Tag: women

Science explodes an old spinsters tale:

The study of online dating, by the University of Wales Institute, Cardiff (UWIC), found men and women are still rather traditional when it comes to searching for their ideal partner. Women generally seek an older and, therefore hopefully, wealthier man, according to the UWIC study. Men, on the other hand, desire a young and attractive female, and often prefer a much younger partner as they themselves age.

One can hear Roissy cackling already. In one bit of anecdotal evidence, I got a call from a single 40-something friend of mine. He was on his way to a date… with a 23 year-old woman.

Roissy moonlights as a romance advisor:

She wants to know whether to stay with her doting, all-around niceguy boyfriend or to dump him to take one more stab at trading up in the hothouse dating market of Manhattan.

(rubbing hands)

She’s come to the right place!

Reading between the lines what we have here is a girl who likes, perhaps loves, her boyfriend, but has recently been propositioned for a date by a higher status man (the CTO of [major bank]). Her sexual market options suddenly thrown into stark relief, her hypergamous instinct is kicking in and she is contemplating, via the sounding board provided by the residents of the stately countryside Chateau, whether her boyfriend is really all that she thinks he is, and whether her ego isn’t as big as it deserves to be.

Gentlemen, behold the awesome power of female hypergamy. You can be the best boyfriend in the world, (and judging by her description of him, he sounds like a stand-up guy with plenty of positive traits), but if a higher ranking man comes along and shows some interest in your girlfriend (or wife!), you can bet your last penny she will be unable to resist pondering the opportunity to trade up and the concomitant reevaluation of her own market worth that goes along with attention from higher status suitors.

I have to admit, this is a remarkable lesson in the reality of female hypergamy for the betas, deltas, and gammas of the world. This cold and rational calculation is how women who are capable of seeing beyond tomorrow evaluate long term relationships; their emotional, logic-free romantic front that they present doesn’t run all the way down or even particularly deep.

Roissy’s advice to her is sound, if slightly cruel. If she gives into temptation and breaks up with her boyfriend in order to grab for the brass ring of a CTO – stifles laughter at the female obsession with corporate titles – she’s going to be pumped and dumped in short order. And, of course, I always recommend that men steer clear of women who are drawn to the big city in search of alphasadventure.

UPDATE – Apparently the girl is real but the email is not, or something like that. Sounds like bitter gamma revenge, but who knows. For what it’s worth….

Is there a man on the planet who genuinely believes women need to learn to NOT apologize? Or strategies on more effectively getting what they want out of others?

THIS morning’s workshop is central to drama reduction. The topic is apologies.

Ms. Simmons divides these ninth graders into two facing lines. If a statement she reads aloud is true, a girl should cross the room.

“I’m usually the first person to apologize!” (A few girls trade places.)

“I apologize too much!” (More make a move.)

“I only apologize when I really mean it!” (A brave two.)

“I rarely apologize.” (An unapologetic one.)

“I’m more comfortable apologizing in a text than in person.” (Stampede.)

Girls are terrified to face a dispute head on, Ms. Simmons said. “In Girlworld, ‘Can we talk for a sec?’ means ‘OMG the end is near!’ ” she remarks, as the girls sit at desks in a half-circle around her. “But think of a conflict with your friend as an opportunity to negotiate for what you want.”

The issue isn’t that women don’t know how to say they’re sorry. They’re perfectly capable of verbalizing the words. They sometimes even prefer to posture absurdly and claim absolutely everything in the world is their fault in lieu of owning up to responsibility for something tangible. The real problem is that most women dislike taking responsibility for their actions and accepting the consequences for them.

The “sorry, sorry” routine is simply a matter of social submission to a dominant female, it has nothing to do with actual apologizing or modifying future behavior. Of course, social dominance is exactly what the Girls Leadership Institute is attempting to instill in girls, which from the description in the article, will likely have disastrous results for their relationships with the opposite sex.

Needless ex-fatty angst over unexpected male interest:

There’s an intelligent, successful, charming bachelor in his 40s. Let’s call him George Clooney. So George, sick of women throwing themselves at him because he’s rich and famous, decides to go undercover. He grows out his beard, he gains weight, he starts wearing ripped sweatpants wherever he goes. He’s the exact same guy underneath, but it’s really important that a woman want him for him—not just for the dashing image he projects and the life he can provide. I’m Not Attracted To Him: Do I Date Him?

