Female mate choice means that, while the average woman has a decent chance of marrying a man who’s in her top 5 choices, a man is lucky if he marries a woman who’s in his top 100.
Men’s preferences are such that they can be satisfied by a much wider variety of women, whereas women’s ideals are satisfied by a much smaller number of men… for whom they are competing with many other women.
Men also compete for women, of course, but not in a way that’s as systematically based on their rarity or the amount of competition! In a way, women get screwed by their biology much worse than men do.
This is actually a fundamental premise of most “pickup” literature, btw: most women are dreadfully unsatisfied sexually and romantically by the vast majority of men.
The goal of the PUAs, therefore, is to develop themselves into the most interesting, exciting men that most women have ever met or will ever meet.… and thereby take up some of the slack in the generally-unfulfilled female population.
(Not that I needed pickup literature to learn that; you learn a lot from just living with a woman for 18 years, if you really listen, and try to understand. And it certainly doesn’t hurt that she’s in the lingerie and sex toy business, and shares gossip from work...)
Men are stuck trying to get the first; moving on to the second is an unrealistic goal for many men.
Fortunately, this needn’t be the case for any individual male, if they’re an instrumental rationalist.
Hell, you don’t even need to be a rationalist, you just have to be willing to put in the work to develop the qualities that will be desired by the kind of woman you’re looking for… and be willing to accept the likelihood that that some of the qualities that that woman will respond to, may be ones that aren’t particularly PC for either you or her to admit to having or responding to.
Actually, one of the funny things that my wife and I have discovered, discussing some of the PUA literature, is that some of the things that sound so very un-PC that they do, actually have more PC terms that women use, but which to an uninitiated male sound like they want something else.
For example, when a woman says she wants a man with a good sense of humor, that usually means something very different from what a man usually thinks of as a “sense of humor”. Typically, it means she wants somebody who is playful and flirtatious with her, not somebody who tells funny jokes or makes fun of other people. (Of course, my geekier female friends would probably also want potential mates to be able to keep up with their rapid-fire punning and obscure reference abilities. But that’s still something different from the usual female definition of “sense of humor” in a man.)
(I hesitate to write some of this, because I’m almost positive there will be people on LW who will—quite rightly—disagree with some or all of it. However, if I don’t speak in generalities, there’s very little that can be said about this.)
Anyway, a lot of PUA stuff, as far as my wife and I can tell, is translating abstract qualities that women desire, into male-language descriptions and concrete steps/examples of how to materialize those qualities. The shocking revelations and deep secrets turn out to only be shocking and secret because:
They’re not always the qualities men would want, think women would/should want, or they’re qualities men would appreciate in a woman, but never thought about from the opposite perspective, and...
They’re things that men and women would not describe using the same words. (e.g. “sense of humor”, “confident”, and “romantic” are just a few of the concepts that can be seriously different in each language.)
Wow, great summation. Thanks for the new insights.
I’ll add to this that the PUA are isn’t the only place that language gets used differently in different cultural contexts.
I mentioned in a previous comment that I’d read a book (“Hardball for women”) about grokking the business culture—and that also has a number of terms where men and women say the same words and the pictures in their heads are quite different.
The example I recall most is the well worn “be a team player” concept.
Speaking in pure generalities, men use that phrase and think of, say, a sports team—where the coach calls the plays, and everybody that “gets behind it” (ie agrees enthusiastically, no matter what) is considered a good team player. Everybody is trying to win, and the coach sets the rules because the way to win is often to present a united front.
Whereas women often think of the more open-ended games they’re used to—eg “playing house”—where there is no coach, and telling other people what to do is looked on as bad form (you’re considered a bit of a bitch). You are a good “team player” if you are good at co-constructing a reality with the other players so that everybody’s needs are satisfied.
This story was another of my “aha” moments—because my boss had been telling me I’d not “been a team player” because I’d tell him if I found fault in something he’d planned… whereas I’d thought I’d been an exemplary team payer because I’d been supportive of my colleagues and helped them with their work when they were under particularly tight pressure.
