When Alicorn wrote, “some people seem to earnestly care about the problem”, she accompanied it with a link to a comment made by me, in which I said that “I want to increase the female: male ratio [here]. So if you ever see me using language that objectifies women or that alienates you, please let me know.”
Let me clarify that although I want to hear Alicorn’s objections to my statements about women (especially since she is better than most feminists at explaining the grounds for her objections) I might not be able to cater to all her objections.
For example, most existential-risks activists (scientists doing networking and research about risks like unFriendly AI) are male, and I plan a top-level post to assert that not having reliable access to sex with the kind of sexual partners who can most improve the life of an existential-risks activist should be considered a large disability in a male prospective existential-risks activist—in the same way that, e.g., an inability to stop rationalizing one’s own personal agenda should be considered a large disability.
Note that recruiting existential-risks activists (though he did not use that exact phrase) is one of the stated goals in Eliezer’s creating this web site.
Since a large fraction of the young men who have many of the other qualifications for existential-risks activism (such as extremely good mastery of math) do not currently have the knowledge necessary to obtain reliable access to sex with the kind of partners who can most improve their lives, I have a strong interest in trying to convey knowledge about it to them (because doing so decreases existential risk according to my current models of male psychology) and it is possible that despite persistent strenuous effort on my part, I will not be able to do a lot of that without alienating Alicorn and other feminists.
Maybe the correct course is for me to start another site where male prospective existential-risks activists can acquire this sort of knowledge, but sex is such a large part of life that it seems overly limiting for the 90 or 95% or so of the participants on this site who are heterosexual men to refrain from discussing how to identify the prospective sexual partners who can most improve their lives and how to increase one’s sexual chances with those prospective partners.
I didn’t get the impression that there was proposed any sort of prohibition on ideas that can be discussed. Rather, just perform a quick ‘sanity check’ against the criteria and make sure you’re not needlessly alienating vast numbers of potential members of the community.
I don’t think anyone is even going so far as advocating ‘political correctness’, and I laughed out loud at calling Alicorn a ‘feminist’ (reluctantly pushed into that role as she is).
Since a large fraction of the young men who have many of the other
qualifications for existential-risks activism [...] do not currently have the
knowledge necessary to obtain reliable access to sex [...], I have a strong
interest in trying to convey knowledge about it to them
You may think this is a great contribution you can make, but it’s probably simpler and more effective to donate money.
Since a large fraction of the young men who have many of the other qualifications for existential-risks activism [...] do not currently have the knowledge necessary to obtain reliable access to sex [...], I have a strong interest in trying to convey knowledge about it to them
You may think this is a great contribution you can make, but it’s probably simpler and more effective to donate money.
If your goal is to deal with existential risks, maybe the Lifeboat Foundation or, of course, the Singularity Institute. It just seems to me that handing out sex advice to potential existential-risk activists is a pretty indirect way to help.
Of course, I’m not helping either, so I should probably just be quiet.
If Alicorn goes beyond discouraging certain modes of expression and starts discouraging certain ideas from being expressed at all, that’s beyond the pale as far as I’m concerned. Hope she thinks so too.
Wouldn’t that just eat up a lot of their valuable existential-risk minimizing time? I might be stealing an idea from Hopefully Anonymous, but I’d ideally like to clone large numbers of the most effective minimizers and devote every waking hour of theirs to minimizing our existential risk (really, maximizing my odds of persistence, but that goal won’t get as many other cloners to buy in). In the absence of that kind of control, convincing them that they can never obtain partners and should just give up would be second-best. I believe Narses put so much effort into living on through his accomplishments precisely because, as a eunuch, he could have no progeny.
I feel some skepticism that you possess special knowledge on this topic. The language above seems objectifying even to me. Do you have a record of success here?
I feel some skepticism that you possess special knowledge on this topic.
I certainly do possess special knowledge on this topic. I have had a loving relationship with a woman for only 8 of the 32 years since I left home for college, so I am qualified to write about the negative psychological effects of girlfriendlessness.
The language above seems objectifying even to me.
Although I tried to avoid objectifying language, I am not surprised to learn that I failed because I have always been bad at predicting what language other people will find objectifying. Clearly I am missing some cognitive capacity that helps other people to make such predictions with much less effort than I can! I requested feedback from Alicorn because it is unusual for me to encounter someone who can describe the cognitive process by which their hearing or reading objectifying language produces aversion as well as she can, but candidly even if she provides the requested feedback, I will probably still be considerably worse than the average 16-year-old at making such predictions. But I keep on trying because even a small improvement in my predictive ability here would pay off big in making me a better communicator.
Parenthetically, since I lack the cognitive capacity to make these kinds of social judgements with little or no conscious effort, I have had to rely on (effortful) deliberative reasoning and my general capacity for mental modeling for what meagre skill I do have. It is my tentative hypothesis that skill that flows from deliberation and mental modeling is easier to transmit than skill that flows from the cognitive capacity I am lacking. That does not mean that I can teach others to predict what language the people around them will find objectify. (I already said that I do not myself have that skill.) But it does mean that perhaps there are some social skills I can transmit more readily than those who are “naturals” in those skills.
Do you have a record of success here?
