Many different things about different people are attractive or unattractive. One person is smart, but physically weak, another is smart and strong, but unusually cruel and disloyal, another is a very good singer, another is a very good cook, another understands emotional/sexual dynamics. So how are these all weighted to determine who is more attractive than who? Using a one-dimensional scale implicitly assumes that there is a very strong correlation between what one man or woman finds attractive and what another does. Is this accurate? There’s been some research that suggests certain features are highly correlated with attractiveness across all people and cultures, but does this capture everything about attractiveness? Are we sure that people who score high on these particular confirmed measures (waist/hip ratio for women, facial symmettry, ocular distance, etc.) are *always* individually more attractive to nearly all people than someone else who scores lower on those matters — no mattter what else is true?

In determining whether, say, facial symettry is attractive, all we have to show is that people find those with greater facial symettry attractive most of the time, all else being equal. To show that attractiveness is one-dimensional, we have to describe a set of traits and a particular weighting of those traits that accurately models attractiveness to nearly all people, even when all else is radically unequal.

Further, using terms such as alpha and beta implies not only that attractiveness or dominance is one-dimensional, but that either the distribution is strongly n-modal, or that particular division points on the scale are far more socially significant than others. Where is the research on that? Anywhere?

My experience suggests that attractiveness is not strongly one-dimensional, nor n-modally distributed. People fall widely distributed over a many dimensional space, and different people put very different weights on many of the dimensions. I often find a person hideous that someone else finds attractive and vice versa.

Although there is clearly substantial agreement on strong weight for certain features, it’s not enough for me to say, find my wife any less attractive than a typical pageant contestant even though she is quite fat — fat is at worst a mild negative for me, and she is very attractive in ways that don’t appear to be captured by the pageant norm, but that I value highly. You could say I am simply signaling loyalty and blinded by the relationship when I talk about my wife, but there are strangers I don’t know that I consider beautiful who it’s clear many other people do not find particularly attractive.

My intuitions are all based on small non-random samples of course, but where is the science with better evidence to which I should bow on which to base these very strong implicit claims? It just doesn’t exist. The field is in its infancy with very few strongly supported conclusions.

S/he will even get the kind of money s/he wants. That can not be said of sex. So inequality in sex is a far bigger problem than monetary inequality.

You see how this reeks of Perfectly General Counterargument? The fact that most men do want to marry (at least in the States) and that, for thousands of years, human men appear to have been either harem-keepers or pair-bonders puts the burden of evidence on you. If your theory is that what men really want is a series of unconnected one-night stands, or a series of friends-with-benefits relationships in the long run, it needs supporting evidence, other than, “That’s what I want at my current age,” or “that’s what a fitness-maximizer operating in a complete cultural vacuum would want in our best current theoretical understanding of evolution, with its own cultural biases.”

Basically, I think that I would be all right with the way the mating game would work in such a society (as well as other aspects of life), although (or perhaps because) I am very much a low-beta male. From where I’m standing, “each woman has many partners = good.” I’d be more optimistic about my prospects under matriarchy than I would be about traditional polygynous patirarchy. And as for comparing the amount I get laid under the status quo vs. a society dominate by free-love women–well, I couldn’t very well have a success rate lower than my current one.

After all, the talk about “sympathy for deprived beta males” misses the point that sympathy isn’t the only reason for helping the deprived. There’s also the idea that helping the deprived can make the society stabler and more efficient, and thus be a benefit to everyone. It’s pretty well agreed that the sex-deprived men in polygynous societies are a force for chaos, and so the matriarchy would have every reason to want as many men as possible to have access to some kind of birth-controlled sex. Growing opportunities for beta males would include homosexuality (we’re starting to see this already), some form of prostitution, older women, and non-reproductive sex acts like oral sex.

Regarding this particular article/thread, I agree with some of the commenters above that Men’s Rights a la Legal Equality and the Men’s Mating Game are different but intertwined topics. They do intersect at certain junctions both at the personal and policy level.

At the personal level, many men now have to compete in the open mating free market, as they no longer have the option, willingly or unwillingly, to go down the lifelong monogamous Marriage path. At the policy level the implications for the changing fault-lines of where men’s rights, women’s rights, equality, and marriage/divorce laws intersect are going to have profound impact on how humans live as socities in the near future.

Here is a good essay, written by Noveseeker a fellow DC-resident of yours, that explores the latter topic. It is titled A General Theory of Human Mating – Past, Present, and Future:

http://novaresources.blogspot.com/2009/04/general-theory-of-human-mating.html

Novaseeker is also one of the contributing writers over at the new Men’s Awareness eZine called The Spearhead. You may also want to check out that site when you get a chance.

Cheers,
Puma

how so?

see, the difference here – and were i more clever i’d turn this into a seminar, dress like a pirate, and milk some crowds – is that in my particular worldview, women are people first and women second. and so i act accordingly.

not sure how to package that for optimal sheep shearing, however.

I can certainly understand someone’s being annoyed about the claims that alphas are monopolizing all the women, claims which might be exaggerated or just false. That makes perfect sense. Those things need to be looked at empirically. As for the degree of anti-womanism, I too find it in bad taste. I’m all for making fun of women as such (or men), even quite scathingly, but I dislike the shrill or coarse invective.

Roissy and his commentators are basically PUA’s version of communists or christians: hardcore believers that think they have the entire world figured out, and will persecute anyone that disagrees.

I have said it for ten years. The original PUA movement was filled with smart, introspective guys that were artists and didn’t think of their movement as a political or social phenomenon (in fact they wanted to keep it secret, for good reason). The PUA movement is now filled with bitter women-hating idiots, gurus with feet of clay, pseudo-scientific jackasses, and the drooling snarling mob.