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| 5/24 |
| 2010/2/9-3/9 [Recreation/Dating] UID:53698 Activity:nil |
2/9 Monogamy is a form of sexual optimization
http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2010/02/new-dating-game.html
\_ http://www.overcomingbias.com/2009/07/who-cares-about-unsexy-men.html
\_ http://wwwhogivesashit.com
\_ http://tinyurl.com/y8fbn2a
What do women want? The guy that the other women want, it turns out.
\_ My gf says that this is so true and thinks her gender is sick
that way. She sometimes goes to the department store and
picks up and fawns over some hideous clothing item and she says
it's not a few minutes before some other woman rushes over to
inspect it and gets all excited over it. I'm not sure if it's
sicker that women do that or that my gf derives some sick
satisfaction from manipulating them. |
| 5/24 |
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| infoproc.blogspot.com/2010/02/new-dating-game.html In case you are unfamiliar with terms like (no, this has nothing to do with portfolio theory): alpha, beta, neg, PUA, AFC, and chick crack, read the excerpt below. I spent my late teen years at an approximately all-male university near Los Angeles, so I endured way too much time at bars talking to women like the ones described in the article below (in case you are wondering, I had a very good fake ID, but that's another story). I was just a kid -- all the women there were much older than I was. Pierre, I'll call him, had just finished dancing with a modestly attractive blonde and sat down at the bar with me. He winked at me and mouthed a single word: Practice :-) The evo-psych explanations given below date back at least to Caltech guys (anthropologists of the LA singles scene) of the 1980s, and probably much earlier. In the late 1990s, Mystery developed a precise and exacting "algorithm" of moves and routines--pre-scripted lines to be practiced in the field--that are virtually guaranteed (according to Mystery at least) to lure a female into your bed after just seven hours in her company from a cold turkey meeting in a public place. The fundamental strategy is to "demonstrate higher value" (DHV, another Mystery acronym), to appear so fascinating that the woman will want to prove her worthiness to you, not the other way around. you get her to give you hers, in what Mystery calls a "number closing." If she asks you what you do for a living, you don't mention the drone desk job that you actually hold down; you tell her you "repair disposable razors" (the choice of a Mystery disciple). You "peacock" (yet another Mystery coinage), which means donning outlandish, attention-grabbing attire. Mystery's signature peacocking wardrobe includes a black fur bucket hat and matching black nail polish and eyeliner. On The Pickup Artist, he sported a seemingly inexhaustible supply of exotic headgear and man-baubles. If it all sounds cheesy, tedious, manipulative, obvious, condescending to women, maybe kind of gay, it's because it is. If you think men who peacock look ridiculous and unmanly, click onto the photo-website Hot Chicks With Douchebags, where spectacular-looking babes hang on the pecs of preening rednecks and "Jersey Shore"-style guidos sporting chest-baring shirts and product-stiffened fauxhawks. Watch the video "Learn Enough Guitar to Get Laid" on YouTube (three chords, max). In June 2005, Craig Malisow, a reporter for the Houston Press, trailed 24-year-old Bashev, a Bulgarian-born graduate student in engineering at Rice University and self-styled pickup expert, to a series of bars and clubs in Houston. Bashev had no intention of telling the 20-something HBs he met that his day job consisted of working with multivariable calculus. Instead he pointed to his shoes and informed them that he was a "foot model." Then he launched into his canned opener: Did they think reality shows were "really real"? Sure, two groups of females on whom Bashev tried that line rolled their eyes and smirked, but three bars (and the same routine) later, he was relaxing in a lounge chair reading a shapely brunette's palm (chick crack plus "kino," a Mystery-ism that refers to getting a woman to crave your touch), and soon enough "her fingers were gently grasping the backs of his wrists," Malisow observed. Within minutes, Bashev had not only number-closed but gotten a date for the following Wednesday. Pickup mentors are relying, consciously or sub, on the principles of evolutionary psychology, which uses Darwinian theory to account for human traits and practices. Robert Wright introduced the reading public to evolutionary psychology in his 1994 book, The Moral Animal: Why We Are the Way We Are. He summarized what biologists had observed in the field: that among animals--and especially among our closest relatives, the great apes--males often fight each other for females and so the most dominant, or "alpha," male has access to the most desirable, and perhaps