If you mean, Do I have a record of success in teaching social skills that might help men enter into or stay in loving relationships with women? no I do not. I will run my posts past Hugh Ristik and hopefully a former pickup/ seduction trainer to make up for my lack of experience.
Maybe the solution is for me to start another site where male prospective existential-risks activists can acquire this sort of knowledge.
I support this solution.
Edit: although I’d extend it. Not all males prefer women, not all women prefer males, some women will also want to learn seduction of their preferred sex, and there are a bunch of gender categories in the middle (trans, queer, intersex, etc) who can be either the source or object of sexual interest. I have never heard that seduction is much studied outside male-wants-female.
I have never heard that seduction is much studied outside male-wants-female.
What? Clothing lipstick fingernails haircut tan waxing liposuction diet aerobics… Women strive to improve their seduction abilities much more than men.
Agreed. It is more socially acceptable for women to improve their attractiveness to the opposite sex than it is for men. Women can also get more improvement of their attractiveness through these methods. Additionally, it’s considered acceptable for women to use various forms of psychological influence over men; see this NYT article I critiqued on my blog advocating training men like animals. When men do this, it’s evil.
Hair and clothes are very important for men, though, not just because of physical looks, but because of the status and sexuality that they do (or don’t) convey.
The amount of rationalization in this thread is disturbing me. Seriously… apply equally? How many dresses do you have? How many shoes? How many shampoos? Skin care products? Do you regularly shave your arms and legs? Did you ever try to wax any part of your body, and do you have any idea how it feels? Were you ever seriously concerned that the tips of your hair were splitting ever-so-slightly and you must do something about that? Do you want me to go on?
The amount of rationalization in this thread is disturbing me.
What do you think I’m rationalizing?
How many dresses do you have? How many shampoos? Skin care products? Do you regularly shave your arms and legs? Did you ever try to wax any part of your body, and do you have any idea how it feels? Were you ever seriously concerned that the tips of your hair were splitting ever-so-slightly and you must do something about that?
You’ve displayed a severe lack of synthesis here. What you should have been thinking about were analogous items that a male would possess for sex appeal. You’re seriously trying to make a point by asking me how many dresses I own? Obviously I own none, and obviously that does not speak at all to the amount of effort I exert trying to impress women. I also own precisely zero skirts, zero bras, and zero tampons!
To my knowledge, a male’s sex appeal is not significantly improved by most of the items you’ve gone to the trouble of listing. I’ve never felt that I would be more sexy if my legs, armpits, etc. were waxed (although I have plucked my unibrow a few times). Nor, with the exception of acne control, do I think skin care products would increase the average man’s sex appeal.
You’ve apparently failed to accurately conceptualize the idea of sex appeal. When I brought this up, rather than ask for apparently relevant or informative information (how much money will I spend on a date? how nice is my watch, jacket, car, apartment, etc? how much effort will I actually go to in order to seduce a woman or get laid? do i wear deodorant/cologne? do i use contact lenses? how often do i shave? how much do i care about hygiene? what kinds of clothes do i wear? what is my job?), you came asking about how many dresses I own and whether I regularly shave my legs, etc.
Seriously… apply equally?
Male sex appeal is quite different than female sex appeal, but there is a common ground. Clothing, hair (dye, rogaine, plugs, transplant, cutting and grooming), diet and exercise fall inside that common ground.
In a vacuous sense of the word, all organs are reproductive organs and you can feasibly claim that your job and apartment are part of your seduction routine, just like Bill Clinton’s job and apartment were. But can you somehow delineate “seduction-related” activities from “other” activities and somehow make men and women spend the same amount of effort on “seduction-related”, without making “other” an empty set? Try it! I don’t think you will succeed. For example, any reasonable delineation would classify work time as non-seduction-related, which instantly skews the ratio towards women.
My figure’s no good for a dress, but I do have more than one good-sized closet full of clothes.
How many shoes?
Due to a condition, I mostly just wear sneakers. However, I do have a couple of other pairs of shoes for when it’s really important to look good or match an outfit.
How many shampoos?
I have one, which is as many as my wife has. How many do you need? I did an evaluation of which shampoo works best with my hair several years ago, and technology really hasn’t advanced enough in the past decade and a half to bother re-evaluating Pantene Pro-V (though knock-off brands do perform just about as well). I also use the same brand of conditioner, and a couple different kinds of hair product.
Do you regularly shave your arms and legs?
Not anymore. Cutting oneself shaving is an avenue for infection, and I’ve had problems with skin infection in my legs. Also, my hair grows too quickly so I have serious stubble just a couple hours after shaving. Armpits, though, are a must.
Did you ever try to wax any part of your body, and do you have any idea how it feels?
Yes. Really not impressed with the performance as compared to depilatory creams, which are much less painful.
Did you ever dye your hair?
No way. That’s terrible for your hair. I have tried colored gels, but haven’t found any that really work with my color.
Were you ever seriously concerned that the tips of your hair were splitting ever-so-slightly and you must do something about that?
Yes, but it’s always a cost-benefit analysis, as I don’t want to cut my hair shorter than I have to, and Pantene does a decent job of ‘repairing’ those sorts of problems, to some extent.
