= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
NancyLebovitz comments on Rational Romantic Relationships, Part 1: Relationship Styles and Attraction Basics - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (1529)
I find that claim bewildering because the partnered men I know aren't jerks. It could be that I'm filtering for non-jerkness, but my tentative alternate theory is that the maybe the most conspicuously attractive women prefer jerks, and the men who resent the pattern aren't noticing most women. Or possibly a preference for jerks really is common in "girls"-- not children, but women below some level of maturity (age 25? 30? whatever it takes to get tired of being mistreated?), and some men are imprinted on what they saw in high school.
For those of you who believe that women prefer jerks, what sort of behavior do you actually mean? What proportion of women are you talking about? Is there academic research to back this up? What have you seen in your social circle?
Does Chapter “You Just Ask Them” in Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman count as academic research? :-)
You got me reading that chapter.
A few bullet-points on what I see as the likely contributing factors to the "women prefer jerks" meme:
Romantic relationships often expose you to the worst of what people are capable of, and often end in unpleasant circumstances. If you ask someone about their most recent ex, they'll probably have more nasty stories than nice ones to tell about them.
If the competition for the object of my affections is charming and confident, I'm going to say he's manipulative and arrogant.
Making poor decisions about people you're attracted to, and systematically overlooking your partner's negative qualities, are well-established behaviour patterns in both sexes.
Romantic underdogs feel like they bend over backwards to be noticed by women, whereas romantically successful men seem by comparison to put in relatively little work to achieve the same goal. This perceived effort is conflated with caring or worthiness.
It strikes me that the nice-guy/jerk idiom has an analogue in the Madonna/Whore dichotomy. I was going to comment on how I'd never seen mention of this in any of the numerous feminist treatments of "nice guy syndrome" I've seen, but a cursory Google suggests it's not a new idea.
Unfortunately I can't provide sources at the moment (Luke probably can), but I have seen research both sociological and anthropological showing that women and female higher primates in general have a tendency to try to mate with multiple dominate highly masculine males, sometimes secretly, while they tend to have long term pairings with less dominate, less masculine males. The theory is that the genes of the more masculine men lead to more fecund offspring, while the parenting of the less masculine men leads to higher offspring survival. In society this works out to women dating more masculine men (and testosterone is of course linked to the aggressiveness and risk taking we associate with "bad boys") prior to marriage, and then marrying less masculine men (nice guys). And if they cheat, they tend to cheat with "bad boys" and have their "nice guys" raise those kids.
EDIT: For pure anecdote, I am a nice guy (I think) who always complained about the "bad boy" thing, and now I am raising a step-daughter from my wife's youthful short term relationship with a guy everyone would still call a "bad boy." My wife is winning at natural selection! As is that jerk :(
If it makes you feel better all sorts of unpleasant people are currently winning at natural selection (no offence intended to any LWer with many children or your wife).
I have a hard time understanding how this would make anyone feel better.
Suffering is often ameliorated somewhat by knowing you are not alone in your situation.
That reminds me of that game that girls sometimes play "Given three choices of guys, which would you sleep with, date, or marry?"
Guys play it too.
The criteria are a little different, though.
I've played it in mixed groups, its generally about perceived personality features rather than subjective attractiveness.
I wouldn't expect this to be a recipe for honesty.
I would expect this sort of game to have difficult honesty issues even when it is a single gender. For example, if some individual has a fetish that is in some way connected to one of the individuals (say for example a celebrity that frequently wears some sort of clothing, or only one of the three falls into a racial group they have a fetish for) how likely is it that someone is going to be honest about that motivation.
That said, I agree that mixed groups will likely have more severe honesty issues.
Seems most plausible to me.
I have had several friends who went to bars to meet women, and then were disappointed that the only women they met were the ones who enjoyed going to bars.
People think/do strange things.
Now, admittedly I haven't seen a whole lot of evidence in this area, but I've seen some, and I couldn't name a single woman I know personally who has ever, in my presence or by report that I've heard, gone for a jerk.
Perhaps this behavior is less common among women who would rather have a 15% chance of $1,000,000 than a certainty of $500 (because most random women I've tested choose the certain $500, but every single woman in our community that I've asked, regardless of math level or wealth level or economic literacy or their performance on the Cognitive Reflection Test, takes the 15% chance of $1M.)
Or maybe "jerk" is being used in some sense other than what I associate it with, i.e., wearing motorcycle jackets, rather than not caring about who else you hurt.
I could name a fair number (in the "doesn't care about hurting others" sense, not the "wears motorcycle jackets" sense,) but none of them have been girls or women I would want to date me instead.
I suspect that the perceived trend owes a lot to a horns effect that guys build up around other guys who're dating girls they want to be dating.
Was this downvoted because someone is just downvoting every single comment on this subthread because they don't like the idea of this topic being discussed here? Because I can't see anything wrong in Desrtopa's comment.
Well, that doesn't surprise me but I don't think it's got that much to do with personality: I'd think that a person struggling to make ends meet would be a lot more likely to choose the sure $500 than a reasonably wealthy person, and I don't think there are many of the former kind among people who have enough spare time to read LessWrong, whereas there are lots of them among random people in the streets (at least in 2011 -- there probably were fewer in the 1980s, and more in the 1930s).
As a substantial portion of the population doesn't play the game of thought experiments very well, it would be worthwhile to ask a second, unrelated thought-experiment question. Anyone who says something like "But a fat man wouldn't weigh enough to stop a trolley!" or "You can't keep a violinist alive by connecting them to a person!" and also doesn't ask something like "Can I have investors bet on whether or not I will receive the $1M?" is just stupid.
Well, it just didn't occur to me that I could make such a bet.
(Or even, I might sell the lottery ticket with an auction: someone richer than me (who would assign roughly the same utility as me to $1M but much less utility than me to smaller amounts such as $500) might buy it for a lot more money.)
If it wouldn't have seemed to you like a decisive refutation that a fat man might not be able stop a trolley, then you're not stupid, and didn't immediately think of auctioning off the ticket because you understand how these things are supposed to work.
Well, I sometimes do think about non-LPCW answers to hypothetical dilemmas (though I don't say them aloud), but in this case I didn't even think of it. (I feel like my inclination to come up with non-LPCW answers is a function of the scenario's plausibility, but not a monotonic one.)
Whoa. A majority of people choose $500 in EV instead of $150,000?
That's scary. Have you written about this before? If not, care to give us rough numbers of how many people you've talked to about it? That blows my mind that a majority of people wouldn't get it when it's so far apart.
I would suggest that it is very easy to concentrate on the 85% chance of getting nothing, and so ignore the difference in EV.
Indeed yeah. But we're not talking $500 vs. $900, we're talking orders of magnitude...
Keep in mind that utility isn't linear in money.