Now, George looks like a homeless man. He still has great knowledge of Darfur, Edward R. Murrow, and the politics behind oil. He can still turn a phrase and crack a joke. He still has an amazing smile…. It would probably not surprise you that George would struggle in his quest for love. He may blame women for not valuing him as a homeless man as much they did as an actor—but he’d be the one losing out.

The problem with the attitude that you should be desired for who you are is that your superficialities are an intrinsic part of you. Sometimes they are an accurate indicator of what lies within, sometimes they are misleading, but they are still a part of you either way. Moreover, no one is ever going to “get to know the real you” if you don’t give them a reason to want to do so in the first place. Weight isn’t like height; the only person the ex-fatty should be annoyed at is herself since clearly she could have lost the weight a long time ago.

However, I’m not entirely unsympathetic with the dilemma of the former fat girl. I once knew a very nice girl who had an incredibly pretty face and a fantastic body but did not have an iota of pretty girl syndrome in her. She really seemed to be bewildered by the idea that she might be attractive at all, let alone highly desirable. It turned out that she had been quite fat in junior high and high school, had never had a boyfriend, didn’t go to college, and was almost completely unprepared for how men would react to her when she lost all the extra weight. But she wasn’t bitter, she was simply scared.

People also tend to forget that more men go through this sort of transformation than women do, since being short for a man is rather like being fat for a woman. But most guys who finally catch up to and surpass the girls in terms of height are simply glad that the situation has changed, they’re not bitter because the opposite sex has finally developed an interest in them.

I wouldn’t get too carried away by the sudden interest if I was an ex-fatty. Let’s face it, the thin girl may have escaped temporarily, but there’s still a fat girl inside waiting to devour her.

This Daily Mail article helps demonstrate why women with casual sexual experience are prone to overrating themselves and underlines the sexual economics that underlies Game. The comparison between the virgin and the cougar-blimp is anecdotal and no doubt one could easily find an opposite pair to serve as a counterexample, but is there any doubt that a 31 year-old man with 50 lovers could not be as unattractive as the example shown here?

However, this is the part that I found the most indicative of Game theory:

I was rather prim when I was growing up – I didn’t have a sexual relationship until I was 17. That was a classic holiday romance – he was a Turkish student and I met him when I was on holiday in Turkey with my sister. He fished my shoe out of the sea, and we got chatting. We spent the entire week together and slept together after a few days. To me, sex meant commitment and I convinced myself I was madly in love. But like all holiday romances, it fizzled out.

Sending a young woman between the ages of 15 and 18 on a vacation without serious adult supervision is the close equivalent of buying a hooker for a young man of the same age. The difference is that there is a reasonable chance the hooker would be more acceptable as a long term partner. Send her to France and she’ll do a Frenchman, send her to the mountains of Peru and she’ll do a squatty Incan if the raffish tour guide isn’t available. For a variety of reasons, women are always much, much more prone to let their hair down and lift their skirts up whenever they have flown somewhere. Throw in curiosity and teenage hormones as well as the appeal of the exotic Other and it’s a virtual lock.

The most amusing part, however, are the famous last words uttered by the woman with 25 notches on her bedpost:

Jonny and I haven’t really talked about how many sexual partners we’ve had because we both take the same view that it’s the here and now that’s important, not the past. I don’t think he will be concerned when he reads my tally. He doesn’t judge me and I don’t judge him.

Of course he doesn’t… what a fortuitous coincidence that a man should happen to share an opinion with the woman he is casually banging! How often does that happen? It’s a shame there won’t be a follow-up piece explaining how Jonny, who no doubt finds it very hard to meet women in the music industry, read the article and eventually made use of it as an excuse to denounce Jodie as an incorrigible slut who is incapable of remaining faithful when he moved on to the next opportunity.

Slutty Jane is really not the category in which a woman wants to find herself when she’s ready to be done having fun and start settling down.