Drawing any statistical conclusions from your answer would be invalid because you have self-selected to reply to me. A reply from PeterS, or lack thereof, would be more meaningful, but it still wouldn’t outweigh the data about men I know personally.
What? Clothing lipstick fingernails haircut tan waxing liposuction diet aerobics…
Most of this is part of some silly game which women play amongst themselves: some of it may be male-directed, but it’s definitely a minor portion. Overall, F2M seduction and “focused self-improvement” are still woefully underexplored.
Overall, F2M seduction and “focused self-improvement” are still woefully underexplored.
Great point. Since women have an easier time finding partners than men due to greater female selectiveness (at least when perceived choice is high, which is the norm for typical dating), women may more easily reach a basic level of satisfaction with their abilities to attract and relate to the opposite sex. Or conversely, women may be less likely to reach a level of dissatisfaction that they are motivated to engage in systematic programs to improve their attractiveness and relational abilities, other than in societally typical ways such as improving physical attractiveness.
Yet I do think women would benefit from improving their ability to attract and relate to men, analogous to what pickup artists are doing. Pickup artists often study men who are “naturals” with women. Likewise, I think there are female “naturals.” I’ve known some women who do very well with men, both in the sense of attracting men, and in fulfilling their goals (typically, long-term romantic relationships). These women take care of themselves physically without being incredibly high maintenance, they are intelligent and accomplished, they are a joy to be around, they like men and understand them relatively well, a large percentage of males who come in contact with them get crushes on them. They don’t have the common complaint of trying to date guys who only want their bodies, and they are in multi-year relationships.
Clearly, there is something that these women are doing right, or something about their attitudes, personalities, and/or upbringings which is leading to across the board positive results with men, while other women of equal or greater physical attractiveness constantly experience difficulties with men. Whatever it is, it can be broken down empirically and other women can learn from it, similar to how pickup artists are breaking down the behavior and mindsets of men who are successful with women.
In fact, I would argue that a lot of the difficulties some women may experience in their interactions with any attractive men with options (including many pickup artists) is due to their lack of corresponding sexual and relational skills. To explain why this is, I’ll back up and use an analogy.
Many men who aren’t very good at interacting with women complain of various difficulties around women. A particular complaint is only being seen as a friend, rather than as a romantic prospective, and may feel that females “lead them on” and then only want friendship. Yet for men who have significant skill at attracting and relating to women, these kinds of problems simply go away, or reduce in frequency. I’m less likely to receive this response nowadays. Often I will see the “let’s just be friends” situation coming from a mile away, in which case I keep her as a friend and pursue other women. If I don’t see it coming, my understanding of female sexual psychology will offer me explanations other than the woman trying to “lead me on.” I have enough perspective to realize that she may have given me a chance to attract her, and I simply failed to convey my attractive qualities to her, or she didn’t find me attractive. Yet I’m not crushed, because I know that I will be meeting new women next weekend, and I am free to maintain a friendship with her if I so choose.
Similarly, many women complain of a situation where they have become sexual with a guy who is “just not that into her.” In fact, this seems to be a fear of some women who hear about pickup artists: they think pickup artists are going to go around seducing them and then moving on. Yet whether a man will move on from a woman after having sex depends on his perception of her appeal for a relationship. This variable is partly under the woman’s control. If she can display qualities that make her appeal to him as a relationship partner, and differentiate herself from other women of equal or greater attractiveness, then he is less likely to move on. Furthermore, with a better knowledge of male sexual psychology, she can more easily guess in the first place whether he would be plausibly romantically interested in her, and move on if not.
There are genuine cases of women taking advantage of men non-sexually, and of men taking advantage of women sexually, by lying about their intentions. There are other cases in which people are ambiguous about what they are looking for, and negligently lead another party who wants something more with them into false beliefs about their availability. Yet in my view, the problems underlying “let’s just be friends” and “pump and dump” scenarios that are equally as common really lie at the feet of the “friend,” or the “dumped.” And those problems include the following:
Lack of qualities that attract the member of the opposite into wanting the same thing as the guy friend or dumped woman does, or presence of unattractive qualities
Presence of attractive qualities, but lack of ability to display them in a timely fashion (e.g. I once went out with a girl who got drunk on our first few dates, which made it hard for me to connect with her real personality, and almost prevented me from realizing how intelligent and accomplished she was)
Lack of understanding of the psychology of the opposite sex, leading to over-investing that will not be reciprocated, walking blindly into rejection, and then blaming the other sex for it
People tend to use their sexual and relational skills to seek what kind of arrangement they want with members of the opposite sex. Yet if members of sex A want arrangement X with members of sex B, while members of sex A are lacking qualities, skills, and understanding necessary for members of sex B to want that kind of relationship with members of sex A, then we have a curious zero-sum situation: a member of sex B’s goals will be different from a member of sex A’s goals with each other. Since members of sex B finding members of sex A underwhelming in a certain way, their preferred arrangement will be to have a narrow interaction in which they get what they want, while members of sex A do not get what they want (and perhaps feel “used”). However, if members of sex A had more “game” (or whatever you want to call it), then they would be less likely to encounter the situation of members of sex A only wanting them in such a narrow way, in which case members of sex B would use their own “game” in order to seek arrangements that are desired more mutually.