No, but I doubt it's so non-linear for most people that it remotely justifies such a choice.
If someone e.g. urgently needs a life-saving surgery that requires 500$, then they may be justified to choose a certainty of $500 over a 15% probability of a million dollars. But outside such made-up scenarios, I very seriously doubt it.
Obviously, I agree. But let me ask: for what values of X would you choose X$ with 15% chance instead of 1,000,000,000$ with 100% chance?
A quite extreme, but still somewhat defensible theoretical assumption is that utility is logarithmic in money. I once heard Bernoulli already worked with this assumption, many hundred years before Neumann-Morgenstern, and it is probably not so silly to assume this near the power-law tail of the wealth distribution. Not that I think it means anything, but from this admittedly extreme starting point, we get that lg(500) = 2.7 is three times as useful as 0.15*lg(1000000) = 0.9.
That assumes someone who initially has $1, and in that case it's certainly true. If on the other hand you initially have, say, $10k...
log(10.5k) - log(10k) ≈ 0.02
0.15 * (log(1.01M) - log(10k)) ≈ 0.3
The crossover point based on this system is $191. Less than that, and you do better with $500. More than that, and you'd try for the million.
Very true, thanks, I missed that. Obviously I am not an economist. Maybe Eliezer has only ever asked the question from people having less than 191 dollars.
The math works out that he's in contact with people with more than $191 - and that makes sense.
I meant the "random women" he was talking about.
Many people are in debt. If you are, then your net worth is less than $191.
Why would people downvote this? Isn't it both correct and obvious? It also has fairly significant implication as to the extent of the applicability of the simplified model.
That's not quite right in practice either. Even if you took all my money, I'd still take the 15% chance at $1M and maybe sell a 15% chance of $5k for $500.
Or if that is somehow not allowed, then I'd run into a bit of debt until my next pay check. Even if I really was spending all the money I make and averaging $0, $500 is a mere blip in the noise, not a factor of infinity more money.
It makes more sense to look at the total money in over whatever time scale you plan for.
Yeah, the prospect of other incomes makes a big difference. I neglected to include a requirement that the initial amount, whichever value it takes, is as much as you can come up with before you'll be needing money again.
Consider item g in the first chart on page 10 of "Cognitive Reflection and Decision Making" by Shane Fredrick. In this study, 31% of subjects with low scores on a "cognitive reflection test" took the 15% chance of the million dollars, whereas 60% of high-scoring subjects did. The p-value was less than 0.0001.
For what it's worth, I can name one. She was a not-too-bright high school student, but her on again, off again boyfriend had definite sociopathic tendencies...
This is a terrible debate and you should all feel bad for having it. Now let me join in.
The research on this topic is split into "completely useless" and "mostly useless". In the former category we have studies that, with a straight face, purport to show that women like nice guys by asking women to self-report on their preferences. To illuminate just how silly this is, consider the mirror case of asking men "So, do you like witty charming girls with good personalities, or supermodels with big breasts?" When this was actually done, men rated "physical attractiveness" only their 22nd most important criterion for a mate - number one was "sincerity", and number nineteen was "good manners". And yet there are no websites where you can spend $9.95 per month to stream videos of well-mannered girls asking men to please pass the salad fork, and there are no spinster apartments full of broken-hearted supermodels who just didn't have enough sincerity. So self-reports are right out.
Other-reports may be slightly less silly. Herold and Milhausen, 1999, found that 56% of university women believed that women in general were more likely to date jerks than nice guys. But although women may have less emotional investment in the issue than men, their opinions are still just opinions.
The few studies that earn the coveted accolade of "only mostly useless" are those that try to analyze actual behavior. Bogart and Fisher typify a group of studies that show that good predictors of a man's number of sexual partners include disinhibitedness, high testosterone levels, "hypermasculinity", "sensation seeking", antisocial personality, and extraversion. Meston et al typify a separate group of studies on sex and the Big Five traits when she says that "agreeableness was the most consistent predictor of behavior...disagreeable men and women were more likely to have had sexual intercourse and with a greater number of partners than agreeable men and women. Nonvirgins of both sexes were more likely to be calculating, stubborn, and arrogant in their interpersonal behavior than virgins. Neuroticism predicted sexual experience in males only; timid, unassertive men were less sexually experienced than emotionally stable men...the above findings were all statistically significant at p<.01"
These studies certainly show that jerkishness is associated with high number of sexual partners, but they're not quite a victory for the "nice guys finish last" camp for a couple of reasons. First, men seem to come off almost as bad as women do. Second, there's no reason to think that any particular "nice" woman will like jerks; many of the findings could be explained by disagreeable men hooking up with disagreeable women, disagreeing with them about things (as they do) and then breaking up and hooking up with other disagreeable women, while the agreeable people form stable pair bonds. Boom - disagreeable people showing more sexual partners than agreeable people.
I find more interesting the literature about intelligence and sexual partners. In high-schoolers, each extra IQ point increases chance of virginity by 2.7% for males and 1.7% by females. 87% of 19-year old US college students have had sex, yet only 65% of MIT graduate students have had sex. There's conflicting research about whether this reflects lower sex drive in these people or less sexual success; it's probably a combination of both. See linked article for more information.
The basic summary of the research seems to be that smart, agreeable people complaining that they have less sex than their stupid, disagreeable counterparts are probably right, and that this phenomenon occurs both in men and women but is a little more common in men.
Moving from research to my own observations, I do think there are a lot of really kind, decent, shy, nerdy men who can't find anyone who will love them because they radiate submissiveness and non-assertiveness, and women don't find this attractive. Most women do find dominant, high-testosterone people attractive, and dominance and testosterone are risk factors for jerkishness, but not at all the same thing and women can't be blamed for liking people with these admittedly attractive characteristics.
There are also a lot of really kind, decent, shy, nerdy women who can't find anyone who will love them because they're not very pretty. Men can't be blamed for liking people they find attractive either, but this is also sad.
But although these two situations are both sad, at the risk of being preachy I will say one thing. When a girl is charming and kind but not so conventionally attractive, and men avoid her, and this makes her sad...well, imagine telling her that only ugly people would think that, and since she's ugly she doesn't deserve a man, and she probably just wants to use him for his money anyway because of course ugly women can't genuinely want love in the same way anyone else would (...that would be unfair!) This would be somewhere between bullying and full on emotional abuse, the sort of thing that would earn you a special place in Hell.
Whereas when men make the same complaint, that they are nice and compassionate but not so good at projecting dominance, there is a very large contingent of people, getting quite a lot of respect and validation from the parts of society that should know better, who immediately leap out to do their best to make them feel miserable - to tell that they don't deserve a relationship, that they're probably creeps who are only in it for the sex and that if they were a real man they'd stop whining about being "entitled to sex".
EDIT: But see qualification here
I don't believe people pay money for those websites in hopes of mating with the videos.
