess that at least a large minority of statements people would make about their identities are true only in virtue of being believed (e.g. "I'm not the kind of person who goes to parties"), and that people could just as easily abandon such self-fulfilling prophecies without disrupting the rest of their narratives (e.g. "I'm a person who is learning to enjoy parties, even though I historically haven't enjoyed them").
If you mean something like "don't present a narrative of yourself that is completely disjoint from your previous narratives, or that factually contradicts the available evidence," I would agree, but such advice would allow for a lot more freedom than what I think people in our culture will understand from "don't try to present yourself as someone other than who you are."
People's notions of selfhood are far too biased by cultural and gender socialization, in addition to self-esteem issues and fear of leaving one's comfort zone; I generally see notions of "self" playing a function similar to "caste," and keeping low status people from attempting to raise their status.
Because narrative allows so much freedom when it's unfettered by limiting beliefs, it's just not a very good guide to action. Just as there are multiple directions that a work of fiction could go in at any point, there are multiple directions your action and narrative of your action could go. A concept of a character influences the future of the character, yes, but that concept isn't enough to determine the character's future; you need additional criteria for where you want the story to go. Same thing with identity and self-characterization.
If you got rid of the philosophy of self and said "present yourself in way such that people who get to know you will still want you", I would also agree, but that is critically different from "don't try to present yourself as someone other than who you are." The former is testable; the latter is philosophical. Furthermore, the former only requires that you behave in a way that is consistent within each interaction with one person, rather than you must behave in a way that is consistent with some philosophical concept you haven't figured out yet.
Maybe that's what you were trying to say in the first place, but I need to nitpick because I don't consider the language of selfhood to be very useful for personal development. Your traits? Yes. Preferences (of you, or of other people)? Yes.
Even with traits, things can get complex. While human psychological traits show some degree of stability, many also show some degree of malleability, or depend on the situation.
I suggest that people stop trying to constrain their social behavior by notions of identity, and it may even be a good idea to try to push the limits of your traits. Your actual traits, capabilities, and values are a sufficient constraint. The resulting pattern of behavior you show will give people all they need to decide if/how to interact with you. Let other people decide what kind of person you are; stop trying to decide for them.
The Vorlon Question!
Of course, in a dating context, it's at least as important to know the answer to the Shadow Question: "What do you want?"
Depending on your philosophy on dating the Shadow Question could be more important. Lorien's First Question "Why are you here" would also be a good thing to know in reference to the dating site itself.
And sometimes you need to strip it all back to fundamentals and ask the first-ones question: "do you have anything worth living for?" Once you've figured that out, you can proceed with the other two.
You don't look like a Vorlon question ;)
Just wait until he takes off his encounter suit.