all, of the females. But it's the female of the species who ultimately makes the choice as to which member of the pack she will deem the alpha male. "Females are choosy in all the great ape species," Wright wrote. He also noted that, for example, a female gorilla will be faithful--forced into fidelity, actually--to a single dominant male, but she will willingly desert him for a rival male who impresses her with his superior dominance by fighting with her mate. That's because, as Darwin postulated, evolution isn't merely a matter of survival of the fittest but also of the replication of the fittest, "selfish genes," in the words of neo-Darwinian Richard Dawkins. Driven by instinctual desire for offspring, male primates chase fertile females so they can replicate themselves, while female primates choose strong males on the basis of survival traits to be passed on to young ones. Evolutionary psychologists like David Buss in The Evolution of Desire (1994) and Geoffrey Miller in The Mating Mind (2000) have elaborated on these theories, arguing that the human brain itself, with its capacity for consciousness, reasoning, and artistic creation, evolved as an entertainment device for male hominids competing to impress the females in the pack. Dennis Dutton's new book, The Art Instinct, makes much the same argument. Evolutionary psychologists postulate that the same physical and psychological drives prevail among modern humans: Men, eager for replication, are naturally polygamous, while women are naturally monogamous--but only until a man they perceive as of higher status than their current mate comes along. Hypergamy--marrying up, or, in the absence of any constrained linkage between sex and marriage, mating up--is a more accurate description of women's natural inclinations. Long-term monogamy--one spouse for one person at one time--may be the most desirable condition for ensuring personal happiness, accumulating property, and raising children, but it is an artifact of civilization, Western civilization in particular. In the view of many evolutionary psychologists, long-term monogamy is natural for neither men nor women. Evolutionary psychology also provides support for a truth universally denied: Women crave dominant men. And it seems that where men are forbidden to dominate in a socially beneficial way--as husbands and fathers, for example--women will seek out assertive, self-confident men whose displays of power aren't so socially beneficial. This game of sexual Whack-a-Mole is played regularly these days in a culture that, starting with children's schoolbooks and moving up through films and television, targets as oppressors and mocks as bumblers the entire male sex. Living in the New Paleolithic can be hard on women, many of whom party on merrily until they reach age 30 and then panic. "Then they get to age 28, 29, and their fertility goes down and they're not quite so luscious. But the guys their age are starting to make money, they look better, they've got self-assurance, and they've also got the pick of the 23-year-olds." Some argue, though, that it is actually beta men who are the greatest victims of the current mating chaos: the ones who work hard, act nice, and find themselves searching in vain for potential wives and girlfriends among the hordes of young women besotted by alphas. That is the underlying message of what is undoubtedly the most deftly written and also the darkest of the seduction-community websites, the blog Roissy in DC. Unlike his confreres, Roissy does not sell books or boot camps, and his site carries no ads. Roissy maintains that he is not an S&M-fetishist but picked the pseudonym because "chicks dig power." Beta men become superfluous until the newly liberated women start double-clutching after years in the serial harems of alphas who won't "commit," lower their standards, and "settle." During this process, monogamy as a stable and civilization-maintaining social institution is shattered. "Monogamy is a form of sexual optimization," Devlin told me. "It allows as many people who want to get married to do so. Under monogamy, 90 percent of men find a mate at least once in their life." This isn't ne... |
| www.overcomingbias.com/2009/07/who-cares-about-unsexy-men.html I don't yet have much of an opinion on whether to embrace or resist the new low-marriage mating equilibrium we seem to be heading toward, something between US ghettos and Sweden today, relative to a high-marriage equilibrium we might instead choose, perhaps like Japan or Utah today. While an awful lot isn't clear here, two effects of low-marriage seem robust to me: 1 Kids will spend less time with dads, and 2 Men will have more unequal intimate sex. This first effect is much noted, and with great concern. Kids spending less time with dads suggests men less caring for kids, which suggests moms get less kid help unless strong alimony or subsidies compensate. This effect seems to increase inequality