That's not quite analogous, given that what one complains about does have bearing on whether someone is actually "nice" and not so much bearing on whether someone is actually "ugly".
I agree that it's not perfectly analogous. Nevertheless, more times than I care to keep track of I have witnessed people lambasting men who complain about lack of relationship success because they pattern match to the Heartless Bitches International construct. They see the black hair and hide the ketchup.
Relevant: the Dark Triad and short-term mating.
I agree as far as this goes. But remember that we don't chiefly want to prevent people calling women ugly. We chiefly want to prevent this, because we think it increases actual rape. (The cited research does not establish this with any clarity, but it does establish that you left out another potential distorting factor.)
Would you actually feel surprised if you found out the belief that women only date jerks causally increases talk of rape fantasies, and that this increases rape? What about the belief that a simple and general method will allow guys to have sex with the women they desire?
I think the causation may be going the other way: it's that men who are willing to rape are more likely to enjoy rape jokes, not that men who read rape jokes thereby become more willing to rape.
Another theory I've heard (although not one relevant to this particular study, except maybe in an ecological sense) is that rape jokes signal to predators that non-predatory men aren't going to socially punish them.
Very plausible, similar things could be said of racist jokes.
I can't think of a negative interpretation of blonde jokes though.
Do you mean negative interpretations in general, or that particular sort of negative interpretation?
I would think ill of someone who told blonde jokes, especially if they told a bunch of them. To my mind, anyone who gives a lot of time to blonde jokes is probably making themselves less able to see intelligence in blonde women. I haven't tested this belief, I'm just going on plausibility.
Late response: I tend to believe in causation of the sort that Oligopsony mentions, because of Altemeyer's research on Social Dominance Orientation and the oddly named Right-Wing Authoritarian scale. Though the conclusion involves two inferences that I personally haven't seen anyone test.
Is the 'we' royal, referring to some specific group you are a part of or a normative presumption that I, and the people in some group of which I am a part all must have this attitude? Because for my part I am perfectly ok with being outraged at insulting women by calling them ugly for its own sake and not due to any belief in some complicated causal chain whereby talking about ugliness causes rape and the torture of puppies.
I would be somewhat skeptical, read the details of such a study closely and in particular look at the degree of the purported effect as well as the significance. I would be equally as surprised to find that belief that women only dated jerks reduced incidence of rape due to the other obvious causal chain (involving reducing sexual frustration by identifying and implementing those elements of 'jerkiness' that are effective).
After talking to a couple of people about this, I should qualify/partially-retract the original comment.
Some people have suggested to me that the best metaphor a man can use to understand how women think about "nice guys" isn't an ugly duckling woman who gets turned down by the men she likes, but a grossly obese woman who never showers or shaves her legs, and who goes around complaining loudly to everyone she knows that men are all vapid pigs who are only interested in looks.
I would find this person annoying, and although I hope I would be kind enough not to lash out against her in quite the terms I mentioned above, I would understand the motivations of someone who did, instead of having to classify him as having some sort of weird Martian brain design that makes him a moral monster.
The obesity metaphor is especially relevant. Since there are people out there who think becoming skinny is as easy as "just eat less food", I can imagine people who think becoming socially assertive really is as easy as "just talk to people and be more confident".
For people who honestly believe those things, and there seem to be a lot of them, the obese woman and the socially awkward man would reduce to the case of the woman who never showered but constantly complained about how superficial men were to reject her over her smell - annoying and without any redeeming value.
Right, but more specifically, the annoying parts are their denial of the problem and reluctance to improve. We'd all be a lot more sympathetic otherwise.
On average people in that category get more than enough sympathy (mind you it probably varies a lot in degree and sincerity). More sympathy would tend to be a toxic influence from the perspective of trying to meet their unmet goals. Far better to empathize but show no sympathy whatsoever.
For what it's worth, my reflex before reading a bunch of stuff here was closer to hearing "socially awkward man who can't manage to attract women" was closer to thinking of various annoying men who have hung around me, who I find unattractive (sometimes at the skin-crawling level [1]), but who never cross a line to the point where I feel justified in telling them to go away. This can go on for years. It is no fun.
After reading these discussions, I conclude that my preconception was a case of availability bias (possibly amplified by a desire to not know how painful things are), and so I use a more abstract category.
[1] To repeat something from a previous discussion, this isn't about being physically afraid. If I were, I'd be handling things differently. It also turned out to my surprise, that at least some men have never had the experience of that sort of revulsion. It seems to me that it's not quite the same as not wanting to be around someone who just about everyone would think was overtly ugly, though women frequently agree (independently, I think) about some men being uncomfortable to be around.
It wouldn't surprise me if there are specific elements of body language or facial expression which cause that sort of revulsion, but I don't know what they are.
The obvious conclusion from these premises: If you had the belief that "This could go on for years and is no fun" is a valid justification for telling someone to go away then your life would contain less 'no fun'.
That works for the future. You have to somehow acquire that belief in the first place, and it seems like something that would be hard to learn any way but experience.
If you find something that works for the past please let me know. That would be awesome. Kind of like timer-turner hack for relationships. You wouldn't have to guess which relationships would work, you would just automatically select a relationship that would work by virtue of all the counterfactual bad relationships being pre-empted by the techniques that work for the past!
Or, like with many life lessons, by having good friends, role models and mentors. They help you notice that you're making a silly mistake when you've been making it for an order of weeks not an order of years!
Amusing, and yes, my phrasing was imprecise - I wasn't intending tautology.
My objection was that 1) she probably has already made this transition herself, and 2) telling people that this transition needs to be made is not providing much information unless they understand how to recognize such relationships, and learning to distinguish what kinds of things suck for years from those that suck right now but get awesome later is necessarily going to take years unless we convey much additional information (assuming it is sufficiently stable between people to allow communication of that information to be meaningful).
I hope not. I was trying to get as close as possible to a pure deduction from the quote so as to be almost entirely impersonal.
Understood. It wasn't so much a complaint directed at you, as at anyone who wanted to add more details.
Edited to clarify: That is to say, the negativity of the complaint, such as it was, was directed at the situation; the communicative content of the complaint was directed at anyone, including you.
I haven't made the transition in all cases. wedrifid's advice might be useful.
I probably need to figure out where I want the line to be. It's also a complicating factor when I'm thinking "I'd enjoy this person's company if there were less of it and I wasn't feeling pressured".
I haven't experienced revulsion I would describe as 'skin-crawling', but I have experienced my scrotum shriveling up. This might be an idiom / physiological experience issue rather than a difference in life experience.
My understanding is that it is an instinct intended to protect you from threats to your reproductive success, not threats to your survival. ie. I expect it to tend to encourage behaviors that will prevent pregnancy to losers more so than behaviors that prevent losers from killing you.