Either men or women are A or B depending on the context. Imagine a matrix of group A’s level of game crossed with group B’s level of game (where I define “game” as ability, conscious or otherwise, to understand the psychology of the opposite sex, and to attract and induce members of the opposite sex to be more likely to want the kind of sexual/romantic situation that you desire with them; I have reservations about the word “game”, but it’s late and I need to save typing):
Neither A nor B have game: mutual blundering
A has more game than B: A “uses” B because A only wants a narrow kind of interaction with B
B has more game than A: B “uses” A, reverse of above
A and B both have considerable game: both groups are more likely to want non-zero-sum interactions with each other because they both desire each other in the ways that the other desires them, and members of both groups can more easily identify and avoid potentially zero-sum situations where an asymmetricality of desires occurs
In short, a woman with relational game should be less likely to fear men with seduction ability, because men will be more likely to fall for her.
Assuming that individuals cannot systematically change the preferences of the opposite sex, the best way for both men and women to get want they want sexually and romantically is by members of both sexes:
a) maximally understanding the preferences the of the opposite sex, and
b) maximally learning to fulfill the preferences of the opposite sex, subject to certain basic constraints of authenticity, ethics, and one’s own preferences
Rational and empirical investigation would be helpful in pursuing these goals. For now, people will have to do this on their own, or with like minded people. Yet in the future, rather than make everyone reinvent the real, these abilities should be instilled by general socialization. To some extent, they already are (at least if you were popular when growing up). But the average quality of advice about the opposite sex is laughably bad for both sexes (especially for men) in society, and dominated by oversimplified stereotypes (e.g. “men only want one thing”) and true-but-useless platitudes (“just be yourself,” “every woman wants something different”).
This should be a top-level post. It would counter both the pervasive misunderstanding of what PUA is about and Eliezer’s point about PUA being locker-room man talk.
Downvote explanation requested. I am already considering moving this post somewhere else; it is on-topic for the comment it is responding to, but it may drift from the topic of the thread. Objections to the argument of this comment, or of the language and framings it contains, is also invited.
Most of this is part of some silly game which women play amongst themselves: some of it may be male-directed, but it’s definitely a minor portion.
It is possible that I have misunderstood your comment. So, I hope that you will not mind if I reiterate in order to make sure that I have understood correctly: Women spend time on “clothing lipstick etc” primarily because they are concerned about the impression other women will form of them.
I’m afraid that any response will be purely anecdotal: but I can say that I am much more likely to shave my legs when I go to have coffee with a group of women, as compared to with a group that contains men. And I am almost certain to shave my legs before going to coffee with a man who I would be interested in dating.
What do you mean by “systematically”? There’s lots of magazines for females that discuss the exact set of topics I enumerated, add sex and relationship advice into the bargain, and very little else. This approach works, so women don’t need to study evo-psych or whatever PUAs study.
I defy your claim about signaling because it seems wildly improbable to me. Why would women want to signal their attractiveness to other women? Give a citation or something.
I defy your claim about signaling because it seems wildly improbable to me. Why would women want to signal their attractiveness to other women? Give a citation or something.
Shoes and handbags are probably an adequate citation. Clothing as well, perhaps, but that’s at least somewhat ambiguous. There may be a lot of men out there who pay close attention to the shoes and handbags of the women they are interested in, but I can’t say I’ve met any of them. I’m not entirely sure what the motivation is for women who buy these things (I dated a woman with numerous $500+ purses, and she was in college), but I am pretty sure it’s unrelated to attracting men, and it would make a great deal of sense if it’s status signaling towards other women.
There may be a lot of men out there who pay close attention to the shoes and handbags of the women they are interested in, but I can’t say I’ve met any of them.
That’s a strawman argument. Of course men don’t pay close attention to the individual aspects, only the general impression matters. The point is to make the guy want you, not make him want your handbag. I don’t mentally note the price of girls’ shoes and purses, but I certainly note when they fit in with and “enhance” the rest of their attire; knowing some girls with an extraordinary sense of color and style taught me to perceive this stuff consciously some years ago, but it’s always had an unconscious influence as far as I feel.
On the other hand, I can’t dismiss the idea of signaling as completely as before. I just haven’t yet heard a convincing explanation why women would benefit from signaling high status to each other, as opposed to (say) signaling friendliness and caring.
I don’t think it’s a straw man argument. Yes if a woman is wearing a nice dress and a pair of Crocs, that’s an issue, but from what I’ve seen the marginal effect of shoes is pretty small from most men’s perspectives. My impression, both from personal experience and from popular culture, is that women actually notice accessories and men do not. That sounds like signaling towards women; in fact, women I know who spend a lot on accessories have admitted as much to me. If someone has actually gathered hard data on this, I can’t find it and would love to see it, but I’d be really surprised if women who shop for accessories seriously are doing so to attract men.
I just haven’t yet heard a convincing explanation why women would benefit from signaling high status to each other.
So? The behaviour either happens or it doesn’t. Your ability to explain it is totally irrelevant. Granted my evidence is undesirably anecdotal, so you may have not seen evidence that women buy accessories for other women to see. Still, the fact that you can’t explain it (especially that you can’t explain it with ev-psych specifically) does not preclude or remove the event from existence. I’d still believe men have nipples even if I couldn’t figure out how it were evolutionarily advantageous.