...sometimes we don’t even realise we have a different culture—because it’s obscured by the blanket of words.
Men’s preferences are such that they can be satisfied by a much wider variety of women, whereas women’s ideals are satisfied by a much smaller number of men… for whom they are competing with many other women.
Men also compete for women, of course, but not in a way that’s as systematically based on their rarity or the amount of competition! In a way, women get screwed by their biology much worse than men do.
This is actually a fundamental premise of most “pickup” literature, btw: most women are dreadfully unsatisfied sexually and romantically by the vast majority of men.
The goal of the PUAs, therefore, is to develop themselves into the most interesting, exciting men that most women have ever met or will ever meet.… and thereby take up some of the slack in the generally-unfulfilled female population.
(Not that I needed pickup literature to learn that; you learn a lot from just living with a woman for 18 years, if you really listen, and try to understand. And it certainly doesn’t hurt that she’s in the lingerie and sex toy business, and shares gossip from work...)
Fortunately, this needn’t be the case for any individual male, if they’re an instrumental rationalist.
Hell, you don’t even need to be a rationalist, you just have to be willing to put in the work to develop the qualities that will be desired by the kind of woman you’re looking for… and be willing to accept the likelihood that that some of the qualities that that woman will respond to, may be ones that aren’t particularly PC for either you or her to admit to having or responding to.
Actually, one of the funny things that my wife and I have discovered, discussing some of the PUA literature, is that some of the things that sound so very un-PC that they do, actually have more PC terms that women use, but which to an uninitiated male sound like they want something else.
For example, when a woman says she wants a man with a good sense of humor, that usually means something very different from what a man usually thinks of as a “sense of humor”. Typically, it means she wants somebody who is playful and flirtatious with her, not somebody who tells funny jokes or makes fun of other people. (Of course, my geekier female friends would probably also want potential mates to be able to keep up with their rapid-fire punning and obscure reference abilities. But that’s still something different from the usual female definition of “sense of humor” in a man.)
(I hesitate to write some of this, because I’m almost positive there will be people on LW who will—quite rightly—disagree with some or all of it. However, if I don’t speak in generalities, there’s very little that can be said about this.)
Anyway, a lot of PUA stuff, as far as my wife and I can tell, is translating abstract qualities that women desire, into male-language descriptions and concrete steps/examples of how to materialize those qualities. The shocking revelations and deep secrets turn out to only be shocking and secret because:
They’re not always the qualities men would want, think women would/should want, or they’re qualities men would appreciate in a woman, but never thought about from the opposite perspective, and...
They’re things that men and women would not describe using the same words. (e.g. “sense of humor”, “confident”, and “romantic” are just a few of the concepts that can be seriously different in each language.)
Wow, great summation. Thanks for the new insights.
I’ll add to this that the PUA are isn’t the only place that language gets used differently in different cultural contexts.
I mentioned in a previous comment that I’d read a book (“Hardball for women”) about grokking the business culture—and that also has a number of terms where men and women say the same words and the pictures in their heads are quite different.
The example I recall most is the well worn “be a team player” concept.
Speaking in pure generalities, men use that phrase and think of, say, a sports team—where the coach calls the plays, and everybody that “gets behind it” (ie agrees enthusiastically, no matter what) is considered a good team player. Everybody is trying to win, and the coach sets the rules because the way to win is often to present a united front.
Whereas women often think of the more open-ended games they’re used to—eg “playing house”—where there is no coach, and telling other people what to do is looked on as bad form (you’re considered a bit of a bitch). You are a good “team player” if you are good at co-constructing a reality with the other players so that everybody’s needs are satisfied.
This story was another of my “aha” moments—because my boss had been telling me I’d not “been a team player” because I’d tell him if I found fault in something he’d planned… whereas I’d thought I’d been an exemplary team payer because I’d been supportive of my colleagues and helped them with their work when they were under particularly tight pressure.
...sometimes we don’t even realise we have a different culture—because it’s obscured by the blanket of words.