Thanks a lot! Your comment made something click for me.
I don't think people are highly optimized. Evolution aims for good enough, rather than best hypothetically possible, and when I say hypothetically possible, I mean hypotheses generated by people from a time when no one knows the limits of what's evolutionarily possible.
I've had the skin crawl effect from men of varying status, though I admit the average status is on the low side.
Having a 'repulsion/creepiness' response to supplement an 'attraction' response seems like something to expect as an early, basic optimization. Something that would begin to be optimized before even bothering with things like human level intelligence.
Has anything like the repulsion response been seen in animals?
Something I don't think I've seen discussed is that the men who set off the repulsion response seem to be pretty rare. I haven't heard of the response being studied scientifically.
If PUA helps, it might not distinguish between men who have been ignored and men who have been actively avoided.
From what I understand of the philosophy a personal development program based on PUA would be expected and intended to reduce the amount that the guy is placed in the 'ignored' category while actually increasing the 'actively avoided' category. Because being ignored is useless (and 'no fun') while being actively avoided actually just saves time. Bell curves and blue and red charts apply.
There tends to be some lessons on how to reduce 'creepiness' in general because obviously being creepy in general is going to be a hindrance to the intended goals.
My brief searching for 'creepiness research' didn't turn up much either. But to be honest I don't really know where to look. :)
There's a community of men how are in fact to find effective ways to be socially assertive in a way that's attractive to women, it's called PUA.
And it is that easy. Just like becoming an engineer is as easy as "getting a degree and being better at math".
That would seem to apply better if at least some (but not all) of the significant elements of gross obesity and bad hygiene were rewarded with approval and reinforced with verbal exhortations for a significant proportion of the woman's lives. So basically the metaphor is a crock. Mind you the insult would quite possibly do the recipient good to hear anyway unless they happen to be the kind of person who will reject advice that is clearly wrong without first reconstructing what the advice should have been, minus the part that is obviously nonsense.
This is taking the unfortunate/entitled/nice/beta/shibboleth-of-your-choice males' complaint too far at face value - i.e., that they are sexually unsuccessful on account of being kind and prosocial.
People are really bad at measuring their own levels of altruism, which is hardly surprising. Those in this cluster of peoplespace are worse than average at reading social cues and others' assessments of them, and are apt to interpret "nice" and its congnates as "particularly kind and proscial," instead of what it usually means, which is "boring, but not actively offensive enough to merit an explicitly negative description." (Consider what it usually means when you describe your mother's watercolors or the like as "nice," sans any emphatic phrasing.) Likewise, we halo bad predicates onto those whom we resent - "jerk" is the male equivalent of "slut," in this sense.
What's creepy about this group is precisely the entitled attitude on display - that they deserve to enjoy sexual relations with those on whom they crush merely for being around them and not actively offending, or indeed in some cases for doing what in other contexts would be rightly considered kind and prosocial. This transactional model of sex is, well, creepy, and quite evident if you're specifically doing {actions that would otherwise be kind and prosocial} for unrequited loves and not people in general. The complaint is accurate in that yes, their being inoffensive and helpful isn't getting them laid, but the conclusion - that if they were jerks they would get laid - reveals a fundamental confusion. (I also think the PUA types are 100% right when they say displaying confidence is key, but that it's a bit confused to treat it as relating to dominance or women's preferences specifically - if you think you suck, others will assume you're right; this is the key to all sales work, and I've known a number of decent-looking women and gay men who aren't getting laid due to a lack of self-confidence as well.)
I have sympathy for these young men in that having poor native social skills and low self-confidence sucks, and, hey, I've been there. But they're not getting any approval for this, except when they meet up for affective death-spirals.
It is doing no such thing. Make no mistake - I don't conflate altruism with approval seeking niceness and I recommend "quit being a pussy" as a far more practical bite of self talk for people in the category you describe to use than the "women only like jerks" message; I'm clearly not rejecting the analogy because I'm supporting a sob story. No, what I am doing is rejecting one soldier that happens to be on the opposite extreme to the one above. Because it is a false analogy.
I don't give any approval for this either, but I don't do it out of judgement or blame. I don't give approval or sympathy because that would be counterproductive to their own goals.
I used to believe this, but after doing some research, and further experience, I changed my mind.
First, the available research doesn't show a disadvantage of altruism, agreeableness, and prosocial tendencies for men.
I used to experience agreeableness and altruism as disadvantages. Now I experience agreeableness as sometimes a big advantage, and sometimes a moderate disadvantage. Altruism is neutral, as long as I can suppress it to normal population levels (I have excessive altruistic tendencies).
Hypotheses that reconcile this data and anecdata:
While some people who believe they are sexually unsuccessful on account of being kind and prosocial have this attitude of entitlement, ascribing an entitlement mentality to that entire class of people is a hasty generalization. It is likely that people who believe they are sexually unsuccessful on account of being kind and prosocial with a genuine entitlement attitude are very visible (far more visible than people in that class without that attitude), and this visibility may distort estimates of their prevalence due to the availability heuristic.
Furthermore, in this context perhaps you would agree that "entitlement" is political buzzword that has not been appropriately operationalized. In some hands, it is used as expansively and unrigorously as "nice" and "jerk."
I said, which was given some implicit endorsement (I think):
The obvious strategy for this woman seems to be to look specifically for men who don't care much about looks and hygiene. (Also, you're a bad person for saying a woman who doesn't shave her legs is gross.) Melissa McEwan is fat and doesn't shave her legs (though as far as I know she has good hygiene), and that works out just fine because the people she's interested in prefer, or at least don't strongly disprefer, that.
On the other hand, those compassionate betas (at least those we hear complaining) seem to only pursue the (admittedly common) type of women who care strongly about status. There are obvious reasons for that (it correlates with being conventionally attractive), but it does seem like they're shooting themselves in the foot. If people who prefer your type have to throw themselves at you before you notice them, you're doing it wrong.
Edit: I don't understand the downvotes. wedrifid's objection is true, but it wasn't my main point. Is it because I'm telling people to hit on people who aren't their first choice? Or is it the "how dare you want the same characteristics everyone wants" undertones? Or did I just plain miss Yvain's point?
That meaning is very different to saying "grossly obese" in the same sentence as never showering or shaving her legs. At worst Yvain could be bad for saying that people who are very, very, overweight is gross - and even then it wouldn't be somewhat of a distortion.
Writing simply 'obese' would be an underspecification. For example the only time I have ever qualified as officially 'obese' was when I was body building aggressively - which is an entirely different thing.
I would say you missed his point. The description was meant to be analogous to the sort of men who're held up as having entitlement complexes. If she doesn't meet many men's preferences, her dating prospects are going to be slim, and she can try to seek out men whose preferences she meets, or try to change aspects of herself which will allow her to meet more men's preferences, or, yes, she can complain about it and rail against men for having the preferences they have, but the last one is unproductive and insulting so it's no wonder if people take a dim view of it.
