Comments on: Who Cares About Unsexy Men?

By: How distinct is negative utilitarianism? » Diabasis

How distinct is negative utilitarianism? » Diabasis — Thu, 25 Aug 2011 17:52:22 +0000

[...] In this spirit, I very much admire a commenter on Robin Hanson’s famous (notorious?) “Unsexy Men” post, who averred I’m so darn nurturing, but not sexy, so what I do is go over to my [...]

By: Richard

Richard — Tue, 03 May 2011 19:03:14 +0000

Pretty much by definition, women who die in childbirth have had sex. Men who have to go through a kill-or-be-killed trial as a test of manhood. pretty much by definition haven’t.

By: who cares

who cares — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 19:01:03 +0000

i just read a little bit of this and thot ‘who cares about this?’ the writing is bad. i think you are trying to sound clever or intellectual or something. just say what you have to say plainly

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 17:11:03 +0000

To Robert and Doug S.
“Not thinking of yourself as a loser” is a mental feedback loop, just like pleasure from ejaculation, only decoupled from your peripheral hardware. Its purpose is the same though, that is, to motivate you to get a mate and ensure reproduction, so I don’t see why with a bit of introspection you couldn’t short-circuit it too, if you don’t care about its goal and it’s cheaper than “the obvious default way out the evolution intended” in the long run.

By: Paavo Ojala

Paavo Ojala — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 00:10:35 +0000

I think it’s quite simple. 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. There’s the simple imbalance.

I don’t see how the imbalance doesn’t exist now. 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? ”

well prostitutes have more sex than they would otherwise for the sake of money. And probably even women in relationships have sex for the sake of their mates, eventhough men want more sex and especially with varied partners.

By: Solutions For Unsexy Men - ErosBlog: The Sex Blog

Solutions For Unsexy Men - ErosBlog: The Sex Blog — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 16:41:41 +0000

[...] perhaps best of all was the very first comment on “Unsexy Men”, in which the commenter came up with a one-word answer to the problems [...]

By: Grant

Grant — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 01:06:43 +0000

I’d always thought the higher male mortality was balanced out by a high rate of death during childbirth?

Whether I’m right or wrong, I’d still like to see a lot more data and citations which discussing topics like these.

By: MichaelBishop

MichaelBishop — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 23:24:47 +0000

agreed

By: Vilhelm S

Vilhelm S — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 18:05:53 +0000

Solution: Unsexy men pool resources to pay sexy men to be monogamous and monitored. A good source of income for untalented actors.

I don’t think this can work at all.

Suppose that men are willing to have sex with 10 times as many partners as women, so women will only sleep with the most attractive 10% of then men. So the other 90% of the men get together and pay the alpha males to be monogamous, effectively removing them from the dating pool along with the 10% most attractive women.

Now the remaining 90% of women will STILL only sleep with the top 10% of the remaining men! So every man below the 81st percentile is being a chump, paying an pretty-boy actor without getting any benefit out of it.

What this example shows is that there is no hope of collective action: every man on the margin of desirability has to pay the full price of removing a rival. Which is no improvement over simply bribing the good-looking guy in the singles-bar to leave.

My sense is that both men and women prefer partners of approximately equal or greater sexiness.

And there are even hard numbers on it! See figure 1A of
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=950782

By: bonara

bonara — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 16:13:03 +0000

Does anyone know of a good study/survey on why do people (men and women) divorce?

It could help us start understanding the theme of this thread.