But I’ll try to offer an explanation (and an alternative). People seek social status. That simple. Women may also want to signal friendliness and caring (they’re not opposed to status), but they benefit strongly from being high-status. Similarly, it may simply be a social thing. My parents encouraged me to dress one way and not another. Clothing is a significant indicator of social status. Thus, people come to believe a certain style is “right,” and what style that is does a lot to signal what social niche they come from. This lets the whole thing operate without any consciousness of signaling.
An alternative. People value looking good for obvious reasons. The only evaluation they can make of “looking good” is by their own criteria, thus they seek primarily to look good to themselves. Thus, if some women like accessories, they will seek them out seriously, because they want to look good and they view them as vital to achieving that end, even if men don’t agree.
Hah. Neither of your offered explanations discriminates between men and women (the first one would actually imply men dressing up more, because men have more to gain from status), and neither explains why women consciously try to stand out from the group when dressing up, e.g. get upset when they see some other woman dressed identically (both explanations would imply the reverse reaction). My obvious explanation of sexual selection accounts for both.
Your “obvious” explanation of sexual selection does not explain why (some) women spend inordinate amounts of time and money seeking out accessories that men don’t notice or care about, and continue to seek these out well after they have married and (sometimes) over the objections of their spouses. Also, I was talking about accessories, not clothing.
My explanation does not discriminate between men and women; society does. Each has a different method of showing off status. Men show off status via different accessories, namely gizmos like phones and watches and conspicuous consumption and in some cases shoes and jewelery (and cars, but those signal between genders, as well). And just because men may have more to gain by signaling status, that does not predict that they will gain status through the same mechanisms. Men who spend a lot more on clothes than their actual status justifies tend to be looked down upon by other men—status is one of those things that if you try too hard to show you have it, you lose it. The same standard (to my knowledge) does not generally apply to women.
Or, more simply, most men don’t really see much about how they dress (or their appearance generally) as relating to their social status, where more women see it as being more important. This would be an evolutionary motivator (show high status) operating through a social outlet (by dressing a certain way).
I was explicitly not talking about clothing, but about accessories, so the “same outfit” really is a straw man. Though I am uncertain how sexual selection explains it better than status signaling (if someone is wearing the same thing as you that seems like it would obviously dilute your status signal heavily), but that’s not the point since I was talking about accessories specifically.
My “people value looking good” also explains both of these phenomena FWIW; men don’t see nice clothing as necessary to looking good, and women might have their self-image of looking good (and special) harmed if they show up dressed exactly like another woman.
women might have their self-image of looking good (and special) harmed if they show up dressed exactly like another woman.
Since I don’t care as much about what I wear as most women (evidence: I own exactly one pair of shoes, typically wear no jewelry except a digital watch, and usually go at least several months between reluctant visits to clothing vendors), I can’t access a lot of this psychology via introspection. However, I suspect that when women dress up, the idea is to display a skill, at least as much as it is to display status. The skill is to create a unique, yet suitably mainstream-attractive look (or to hit some sweet spot of quirkiness). Showing up in duplicate outfits impugns the skills of both women (or more, if you wind up with a situation like that scene in “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying”). If you wear expensive things, most other people cannot afford those articles and you get an automatic “uniqueness” edge; this explains why people who can afford very expensive accessories deplore knockoffs.
I agree pretty much entirely; I didn’t want to get into the issue of displaying skill and taste, since it gets even more complex and my post seemed long enough.
I’m not sure about the distaste for knockoffs coming from a desire for “uniqueness.” I don’t think that rich women mind that other rich women have the same, say, Luis Vuitton bag; I think they mind when any woman who wants it can have a Luis Vuitton bag that looks like what they spent serious money on. It ceases to be a clear status symbol. It seems that the effect on signaling is greater than the effect on uniqueness.
However, I suspect that when women dress up, the idea is to display a skill, at least as much as it is to display status.
I’ve seen a different evolutionary explanation, which is that females’ gene propagation is best served by cultivating uniqueness, in order to convince a man that there is no one else like her. Whereas a man’s gene propagation is best served (if he’s not the leader of the group, that is) if all men appear to be the same.
The article I read about this discussed dancing as an example of this phenomenon, noting that in nearly every known culture, traditional dances done by females are either individual or emphasize individual characteristics, whereas dances done by men are synchronous group affairs in which they all try to look the same, in order to disguise their individual differences and conceal their relative skills.
There was also a bunch of stuff about scent, martial ability, and other signals being read in male/female dances, how certain male-female dance moves common to many cultures have the function of bringing a woman’s face past a man’s underarm so she can smell his genetic compatibility or lack thereof, how men’s skill at individual dance affects both their perceived desirability as sex partners by women and how likely they are to stray… even an explanation of why men are generally far more reluctant to dance or learn how to do so than women are, unless they are confident they’ll be highly skilled at it.
Anyway, the strong implication I got was that women would likely have evolved to have a negative reaction to looking the same as another woman, because it would make them appear more interchangeable, and thus less likely to sustain the commitment of a man through pregnancy and childbirth (vs. “losing” the man to her lookalike competitor).