Since the woman is being rejected by people whose preferences she doesn't meet, and complaining about it, there is no "on the other hand" relative to the men who're complaining about their lack of success with women whose preferences they don't meet, they're behaving in the same way. You seem to be arguing that the men are more socially blameworthy (because they are shooting themselves in the foot) for not engaging in the behavior which you say the obese woman should be engaging in. But in the context of the analogy, she isn't doing those things.
Also, Yvain didn't even come up with the analogy, it was related to him by people who didn't think that his previous analogy (the ugly duckling woman being rejected by men) was appropriately descriptive. So saying something like "Also, you're a bad person for saying a woman who doesn't shave her legs is gross" sends a doubly negative signal, first for parsing his statement in a disingenuous way, and second for holding Yvain accountable for the opinions of other people he's relating to us. Unless you were obviously joking, I would have downvoted for that alone, even if as you say it isn't the main point, unless the rest of the comment was exceptional.
Thanks!
I think part of the situation is that both the very fat woman and the shy man feel rightly that they're on the receiving end of a hostile conspiracy.
It isn't just that people are spontaneously unattracted to them, it's that there's a lot of public material which portrays people like them (and perhaps especially in the case of the very fat woman) anyone who's attracted to them as objects of mockery.
Thinking about the dominance thing.... there are heterosexual couples (actually, now that I think about it, the examples I know best are poly) where the woman is dominant.
If a man is temperamentally in the not-dominant to submissive range, would looking for a compatible dominant woman be a good strategy?
There are many more submissive men than there are dominant women. On top of that, in the poly community I seem to have noticed a pattern where dominant women end up primaries with even more dominant men (with both taking more submissive people as secondaries, etc).
So the prospects for a submissive male can be slim.
I voted you down for saying "Also, you're a bad person for saying a woman who doesn't shave her legs is gross" when I never said anything of the sort. Maybe you misunderstood the term "grossly obese" (which uses 'gross' in the sense of 'large')? I don't know.
Even if I had said that, there would have to be a nicer way to correct it.
No, just the description that is intended to make people go "Ew, undateable" (obesity, poor hygiene), as opposed to "Aw, poor girl, those guys are so shallow" (ugly duckling).
But... but... how come I don't get to say that, when you get to say "This is a terrible debate and you should all feel bad for having it."? (Because you're freaking Yvain. Also because you have some concept of tact.)
Because this is a terrible debate, and we should all feel bad for having it. (I say this, like Yvain did originally, as a moth who knows it is drawn to the flame.)
Again, where did I say that it was "gross"?
I said it would make it harder for the woman to get dates with men, but is that really in doubt? Do you need me to find statistics showing that (American) men in general rate women who don't shave their legs as less attractive? And I was using it as an example of something that shouldn't matter, but does.
You don't get to say that because 90% of people who used it in the context you did would be using it seriously, and because accusing someone of being a bad person for being sexist is more of a trigger point than accusing someone of having a bad debate.
When you give a list of three attributes, people tend assume the salient features are common for all three or different for all three. The attributes you gave were obese, poor hygiene, and unshaved. Two of these, obese and poor hygiene, are problematic for reasons other than simple lack of social acceptance, and people thus feel more confident calling them "gross" - for which they were also primed by your use of the term in it's other sense.
As I see it: no, you didn't say it, but I completely understand why they heard it.
Uh. Okay. I guess I far underestimated the proportion of people who would seriously call you a bad person on LW. My bad.
For what it is worth I appreciated the tongue in cheek nature of your call and only object to the 'being wrong about what what Yvain said' part, not the 'bad' part. I can't help you in finding an explanation on how you managed to get to -4. Perhaps you could edit that one part out and see if you get back up to 0? People often seem to approve of retraction-edits.
Oh, fine. Maybe I'm just oversensitive. Downvote revoked.
I suspect a large number of upvotes were purely for this line. I approve.
To quote another user, Scott H Young, "superficial would be the right word to describe most aphorisms, as being merely pointers to a more nuanced set of beliefs". So I'm sure it just has to do with the fact that of the bundle of qualities aggregately known as "jerks", some of those qualities are attractive. Check out the blog Hooking Up Smart for more nuanced stuff on the idea of nice men vs jerks.
Whatever age it takes to get past peak attractiveness and fertility.
Seems relevant.
While it's definitely interesting to point out the correlation between egg-bank and attractiveness, I have to say that my god but that site is chauvanistic! Apparently, after "hitting the wall" a woman is "sexually worthless" o_O I do not agree.
You haven't heard of Roissy before have you?
Nope.
He is pretty famous for his offensive and rude style.
I can see why. I also note he has ready-made fully-general counterarguments for any detractors... ie "any woman that objects to what I say is just old and jealous"
He is pretty well known around here, Robih Hanson at Overcoming Bias has him on his blogroll for exmaple.
No, not necessarily. He often just says her hamster is doing overtime.
Also his main argument is basically that "boners don't lie". A large enough fraction of men find a specific subset of women on average more sexually desirable than others that sexual desirability may as well be a objective criteria at least when comparing averages of groups like say 20 year old vs. 50 year old women or overweight vs. slim women.
Freudian slip?
Yes - "her hamster" is an interesting way of saying "women aren't rational, they just rationalise everything away".
it's an unfalsifiable proposition. Have you had a look at the list of things that he says women say? Yep - they could indeed be rationalisations... or they could in fact be the truth... how can you tell the difference? well - you can't. That's because this, as I said, is a fully-general counterargument.
No matter what his (as he says) "screechy feminist kvetches" about... he can just say "that's just a rationalisation" and not think any further or take it into account. he never has to update on anything a woman says to him ever. Also, i note that he seem to think that female rationalisation is a totally different species to male rationalisation... and doesn't even mention instances of the latter.
As to "boners don't lie" - this is demonstrably untrue any time somebody is turned on by a picture. There are no doubt objective criteria which have high correlation with the average male's likely attraction to a woman. Studies into facial symmetry, smooth complexion etc etc have clearly shown this. yes, you can compare averages...
However - need I remind you of the alien stealing our sexy women aspect of the mind-projection fallacy? the woman is not sexy... the men are attracted to certain types of women.
You can definitely make a case to me that "the average 40 year old woman has a reduced likelihood of finding male sexual partners"... but that does not mean "sexual worth = zero"
I might also add that as yet I have never met a woman anywhere that could find literally zero partners anywhere. She may not be interested in the men that would be likely to have sex with her... but that is a different question. There is a vanishingly small percentage of women who would literally have zero "worth" on the open market. To lump in every 35YO (and older) women is to be particularly ignorant of sexual dynamics... it is this man mistaking his own preferences for reality.
