We already established that men will happily have sex with women who aren’t optimizing for sexiness, and date women who aren’t the most sexually desirable, and persist in long-term relationships independent of the woman’s looks, and will care about their woman’s beauty in large part to the extent that they care about its effects their status in the hierarchy of men. And so my answer to the original question is:
Women are hot to see themselves, through the internalized standards of society’s judgment, as worthy of their relationships and their happiness.
Hmm, while it’s true that many women can still attract a mate/have plenty of sex if they don’t put effort into their looks, it definitely seems to me (anecdotally, through both my own lived experience and what others talk about) that women get more male attention when they do put in effort
I think the point is that women are clearly optimizing way harder for female approval of their looks than they are male approval.
This article is pretty wild to read in this context. I think it has some Hell Realm memetic code embedded in it, & LW is kind of awful at navigating Hell Realm memetics, so I kinda hesitate to point at it here… but with that caveat: it’s just fascinating that here’s an article spelling out how to maximally appeal to the male gaze, focused on some sincere attempts at data, and the apparent female reaction is disgust and eyerolling and attempts to censor?
(It’s possible that the female reaction is actually to Hell Realm code, not so much to the optimize-for-male-gaze thing. I bet that’s at least a factor. But it’s still interesting that the rejection shows up this way!)
Oh yeah, I read this article some time ago! It probably affected my thinking here.
I also heard Louise Perry make comments pointing out something similar recently.
I don’t really get to claim a lot of originality here. Maybe my Great Insight™ is how there’s maybe an analogy between the way women focus on beauty and men focusing on getting big.
I spent a long time figuring out the same thing about women’s beauty, and came to roughly similar conclusions: https://putanumonit.com/2022/12/13/why-are-women-hot/
Hmm, while it’s true that many women can still attract a mate/have plenty of sex if they don’t put effort into their looks, it definitely seems to me (anecdotally, through both my own lived experience and what others talk about) that women get more male attention when they do put in effort
I think the point is that women are clearly optimizing way harder for female approval of their looks than they are male approval.
This article is pretty wild to read in this context. I think it has some Hell Realm memetic code embedded in it, & LW is kind of awful at navigating Hell Realm memetics, so I kinda hesitate to point at it here… but with that caveat: it’s just fascinating that here’s an article spelling out how to maximally appeal to the male gaze, focused on some sincere attempts at data, and the apparent female reaction is disgust and eyerolling and attempts to censor?
(It’s possible that the female reaction is actually to Hell Realm code, not so much to the optimize-for-male-gaze thing. I bet that’s at least a factor. But it’s still interesting that the rejection shows up this way!)
Seconding recommendation of the linked article both for its own sake and due to its relevance to this discussion.
Oh yeah, I read this article some time ago! It probably affected my thinking here.
I also heard Louise Perry make comments pointing out something similar recently.
I don’t really get to claim a lot of originality here. Maybe my Great Insight™ is how there’s maybe an analogy between the way women focus on beauty and men focusing on getting big.