among kids and moms, and is much noted and lamented. said: It hurts children, it reduces mothers' financial security, and it has landed with particular devastation on those who can bear it least: the nation's underclass. Time didn't discuss the other effect, however, nor do most main-stream media mentions. When dads help with kids less, women tend more to choose sexy over kid-helping men. Relative to a strong marriage world, sexy men are now more easily shared, either via two-timing, which is easier to manage in a world of fluid relationships, or via serial monogamy, where women wait longer than their men between relationships. So the few sexiest men get more attention, at the expense of men who might otherwise have been good solid husbands. But it is striking to me that people express far more concern about increased kidcare inequality of kids and moms, than about increased sex inequality of men. Pundits express concern about male income inequality when women and kids depend on those men. And US pundits express concern about the unhappy unsexy men created by an imbalanced gender ratio in China, even though since China has a stronger marriage culture, they'll have a much smaller fraction of unhappy men than we'll have. But why do US pundits express so much less concern about US men unhappy about sex inequality? Women and men can both can seem attractively caring, ie, good parent material, by expressing concern about moms and kids with unequal access to dads or kidcare. But regarding male sex inequality, men have to act like they aren't worried because they expect to be among the winners. Men can express concern about unsexy men in other places, but offer sympathy for local unsexy men and people will suspect that you think you are one of them. So who really cares about the suffering of unsexy men, besides their parents? Reply There is a point which one of the comments to the previous post addressed but which merits to be restated: Being born out of wedlock does not mean being born to a single mother. dk), and they tell us that on January 1 2009, 56% of Danish children ages 0 years lived in a family with married parents, 34% in a family with a couple living together and 0,25% with a couple in a registered partnership (mostly lesbians, I'd guess). If we look at ten-year-olds, the distribution is 67% in a family with married parents, 12% couple living together and 0,06% with a couple in a registered partnership. So, have the family values gone down the sewer since 1999? Well, in Scandinavia, it is not uncommon for couples to marry after the birth of their first child. Unfortunately, the data doesn't tell how many ten-year-olds who live with both biological parents, but my hunch is that marriages often split later. My guess is that the long working hours favoured by US and UK employers are as disruptive to father-child relations as divorce or births outside of formal wedlock. Reply I'm not sure how you could think I'm claiming that kids of unwed moms never have any men around. The claim is that men are around less in a low marriage culture. July 9, 2009 at 7:37 pm But surely that claim is also rebutted by this data? ie the original trend may indicate a decline in marriage but not two parent child raising (80-90% seem like high levels to me). Either that or low marriage cultures aren't sufficiently homogeneous to pool the US and Scandinavia into "low marriage" sets. Also, deducing evidence for the second effect from an anecdotal observation from what you've already implied is a poorly written article seems a bit flimsy. The way it's written you could equally assume the interviewee was flirting with or boasting to the interviewer. July 10, 2009 at 1:54 am I think you have no proof, at all, to your claim that man living together with a woman spends less time with his child than a man in marriage. Especially, in scandinavia, the culture is such that people tend to have long and loving relationships and have kids. You seem to have a bias which you are currently unable to overcome. July 10, 2009 at 12:37 pm Mikko, you're missing the point of this forum. The purpose is seemingly for US (the readership) to overcome OUR biases, not for the authors to confront theirs. You've got a good point though, I think this is more representative of a widespread bias amongst some intellectuals that their at a disadvantage compared to the brash sexually aggressive neanderthals (and arts professors) who keep stealing their girls. I'd call it a "nerd heuristic" if someone else hadn't already pinched it. Reply Jacob, if you work out US tax tables, to marry without a child is a tax loss, to marry with one child is about even, and to marry with two children is a benefit. Reply Why is this an "unsexy man" problem and not an "unsexy woman" problem as well? All that adding reproductive roles does in this context is ensure that women will gravitate towards relatively sexy men when they want to conceive... but given that