Not to take a stance on any of the wider issues, but that's not fully general: if all the women who objected were young, for example, it would be false.
Just call them fat. If they're skinny enough to disprove that, resort to calling them ugly.
Yeah but... he gets to decide how old is "old" - and from what I an tell, his idea of "old" is pretty darn young. Those women who simply cannot be manipulated into the "old" category easily fall into the "jealous" category.
This dosen't deserve down votes. Roissy's style (aesthetically pleasing but quite outrageous) and persona are hard to stomach (at first?).
Um, for many people (e.g. me) , it is hard to stomach at all, and I'm a het male, the sort of entity he is nominally writing for. The reason for this is simple: at a certain point style does reflect substance, and moreover, Sapir-Worf issues come into play.
Agreed. There's a sense of futility in life there that doesn't really have an upside, or even a non-downside
Sometimes the persona comes across as fake and bizarre. Take this article on frame control. It's completely reasonable, and meshes well with what you'd read here or in books on social skills. Then he lazily throws in
and continues talking about framing, having reminded his readership that bitches be crazy. Maybe the equivalents reminders on LW ("Remember, humans don't operate in a logical universe; we abide by our biased emotions first and foremost") and social skills books ("Remember, humans don't operate in a logical universe; we abide by our emotions first and foremost, and that makes us wonderful beings because rationality means Spock") sound as artificial when you're not used to them?
Forever.. Ok, probability one minus epsilon.
I see the "just jealous" claim as equivalent to A attempting to lower B's status, and when B says they don't like it, A says "you just don't like having your status lowered, so your point should be ignored".
Hmmm - my comment has been quite severely downvoted. Quite interesting. I'd like to know why.
perhaps I should point out the obvious mind projection fallacy inherent in the "sexually worthless" comment, instead of leaving it as an exercise to the reader... ?
After all, he didn't say "Due to my own personal predilections, i find that a woman over the age of 40 is no longer at all sexually attractive for me", but instead made his value judgment and considers it to be some kind of inherent value of the woman (ie value == 0) completely oblivious to the fact that other men (and possibly women) may have a different value-judgment of that woman.
I disagree with his assessment because her worth is not 0... just his own personal map-value for that woman.
I don't take Roissy all that seriously but have read quite a bit of his stuff. I've never understood him as comparing women's value as people, but rather their sexual value or dating value from the perspective of the (sort of) median man.
The sexual value is something determined by "the sexual marketplace". Sure some people like the less likeable, but they are pretty rare and thus on average the person with these traits will need to be less picky, since she/he runs into those interested in them less often.
Yep, I can understand that. though his phraseology is very clearly as though it is an inherent value of her worth as a (sexual) person... which is what I found so unappetising.
I also disagree with his valuation. I know from... well knowing 40 YO women (and older), that they do indeed suffer from diminished sexual appeal - but certainly nowhere near zero. 40YOlds get it on all the time... therefore his valuation is wrong. It is limited by his own personal perspective - and that of the average young-ish man who is himself high up on the "sexual appeal" rating.
I can definitely understand that for a man who can "get anybody" - that they would try almost exclusively for younger women, and that therefore an older woman would hold no sex appeal for them... but for anybody not an alpha male... (especially 40-50YO average men), a 40YO woman would still hold some interest.
Her "value" on the marketplace is not zero.
While mean sexual value is an important concept, as lukeprog points out with my graph, sometimes it is not relevant. The relevant metric of success in attracting people is something like "being over a cutoff of attractiveness for a subset of the population that you desire and that you can find, and where you don't face a punishing gender ratio in that niche."
For instance, regardless of your average attractiveness, you could be doing great even if 0.1% of the population is attracted to you, as long as (a) you know how to find them, (b) they fit your criteria, and (c) there isn't an oversaturation of people like you that you're competing with.
It's not the content of what you said (though, given the topic we're on, people are getting offended, this being one of the things LessWrong can't really discuss without exploding and drawing battle lines) but the way in which you said it; your online habitus automatically marks you as an outsider. Lurk a bit more and you'll get an idea of how to phrase things.
Thank you for responding. :)
Firstly - can you define "online habitus" in this context? the dictionary gives me "physical characteristics", but I'm not sure exactly how that relates here, but I've taken a stab at it:
ie that it was the emotive content of my comment that was objected to. I', surprised that the reaction against my personal expression of shock was disliked so much so that I was downvoted. Surely rational people are allowed to be offended too? :)
Am I allowed to personally respond to a site that objectifies women and rates their value as objects (and values them at literally zero) in a way that shows that I do not agree?
How should I have expressed my reaction in a way that would not have offended?
I upvoted your original comment but I disfavored this statement because it sounded like arguing against something by saying something other than "it isn't true".
If someone tells me "Japanese-Americans have average IQs 70 points higher than Korean-Americans," I don't have to try and refute that by saying "that's racist," because I have available the refutation "that's false". When I want to disfavor or shun a true idea that's unpopular, and can't say "that's false," I will have to say something else, such as "that's racist". Observers should notice when I do that, and estimate depending on the context how likely I was to respond with a negation like that had it been available.
You don't think it's acceptable to argue against things by saying various forms of "it has bad consequences"?
That wasn't how I saw the context here, because of the statement "I do not agree". Also, no consequences were enumerated. "I agree with the facts as stated, but think phrasing them this way has bad consequences," is a fine way to argue against a presentation of ideas.
I am very suspicious of obscuring truth in the name of positive consequences, of applying only or mostly first-order idea utilitarianism.
Not to speak for lessdazed, but what I understood them to be saying is that when I argue against a proposition P solely by pointing to the consequences of believing P, I am implicitly asserting the truth of P. I would agree with that.
I would say further that it's best not to implicitly assert the truth of false propositions, given a choice.
It follows that it's better for me to say "P is false, and also has bad consequences" than to say "P has bad consequences."
It's perfectly fine, for me at least, but I prefer moral objections to be specified more clearly than "I do not agree", which seem more appropriate for the disputing of factual statements. I discuss this in further detail in a comment of mine above.
Factual incorrectness is not the only objection a person could have to something. In many cases, people present what they believe to be the facts and then give their response to those facts. For example, someone says that Amy is 80 years old. They could then decide:
1.) Amy should be treated with unquestioning respect--they want to live in a society that respects their elders.
2.) Suggest that Amy should treat her children with unquestioning respect since they will have to take care of her.
3.) Say that Amy should be accorded respect, but not unquestioning respect because their preference is to treat others in an egalitarian way.
4.) Any number of other things.
You could then have objections to either the fact they stated (if it is not true), or to preferences they stated (if yours differ), or to both. Preferences can reference facts, especially if they are contingent on facts to achieve other, more central, preferences. And so sometimes you can use facts to show that someone's preferences are not in accordance with their core preferences. But a person's core preferences only convey a fact about the person holding them, not a fact about the world. The world has no preference about what happens to us. Only we do.