Whatever form this reaction manifests in—whether as just a feeling of being gauche or unskilled, or as an elaborate theory of “objectification”, there would certainly be a strong evolutionary benefit to such an adaptation, and quite likely a bigger benefit than would come from merely displaying skill to other women. Of course, it might also be that skill at presentation also signals to other women, “I am a strong competitor, so don’t try to take ‘my’ man” (whether ‘my’ means the one they have, or the one they’re going after).
However, I suspect that when women dress up, the idea is to display a skill, at least as much as it is to display status.
In reality, the wealthier you are, the less personal skill is involved, to the point where red-carpet celebrities are dressed by couturiers (i.e. at x event so-and-so was dressed by Marc Jacobs). I suppose the less status you have, the more skill you need, but I think that skill is employed for the purpose of faking higher status.
You can still go very, very wrong despite spending a lot of money. Celebrities with couture designers are in kind of a special position, since no matter how bad they look, they have a significant power to define what counts as fashionable. Rich people who are not fashion icons can go very very wrong, even (and in some cases especially) if they buy whatever couture the celebrities were wearing.
I don’t like your explanations because they don’t really explain anything, just shuffle complexity around. “See, there’s this thing called phlogiston, err status, that says you have to do this if you’re a man but something different if you’re a woman, for reasons unspecified.”
Take a woman to a store and you’ll see that the process of buying a handbag is guided by reasoning very similar to the process of buying a dress. The dress is clearly for attracting mates; what if the handbag is just a side effect, some clever marketer’s way to hack the mate attraction instinct?
what if the handbag is just a side effect, some clever marketer’s way to hack the mate attraction instinct?
Easy. Price and conspicuous branding. There are many, many accessories (and regular clothing) that do not look all that much different from cheaper substitutes, yet cost a very large amount of money. Think in particular of products that display very large logos or brand names—you think people buy these because the logos look so good? My favorite example is “celebrity”-style sunglasses—the huge sunglasses some celebrities wear in order to make them hard to recognize. This is a product that attractive people wear for the express purpose of hiding how they look. Yet (among some subgroups) these are quite popular, and I know women who will drop several hundred dollars on a designer pair of these, despite having a face that they are not served by hiding.
It is clear that (some) women (and men) value such products precisely because they cost so much. Mate selection does not explain why people would spend a whole lot more on an item that does not make them look better. Status signaling explains this quite well; the purpose of the $1000 bag isn’t to look good so much as it is to say, “I spent $1000 on this bag.” An ev-psych approach would explain why men would want to show this off, hence the Ferrari, but I don’t really see how showing off wealth would help women attract desirable men, certainly not to the extent that some women spend on these things, and certainly not after they already have a mate.
And phlogiston? You sincerely believe that men and women signal status by doing the same things? Or do you not believe that social status exists? Do you think that a man and a woman both owning a red Ferrari signal the exact same things? Do you think people will view a man with a $1000 handbag just like they’ll view a woman with a $1000 handbag? “Phlogiston” makes a delightful straw man, but a terrible argument. Social status exists, and men and women do actually do different things to express having it, because society expects different things of men and women.
Some things, particularly human social customs, are really, really complicated. The fact that you would prefer a simple and elegant answer does not change this brute fact.
Peruse Vogue any time. None of that stuff is for males. it signals things like: I’m rich, I’m young, I’m cultured, I’m upper-class, I’m able to devote effort to display, I’m socially well-connected...
What evolutionary reason could a woman have for wanting to signal being rich and cultured to other women? ’Cause it doesn’t make those other women want to become her allies; rather, it aggravates them. And do you consider it a weird coincidence that all the things I listed (tan, lipstick etc.) also increase the woman’s attractiveness to men?
I’m sorry, but that’s just a wierd question. Why wouldn’t women want to play status games?
Most of those things were originally developed as seduction aids and do double duty, but they have been adopted as status aids and probably are more important in that role. (Signaling only to men, women can get away with much less work—compare porn.)
In their original pure seduction aid role, some stuff—lipstick and perfume for example—used to be extremely disreputable.
Also some obvious fashion fetishes are void of signal to males—handbags are an example.
It seems to me a lot of this has to be female-female signaling as proposed. Most men do not seem to care what I’m wearing, and would probably prefer it was ‘nothing’. I have NEVER had a guy bring up something I’m wearing unless it was clearly being used as an opening for chatting me up.
For the record (I don’t think this is objectifying, but my calibration’s pretty confused lately), yes we’d probably prefer it was ‘nothing,’ but we still notice what you’re wearing and respond strongly to it, and no, it’s not as simple as “less is better”.
Well, I wouldn’t say that women can not wear clothes that men find attractive/unattractive, or otherwise interesting. But I know from conversations that many men consider a good majority of what women wear to be pointless and stupid looking. All the guys I know are practically offended by those baby-doll dress, or stuff like shoes with bows on them.
I have to agree. I mean, I like dressing up, but there is definite limit of like an hour which I will not go beyond. If an hour of work can’t make you look good, no amount of time will.
I have NEVER had a guy bring up something I’m wearing unless it was clearly being used as an opening for chatting me up.