that's presumably only a small proportion of their total sexual activity, then I'm not seeing where the meaningful asymmetry is coming from. Lest Johnny Depp and Brad Pitt divide and conquer the entire female population of the Earth, I'd guess that the limiting factor here is obvious - that people have limited energy to expend on relationships, and they would prefer to expend it upon high-quality mates, and thus a low-quality female would not be sufficiently appealing to a high-quality male to justify his paying attention to her over another high-quality female... To put it in more meaningful terms, I doubt there are many males who: Are decent enough to be marriage material Cannot pull of a Craigslist hookup As females become more "liberated", I'd expect this to only become more true. Reply I think that women are more tolerant of infidelity from their mates than men are with infidelity in theirs. This means that there will be more pseudo-stable polygynous men, which will drain a disproportionate number of women out of the active dating market. Also, what with all this concern about inequality, it would be amusing to see what an "affirmative-action" or "quotas" system for unsexy men would be like. There is more sex with Brad Pitt on the market than there is with Angelina Jolie. Men will want more sex even when women come more "liberated". And many decent men, who would be good providers and partners can't pull of a Graigslist hookup. Even the parents like their sexy sons better than unsexy ones. But I guess there is always prostitution and third world women for unsexy men of developed world. Reply Men will want more sex even when women come more "liberated". This strikes me as something that can't just be asserted. And even if it were true, how would this create an asymmetry that doesn't currently exist, unless it's being implied that women in committed relationships have more sex than they would otherwise for the sake of their mates? If this is so, could we really consider this a good thing? Sexual desire is about reproduction, and because of differing parental investments the male strategy is quantity and female strategy is quality. So high quality males will have a high quantity of sex, and high quantity of women will have high quality sex. It exists with the clients of prostitutes and it exists with the users of pornography. "unless it's being implied that women in committed relationships have more sex than they would otherwise for the sake of their mates? " ... |
| tinyurl.com/y8fbn2a -> www.psychologytoday.com/blog/one-among-many/201001/what-whom-women-want Joachim I Krueger, PhD Joachim Krueger is a social psychologist at Brown University who believes that rational thinking and socially responsible behavior are attainable goals. Where it gets interesting is how they figure out what kind of man to look for. Sure, most women like a man who is sincere and able to make them laugh, but the story gets more complicated. Women's preferences vary over their menstrual cycle and whether they are looking for a short-term mate or a long-term partner, which, in turn, also depends on the time in the menstrual cycle. When looking for a short-term mate, women can use visual cues such as his shoulder-to-waist ratio, the angularity of his face, or the presence of facial hair. When looking for a long-term partner, however, her task is more difficult. A man's appearance or his behavior on a date do not broadcast his ability and willingness to invest resources in offspring that is presumably his. The woman actually needs to get to know him before she can make a sound judgment. For decades there has been plenty of evidence of conformity among humans, much of which has been thought to discredit their rationality. Solomon Asch, for example, showed that many people conform, at least some of the time, with outrageously mistaken judgments made by a unanimous majority of others. Such findings suggest that humans are prone to a crowd mentality. Some psychologists argue, however, that it is adaptive to conform if it appears that others are acting on information that is not available to the person and if conformity saves the cost of going out and getting the information for oneself. This is where choice copying in mate selection comes in. The basic idea is that females looking for a male partner are, in part, swayed by a male's ability to attract other females. If this happens, if other women flock to some men just because other women do, two related phenomena familiar from folk psychology begin to make sense. dating market paradoxically rises when they are committed; second, some women are concerned about losing their men to other, "raiding," women. Until recently, the only evidence for choice copying came from animal studies using such exotic species as grouse or guppies. I found some interesting references in a popular book on social networks ("Connected" by Christakis & Fowler, 2009). The first study