That's why people usually use other things to object with if they are available. I don't object to a critic's value judgement that an opinion is bad if spread, but the most convenient way for the critic to encourage me to disfavor the opinion is to convince me it is false. If the critic does something else, perhaps that is because the truth of the opinion is not contested.
First of all, let me say I didn't downvote you. Or upvote you either.
Secondly, there's some confusion of terminology here.
a) There's "agreement" in the sense of shared beliefs about the state of the world. (Epistemological agreement - ("is" statements)
b) There's "agreement" in the sense of shared beliefs about how the world should be. (Moral agreement - "ought" statements)
c) There's "agreement" in the sense of shared preferences. (Agreement in taste - "like" statements)
(a)s have objective truth value.
(c)s are subjective.
(b)s have people always debate about their objectivity/subjectivity thereof.
Now the three types aren't always clearly distinct. If someone makes a statement about "attractiveness" it's both a (c) statement about preferences, but it may also be a statement about what real-life people like on average -- in which case it can be an (a) statement about the distribution of preferences in a population, which has a truth value.
So, if someone calls someone else "sexually worthless", and you say you don't agree -- do you mean that you simply have different preferences -- are you making a (c) statement? That you believe his statement factually false -- you're making an (a) statement about the distribution of attraction feelings towards such women in the real world?
Or do you mean that you consider it MORALLY WRONG for him to speak and behave in such a rude way?
If the last of these, then "I morally object to such an attitude" is obviously a clearer way of talking about your objection rather than "I do not agree" which is vague and imprecise.
It depends. Was the context marketplace value or value to the individual who most values that person sexually? Ifthe latter, it was the MPF. If the former (which it implicitly probably was there), then I don't think marketplace valuations necessarily fail in that way.
They can still be wrong valuations.
I got the sense that he was actually using his personal valuation, and passing it off as a marketplace-valuation. His references to studies felt like he was trying to find facts to fit his own valuations. However - I'll freely admit that I have not read his stuff widely. This is one of those websites where I decided it would not be a good idea for me to keep going as it simply continued to fuel my anger. It was more rational simply to stop reading.
I will respect properly written articles on almost any subject. Not these.
One thing I demand from authors claiming to be supported by "science" is that they won't make me stop thinking in mid read. The articles behind these links do not respect the reader's opinion. Instead of making you think, they seek to shock, trump and convince. I've seen this style and these patterns before in articles about climate denial, xenophobia and religious fundamentalists. (Seriously, a lifestyle article is not a valid citation.)
I'm not saying the author has not done his fair share of reading. I'm saying he should stop waving the "this is science"-sign with one hand and be clubbing down his readers with the other.
The latter trait doesn't seem all that closely linked to 'science'. It is a quality of good authorship not science.
I remember as an high school kid PUA seemed sensible. (I had a nerdy straight male friend into it, and no personal interest since if I wanted to get laid I could use boobies.) I mostly took home "People, especially women, dig confidence, and will chase rather than be chased. 'Bitches ain't shit' is therefore a desirable mindset.".
And then just today I looked into it again, starting with the Dating market value test for women. I had trouble believing it was serious. Not because I'm supposed to want sex with hot women and nothing else, but because their idea of "hot women" isn't hot at all. Why would I ever want that?
I get that liking androgyny and brains and being neutral to fat and small breasts are rather idiosyncratic traits. But what kind of guy wants a girl just old enough to legally consent who never swears, dresses sexy and fashionable without actually caring about it, same for sports, and has the exact three kinds of sex they show in cookie-cutter porn? That's not a person. That's what you get if you ask RealDoll's research department for a toy that reconciles your horror of sluts with your hatred of prudes.
...also, the hot photo is supposed to be the one on the left, right?
Yes.
An exaggeration of a real , very common type. The better the description fits the less common the type. Practically no one who reads this site would fall in that category (I think/hope) if only because boring people are boring.
That's because it's a "blue line" test. At the beginning, it explicitly points out it's orienting on averages, and defining market value in terms of breadth of appeal. It doesn't mean lots of people will like a high scorer, it means lots of people won't rule out the high scorer.
In other words, the person who scores perfectly on this test will probably not be hideously offensive to anyone -- which means they don't get ruled out early in the selection process. But a low score just means they're more likely to need a "red line" strategy, aiming at strong appeal to a narrower audience, at the cost of turning more people off. (i.e., emphasizing one's supposed "defects" would attract people who like those qualities, while turning away more of those who don't)
(Ugh. I can't believe I'm defending that misogynist a*hole, but I don't see anything wrong with the test itself, just the conclusions/connotations being drawn from it.)
Why did you link to Roissy rather than laying out his argument in more neutral terms?
The comment was clearly something user CharlieSheen picked up from Roissy.
From what I understand Dark triad traits have been shown to be sexually attractive.
Edit: Damn you gwern! :)
An accurate analysis of this issue would require unpacking the cluster of traits implied by the word "jerk," and then dividing them into several categories:
Traits that are indeed actively attractive to women, or some subset thereof.
Traits that are neutral per se, but have a positive correlation with others that are attractive, or negative correlation with others that are unattractive.
Traits that are unattractive, but easily overshadowed by other less obvious (or less mentionable) traits, which produces striking but misleading examples where it looks like the "jerk" traits are in fact the attractive ones.
This is further complicated by the fact that behaviors and attitudes seemingly identical to a side-observer (especially a male one) can in fact be perceived radically differently depending on subtle details, or even just on the context. This makes it easy to answer accurate observations with jeering and purported reductio ad absurdum in a rhetorically effective way.
This question further complicates the issue. Different types of above listed traits can elicit different reactions from various categories of women. However, even just to outline these categories clearly and explicitly, one must trample on various sensibilities one is expected to respect in polite society nowadays.
I wish this kind of comment were more common.
I wish you'd just spit out whatever unPC stuff you thinks going on, even if it was rot13'd or only PM'd to people who volunteered to read it out of curiosity.
Ditto, though I would phrase it differently.
Vlad_M says a number of things which are unintuitive to me, but without more details it's hard for me to judge why the conflict exists.
In this case at least the potential for conflict should be quite obvious from what I wrote. What exactly do you find unintuitive in my above comment?
Doesn't that imply that the claim "women claim to want nice guys, but prefer to date jerks" should be downrated in emphasis and considered factually suspect until an accurate jerk-model can be constructed, and we can simply go look for the actual prevalence of what we now agree are jerks and their success at attracting women, as opposed to nice guys?
Come to that, don't we need a coherent nice-guy model as well? Or are they equivalent to a control; ie, "not jerks" = "nice guys?" And how useful does that render the resulting model?