I assume ‘chatting me up’ is being used here to mean something involving dating? An internet search for the expression just turned up synonyms for “making conversation”, which wouldn’t make sense in context.
Curious… where are you from?
ETA: thanks to anonym below.
In that case, it seems odd to me that guys you know never bring up anything you’re wearing. Do you have many male friends? Maybe this is a cultural thing, or am I the ‘odd one out’ here?
You didn’t answer. Why would women play status games? Men play status games to rise in the dominance hierarchy and ultimately get many girls; that’s the obvious evolutionary reason.
My working hypothesis for now is simply that women claim they strive to look good primarily to show off to other women, and you’re accepting this claim uncritically. The reason they claim that (and actually believe that, evolution’s weird) is that explicitly admitting that you dress up to steal high status men from other women would make those other women feel threatened, so this behavior has evolved into a harmless “game”. That also addresses your objection why women adopt those ornate displays instead of just undressing.
There actually are reasonable-sounding evolutionary hypotheses behind status competition for women in addition to competition for males: competition over food, particularly food for infants.
Further reading:
Male, Female by David Geary
Mother Nature by Sarah Hrdy
Also recommended: Anne Campbell’s A Mind of Her Own: The Evolutionary Psychology of Women, which has chapters on status, competition, and aggression amongst women.
Thanks! I found this review, and at first look it seems to support me more than y’all: unless I’m reading it wrong, it says that women’s desire to look good is explained only by competition for good mates. Now, I’m a total amateur and would love to be corrected, but the arguments offered so far just aren’t very convincing.
What evolutionary reason could a woman have for wanting to signal being rich and cultured to other women?
Evolutionary reason? Sounds like you’re automatically discounting the possibility that the specific status games of a specific group of people in our specific society are a result of cultural development that has no particular basis in evolutionary psychology.
When Alicorn wrote, “some people seem to earnestly care about the problem”, she accompanied it with a link to a comment made by me, in which I said that “I want to increase the female: male ratio [here]. So if you ever see me using language that objectifies women or that alienates you, please let me know.”
Let me clarify that although I want to hear Alicorn’s objections to my statements about women (especially since she is better than most feminists at explaining the grounds for her objections) I might not be able to cater to all her objections.
For example, most existential-risks activists (scientists doing networking and research about risks like unFriendly AI) are male, and I plan a top-level post to assert that not having reliable access to sex with the kind of sexual partners who can most improve the life of an existential-risks activist should be considered a large disability in a male prospective existential-risks activist—in the same way that, e.g., an inability to stop rationalizing one’s own personal agenda should be considered a large disability.
Note that recruiting existential-risks activists (though he did not use that exact phrase) is one of the stated goals in Eliezer’s creating this web site.
Since a large fraction of the young men who have many of the other qualifications for existential-risks activism (such as extremely good mastery of math) do not currently have the knowledge necessary to obtain reliable access to sex with the kind of partners who can most improve their lives, I have a strong interest in trying to convey knowledge about it to them (because doing so decreases existential risk according to my current models of male psychology) and it is possible that despite persistent strenuous effort on my part, I will not be able to do a lot of that without alienating Alicorn and other feminists.
Maybe the correct course is for me to start another site where male prospective existential-risks activists can acquire this sort of knowledge, but sex is such a large part of life that it seems overly limiting for the 90 or 95% or so of the participants on this site who are heterosexual men to refrain from discussing how to identify the prospective sexual partners who can most improve their lives and how to increase one’s sexual chances with those prospective partners.
I didn’t get the impression that there was proposed any sort of prohibition on ideas that can be discussed. Rather, just perform a quick ‘sanity check’ against the criteria and make sure you’re not needlessly alienating vast numbers of potential members of the community.
I don’t think anyone is even going so far as advocating ‘political correctness’, and I laughed out loud at calling Alicorn a ‘feminist’ (reluctantly pushed into that role as she is).
You may think this is a great contribution you can make, but it’s probably simpler and more effective to donate money.
OK, nerzhin, I’ll bite: donate money to whom?
If your goal is to deal with existential risks, maybe the Lifeboat Foundation or, of course, the Singularity Institute. It just seems to me that handing out sex advice to potential existential-risk activists is a pretty indirect way to help.
Of course, I’m not helping either, so I should probably just be quiet.
If Alicorn goes beyond discouraging certain modes of expression and starts discouraging certain ideas from being expressed at all, that’s beyond the pale as far as I’m concerned. Hope she thinks so too.
I find this a very disturbing comment.
Why do you invoke Alicorn? Why not just “that’s beyond the pale as far as I’m concerned”?
This is by far the strongest one of a very few comments on this thread (and no prior threads) that make me think Roko is right about cliques.
Wouldn’t that just eat up a lot of their valuable existential-risk minimizing time? I might be stealing an idea from Hopefully Anonymous, but I’d ideally like to clone large numbers of the most effective minimizers and devote every waking hour of theirs to minimizing our existential risk (really, maximizing my odds of persistence, but that goal won’t get as many other cloners to buy in). In the absence of that kind of control, convincing them that they can never obtain partners and should just give up would be second-best. I believe Narses put so much effort into living on through his accomplishments precisely because, as a eunuch, he could have no progeny.