by Eva and Wood (2006) tested the choice copying effect by asking women to judge pictures of men. The same men were rated as more attractive when labeled married than when labeled single. A man who has been "validated" by another woman becomes more attractive. The desire to be friends with a man depends only slightly on an endorsement by another woman, and the expectation of being able to work with him as a colleague is not affected at all. The second study (Waynforth, 2007) produced two effects, one of which already well-known and the other being a statistical artifact. Women first rated the attractiveness of men who were shown alone. Then they re-rated them when shown along with a picture of a woman. The familiar effect was that men benefit from being seen with an attractive woman and suffer from being seen with an unattractive one. The statistical artifact was that those men who were initially rated as unattractive showed the largest gains, and those who were initially rated as highly attractive showed the largest losses. This sort asymmetry is known as regression to the mean since the time of Sir Francis Galton. More interestingly, the study also revealed that choice copying decreases with a woman's sexual experience. Experienced women more confidently rely on their own judgment when picking a man. Jones and colleagues (2007) showed pairs of photos of men of average and equal attractiveness (thereby avoiding the dreaded regression effect). Between the men, they placed a photo of a woman who was looking at one man and who was either smiling or not. Female participants judged those men who were smiled at as most attractive and those who were not as least attractive. Perhaps more surprisingly, the opposite was true for male judges. team are always eager to demonstrate prediction errors, and here they found one in the context of speed dating. Most women in their study thought they could best predict how they would feel about a man they were going to talk to for 5 minutes if they considered his picture and written profile (which contained information about his age, height, music preferences, and such). In fact, a report by another woman who had just speed-dated this man was a much better clue. This study supports the idea that conformity is adaptive when the people we conform to actually possess relevant information. As usual, Gilbert and colleagues found the mot juste to go along with the story. La Rochefoucault advised "Before we set our hearts too much upon anything, let us first examine how happy those are who already possess it." Interesting as it is, the work summarized here has one glaring hole. Although I have no empirical evidence and only the ghost of Charles Darwin to appeal to, I think that overall the effect would be weaker among men. Virtually all women know if their children are biologically theirs, whereas men can be haunted by visions of cuckoldry. The men may be present at birth, but the babies emerge from the mother's body. It follows that a woman who has children with a man who also has children with other women still knows what is happening to her genes. A man who courts a woman who is also courted by many others multiplies his uncertainties if there are children. By copying choice they save the cost of doing their own research to find the best man. If too many females gather around a few lucky males, even these lucky ones may be overwhelmed. The hidden cost to females is that those who rely on copying too much could end up without a partner. Before we bemoan the costs to females, we must remember that those who pay the highest price for female choice copying are those males who do not trigger the herding effect. Female choice copying is one process that creates polygyny, and in a polygynous population the real losers are the many men who are left without any offspring. The ability of some males to claim a disproportionate number of females cannot be fully explained by the dominance or ruthlessness of these males. It may entirely be matter of female choice and female copying. In the movie "A beautiful mind," troubled genius John Nash-played by Russell Crowe-offered a solution (I don't know if this scene is based on a real event). Nash and two buddies are hanging out at a campus bar when four women walk in. Nash, however, counsels that the three men ask the other girls to dance, leaving the pretty one without a partner. That way, each man (and three of the four women) get to dance. In contrast, if all men vie for the pretty woman only one couple will end up dancing as the other women will refuse to be second choice. For those interested in game theory, it may be puzzling that Nash counseled collective cooperation when his own theory proved that to be an unstable state. I am therefore afraid that it is pointless to plead with women not to pursue the rock stars and quarterbacks while ignoring the rest of us. |
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