Here's a couple more:
Traits that are neutral or unattractive, but help people in their mating interaction during one-on-one interaction with a potential partner (e.g. initiation or receptiveness).
Traits that are neutral or unattractive, but help people compete with others of their same gender
In sexual selection, there is a difference between intersexual choice, and intrasexual competition. "Women go for jerks" or "nice guys finish last" might not be a primarily a claim about the traits that women are attracted to; rather, it could be a claim about the traits necessary to initiate with women and compete with other men. All this stuff partially overlaps, but there are differences.
For example, pushing past competition on a crowded dance floor, dealing with competitors interrupting you, or making a physical advance on a potential mate may require a slightly different balance of traits (e.g. more assertiveness or even aggression) than what is necessary to attract mates.
Specifically, I would suggest that the male initiator script along with male-male competition jacks up the necessary amount of "jerk" traits beyond what women are actually attracted to. This hypothesis could help explain why people have trouble seeing eye-to-eye on this issue.
IOW the reason jerks are more successful might be that they cockblock other guys. It makes perfect sense to me and, in retrospect, I'm surprised that it took so long for someone to hypothesise this.
(Caveats: Small N, college-age subjects, and WEIRD) Believe it or not, someone actually tried to test the jerk theory empirically and found support for it
Hat tip: Eric Barker.
Another caveat is surrogate behavior-- what's tested is which photographs women chose, not which men.
It's occurring to me that part of what annoys me about the "women prefer jerks" meme is the implication that women are distinctively irrational. There are men who chose women who mistreat them, sometimes one such woman after another, but I've never heard anyone say "men prefer bitches".
Just on the notion level, but I've wondered whether some women (especially young women) choose bad news men for the same reason that some men (especially young men) ride motorcycles-- risk and excitement. From what I've heard, one of the reasons women chose difficult men is the hope of being able to change them.
Another possibility is availability bias-- the stereotype is the woman who spends years complaining about the awful men in her life to a patient male friend who's wondering why she never chooses him. Women who are happy with their relationships aren't going to do as nearly as much complaining about them, and probably aren't going to be talking in comparable detail about how good the relationship is.
Isn't there a stereotype whereby men prefer women who play by The Rules, which apparently consist of guidelines for emotional manipulation? That counts as bitchy in my book.
Also, can someone explain the "patient male friend" part of stereotype? I think it's one of these cases:
It is all of those cases, except it is also stipulated that the description must be cast in a more positive light.
It occurs to me that a common factor might be that the two of them are both highly pessimistic about relationships-- neither of them is looking for someone they can be happy with.
Woman seems to expect to be happy with her boyfriends (after all, she doesn't date people she isn't attracted to, whom she would be unhappy with). Nice Guy may or may not be looking for someone he can be happy with in parallel with pursuing Woman.
I may be too hard on her-- I was doing the jump of assuming that if she really wanted to be happy, she'd be using more efficient selection methods, but that could be another of those bad advice schemas.
Actually, you're missing the part where her selection method may well be optimal, given her goals. She gets excitement, sex, and drama from the "jerk" boyfriends, and companionship, emotional, and other kinds of support from her orbiter(s). (PUA terminology for guys who hang around a girl hoping she'll realize he's perfect and stop dating the jerks.)
This is such a common thing that it seems evolutionarily optimized. Enough orbiters occasionally luck out to make it a viable minority strategy for males, and the win for the females is obvious.
It's only if you think idealistically ("far") that you'd even be surprised by the frequency with which this occurs.
(Also, one thing that sometimes happens is that the orbiter, after getting his lucky moment, actually becomes more confident about expressing his interest in women and quits orbiting them. Everybody wins!)
Really? That belief isn't all that uncommon, and for reasons somewhat similar to the 'jerk' idea. Mind you the (overwhelmingly justified) belief that men are less picky than women when it comes to their mate selection makes such beliefs less emphasised.
Partially this is because men are less often the one whose preference is at the center of the relationship (the standard cultural trope is a man pursues a woman, attempting to make her prefer him) and so there is less scrutiny of men's preference by both parties, and much more scrutiny of women's preference by men (in order to understand better how to make a woman prefer him).
Partially this is also because male attraction is determined less strongly by personality, and the "bitch/jerk" adjective is about personality.
There, now you have. According to the Amazon Best Sellers Rank, it is currently ranked #560 overall in the Books category, #1 in Dating , #2 in Mate Seeking, and #4 in Love & Romance. Surely the idea isn't unheard of.
I think the hypothesis would be that women choose men who are "jerks" partly because they are jerks, while men choose women who are "jerks" because they just don't care so much about personality traits, and/or despite those women being jerks.
Examining this hypothesis would require an operationalization of "jerk."
Wouldn't it, though? I wish that would happen, and I wonder why at least a sketch of a definition hasn't emerged yet.
I'm almost certain that at least one has.
I saw a list of possible meanings somewhere in this discussion, but I don't remember a follow-up of what particular people have in mind.
Does this count? I think there are more too.
That is true. Pretty much every guy I know with a partners is quite decent,
Conversely however, the guys who score one hot chick after another, who don't have a partner except in the sense that they have half a dozen partners, those guys are jerks, Max Tucker being the infamous example.
I know a guy who is a male model and a thoroughly decent, caring and loving guy, also financially quite well off and highly intelligent. People pay him money to put his face and body on their products. Women often try to pick him up on sight. But after they get to know him a bit, they don't like him nearly so much. It does look to me that he is far too nice, and could profit from a fair bit of ruthless and cynical brutality towards women. I have put this to him, but he strenuously disagrees. He does not do that well with women, though if I had women hitting on me like he does, I know what I would do.
And while those partnered men are not jerks, they don't live up to politically correct standards for not being a jerk. Stereotypical women's work is largely done by their partner. So, yes, unlike Max Tucker, they are decent people, but our standards for a decent male person differs from that standard that one pretends to.
Does the male model have any women he's spontaneously interested in, or is it all women who choose him more than him especially wanting them?
I don't know the details of enough households to be sure of the housework distribution. I can think of two where the men definitely weren't doing it. One ended in divorce (mostly for other reasons), the other seems to be stable. One household where I think it's pretty equal, but I'm not sure. Statistics back up the idea that husbands typically do less housework than their wives.
He is heterosexual. I don't know if his relationships started with him hitting on the girl or the girl hitting on him. I have seen quite a few hot chicks hit on him and he brushes them off, or pretends not to notice. With his girlfriends he acts excessively needy, and respectful, as if they are very important to him. I don't act that needy, even though women never hit on me, and are frequently hitting on him.
I don't see how he can actually be needy. Girls think he is candy when they first see him. But he acts needy, leaning in to his girlfriend rather than his girlfriend leaning into him. Needy body language, even though girls somehow appear whenever he is around.