If you happen to be a woman who genuinely thinks life as a middle-aged divorcee with kids is a worthwhile trade for not getting flowers and a card on a Hallmark holiday, I’d say your ex-husband-to-be is getting an even better deal:

Momlogic has exclusively learned that 31,427 women signed up for AshleyMadison.com yesterday — which is over ten times the average number of women who typically sign up on any given Monday. Ashley Madison took a sample survey of the women who signed up yesterday, and found that:

* 67 percent identified themselves as stay-at-home moms.
* The average age was 36.
* Over two-thirds had been considering an affair before Mother’s Day.

Roissy, meanwhile, correctly ascertains what are the first and third biggest signup days for Cheater Central. The days after Valentine’s Day and New Year’s Day. I wouldn’t put too much significance on the high percentage of stay-at-home moms, though. Women who work at an office don’t need the help of a web site if they are inclined to seek a surreptitious ride or two on the carousel.

All that being said, let me note that this all sounds rather like a calculated PR stunt to me.

Veronica: Why do you have to be such a mega-bitch?
Heather #1: Because I can be.

Most men understand it when the most attractive women consider themselves too good for the average joe. Because, in short, they are, and few men have much of a problem with that. Where men get confused and irritated is when a woman who is manifestly NOT too good for them by any reasonable objective metric acts as if she genuinely believes that she is. The reason is exactly as Occam’s Razor suggests. She does. And here’s why.

Women have a strong preference to date and mate up. Men, on the other hand, are much more inclined to date broad-spectrum and mate down. And while most men understand that the definition of “up” varies according to sex – men placing extra value on looks and sexual history, women placing emphasis on social status and wealth – they don’t understand the logical consequences of women dating up and men dating down. And these consequences are further exacerbated by men generally being the pursuers and women the pursued.

Look at it this way. A woman who manages to attract the passing attention of a higher-status man, even if she does so through taking the role of the pursuer, is quite reasonably, if incorrectly, inclined to consider herself worthy of the attentions of higher status men in the future despite the declining marginal utility of her youth and sexual history. This is why a woman will always identify her status by the football star, the surgeon, or the singer in the band with whom she once spent a few hours rather than by the nondescript fellow who was her boyfriend for several years, regardless of how long ago it was. Roissy had an amusing post about a woman who had dated Anthony Kiedis a long time ago and actually carried around pictures of them in order to show them to people she had just met.

This creates an essentially Austrian problem of false signals leading to malinvestment. Because women do not distinguish between the quantity of male attention and the quality, the conflation encourages them to a) overrate their own attractiveness, and, b) invest their time and attention in men who are not likely to have any interest in them beyond the immediate term. So, the female 6 considers herself an 8 by virtue of the times that a male 9 decided that she was the best available at the moment, and quite logically feels insulted when she is approached by a male 5 or 6. Meanwhile, the male 6 is standing there in astonishment, staring at what he believes is quite clearly an appropriate counterpart and wondering who in the world she thinks she is.

What this means is that thanks to modern hook-up culture, the average woman now tends to consider herself a 7 or 8 rather than a 5, which is one of the many social factors that make it hard for her to eventually “settle”.

Dr. Helen asks if men care if women are overweight:

I don’t know about people who are married but it seems to me in the 20’s and younger set, the overweight (maybe not obese) women and girls in the US seem to do pretty well. Guys seem to hang all over the girl spilling out of her jeans with a few extra pounds.

I like women with a BMI between 16 and 20 best, but then, as those who have seen Spacebunny have probably ascertained, I possess a strong preference for slender women. But male preferences tend to vary; one of my good friends always went for short, curvy women that I considered to be quasi-trolls. (Reasonably pretty trolls, to be sure, but trolls all the same.) In fairness to him, he usually thought the girls I dated looked like anorexic heroin addicts. To each his own. However, individual inclinations aside, I do think something drastically changed on a grand scale sometime between 1990 and 1998, because I can distinctly remember some of my younger teammates on the Nike team for which I played in the States commenting favorably on a group of young female soccer players, all of whom I considered to be varying flavors of butterball.

When I expressed my surprise that they so appreciated these roly-poly puppies, one of the other strikers shrugged and said that all the girls had junk in the trunk these days. So, I expect that as society has gotten fatter, people’s perceptions of what is acceptably attractive has mutated accordingly, especially younger guys whose exposure to non-overweight young women is relatively limited. This doesn’t mean that the standards of absolute attraction has changed at all, although the advent of the reality TV / sex tape celebrity does seem to have uglified the celebrity set as well.