A number of people have been asking me if there is a female equivalent to the Alpha-Omega scale of male socio-sexual attractiveness. I originally replied, rather facetiously, that there is a perfectly useful 1-10 scale that doesn’t strain anyone’s brain to comprehend, but of course, it is obvious there is more to a woman’s socio-sexual rating than her raw physical beauty at a given moment. However, it wasn’t until I read The Sex Risk for Women That No One Likes to Talk About that I realized how the female scale works.
As David Buss says, the modern conditions for mating may have changed significantly, but humans still employ the same sexual strategies. Of the 67 traits men seek in a committed partner, faithfulness and sexual loyalty rank as the most important in every culture ever studied…. While men seek women with promiscuity, sexual experience and high sex drive when selecting for short-term mating, they still retain the preference for a sexually inexperienced wife, or at least one who is less experienced than they are.
In the era of hooking up, this concern is exacerbated as the number of inexperienced woman has dropped dramatically. One of the things I hear most from men like Conflicted is that they have no interest in stepping in to pick up the pieces after women have been “used up” by other men. It’s insulting to their pride for obvious reasons, and many will refuse to marry if they cannot find a woman who meets their requirements.
Now, we already know that men place a high value on female beauty, so if we take into account that sexual loyalty also matters a great deal to them as well as how a woman’s sexual history serves as a practical proxy for that otherwise indeterminable loyalty, we can construct a scale that should reliably describe a woman’s socio-sexual attractiveness to men. The Center for Disease Control reports that women between the ages of 20 to 59 anonymously report their sexual histories as follows.
Slutty: 15+ partners: 9.4 percent
Frisky: 7-14 partners: 21.3 percent
Normal: 2-6 partners: 44.3 percent
Chaste: 0-1 partners: 25 percent
Also according to the CDC, the median number of sexual partners for women of what has lately become the normal age of marriage (25-29) is 4. The report also shows that the sexual history proxy is a reasonable one for future marital prospects; 30.8% of Chaste women are currently married and 6.5% are divorced whereas only 7.4% of Slutty women are currently married compared to 19.1% who are divorced.
To keep things relatively simple, I will next divide women into four categories based on their perceived physical beauty on the conventional 1-10 scale as follows:
Barbie: 9-10: 5 percent
Babe: 7-8: 15 percent
Jane: 4-6: 50 percent
Coyote: 1-3: 30 percent
The key thing to remember here is that men have a very binary approach to women. What they are looking for in the immediate term is almost never what they prefer in the long term. For permanent relationships, which I assume is the hierarchy of interest here, most men prefer to drop down one level on the Beauty side in favor of going up one level on the History side, the possible exception being the Alphas who put a premium on Beauty and for whom the numerical difference between Normal and Slutty is a rounding error in their own telephone book-length sexual histories.
Tier 1: Chaste Barbie, Normal Barbie, Chaste Babe
Tier 2: Frisky Barbie, Normal Babe, Chaste Jane
Tier 3: Slutty Barbie, Frisky Babe, Normal Jane
Tier 4: Slutty Babe, Frisky Jane, Chaste Coyote
Tier 5: Slutty Jane, Normal, Frisky, and Slutty Coyotes
This explains both Conflicted’s negative reaction to his girlfriend’s history and the Hot Wife + Herb combination that puzzles so many observers of human relationships regardless of their sex. Conflicted thought he had scored a Normal Babe, but she turned out to be a Slutty Babe. So, her value declined accordingly in his eyes to such an extent that he is contemplating ending the dating relationship and almost surely will decline to marry her. In the case of the Hot Wife + Herb, it’s most likely an obvious case of a woman having her Beauty value reduced by her History value.
Now, as Spacebunny points out, these are merely general guidelines based on statistics and there are always individual exceptions. But it explains why even the prettiest porn stars don’t marry Alphas and why relatively unattractive women manage to marry highly desirable men like Piers Brosnan and Matt DamonDenzel Washington. It also shows the clear choice that young women have to make between their short-term hypergamous instincts and their long-term marital prospects. And to me, one of the more interesting things is the way women tend to share this hierarchical view of their own sex with men, whereas men are often contemptuous of the smarmier sort of Alpha and simply cannot believe women put such a high value on them.