On a related note, I’ve got a post saying we should be grateful for diversity-induced anomie. Bryan Caplan & Mencius Moldbug have both had interesting things to say on the virtues of abject surrender.
I feel some skepticism that you possess special knowledge on this topic. The language above seems objectifying even to me. Do you have a record of success here?
I certainly do possess special knowledge on this topic. I have had a loving relationship with a woman for only 8 of the 32 years since I left home for college, so I am qualified to write about the negative psychological effects of girlfriendlessness.
Although I tried to avoid objectifying language, I am not surprised to learn that I failed because I have always been bad at predicting what language other people will find objectifying. Clearly I am missing some cognitive capacity that helps other people to make such predictions with much less effort than I can! I requested feedback from Alicorn because it is unusual for me to encounter someone who can describe the cognitive process by which their hearing or reading objectifying language produces aversion as well as she can, but candidly even if she provides the requested feedback, I will probably still be considerably worse than the average 16-year-old at making such predictions. But I keep on trying because even a small improvement in my predictive ability here would pay off big in making me a better communicator.
Parenthetically, since I lack the cognitive capacity to make these kinds of social judgements with little or no conscious effort, I have had to rely on (effortful) deliberative reasoning and my general capacity for mental modeling for what meagre skill I do have. It is my tentative hypothesis that skill that flows from deliberation and mental modeling is easier to transmit than skill that flows from the cognitive capacity I am lacking. That does not mean that I can teach others to predict what language the people around them will find objectify. (I already said that I do not myself have that skill.) But it does mean that perhaps there are some social skills I can transmit more readily than those who are “naturals” in those skills.
If you mean, Do I have a record of success in teaching social skills that might help men enter into or stay in loving relationships with women? no I do not. I will run my posts past Hugh Ristik and hopefully a former pickup/ seduction trainer to make up for my lack of experience.
I support this solution.
Edit: although I’d extend it. Not all males prefer women, not all women prefer males, some women will also want to learn seduction of their preferred sex, and there are a bunch of gender categories in the middle (trans, queer, intersex, etc) who can be either the source or object of sexual interest. I have never heard that seduction is much studied outside male-wants-female.
I have never heard that seduction is much studied outside male-wants-female.
What? Clothing lipstick fingernails haircut tan waxing liposuction diet aerobics… Women strive to improve their seduction abilities much more than men.
Agreed. It is more socially acceptable for women to improve their attractiveness to the opposite sex than it is for men. Women can also get more improvement of their attractiveness through these methods. Additionally, it’s considered acceptable for women to use various forms of psychological influence over men; see this NYT article I critiqued on my blog advocating training men like animals. When men do this, it’s evil.
Hair and clothes are very important for men, though, not just because of physical looks, but because of the status and sexuality that they do (or don’t) convey.
Clothing, haircut, diet and aerobics apply equally to men as well, and waxing has shaving as a counterpart.
Also, do you have figures on what percentage of women undergo liposuction? Or tan regularly?
Seems to me that all you’ve done is generalized from a couple cliches.
The amount of rationalization in this thread is disturbing me. Seriously… apply equally? How many dresses do you have? How many shoes? How many shampoos? Skin care products? Do you regularly shave your arms and legs? Did you ever try to wax any part of your body, and do you have any idea how it feels? Were you ever seriously concerned that the tips of your hair were splitting ever-so-slightly and you must do something about that? Do you want me to go on?
What do you think I’m rationalizing?
You’ve displayed a severe lack of synthesis here. What you should have been thinking about were analogous items that a male would possess for sex appeal. You’re seriously trying to make a point by asking me how many dresses I own? Obviously I own none, and obviously that does not speak at all to the amount of effort I exert trying to impress women. I also own precisely zero skirts, zero bras, and zero tampons!
To my knowledge, a male’s sex appeal is not significantly improved by most of the items you’ve gone to the trouble of listing. I’ve never felt that I would be more sexy if my legs, armpits, etc. were waxed (although I have plucked my unibrow a few times). Nor, with the exception of acne control, do I think skin care products would increase the average man’s sex appeal.
You’ve apparently failed to accurately conceptualize the idea of sex appeal. When I brought this up, rather than ask for apparently relevant or informative information (how much money will I spend on a date? how nice is my watch, jacket, car, apartment, etc? how much effort will I actually go to in order to seduce a woman or get laid? do i wear deodorant/cologne? do i use contact lenses? how often do i shave? how much do i care about hygiene? what kinds of clothes do i wear? what is my job?), you came asking about how many dresses I own and whether I regularly shave my legs, etc.
Male sex appeal is quite different than female sex appeal, but there is a common ground. Clothing, hair (dye, rogaine, plugs, transplant, cutting and grooming), diet and exercise fall inside that common ground.
In a vacuous sense of the word, all organs are reproductive organs and you can feasibly claim that your job and apartment are part of your seduction routine, just like Bill Clinton’s job and apartment were. But can you somehow delineate “seduction-related” activities from “other” activities and somehow make men and women spend the same amount of effort on “seduction-related”, without making “other” an empty set? Try it! I don’t think you will succeed. For example, any reasonable delineation would classify work time as non-seduction-related, which instantly skews the ratio towards women.
This seems to mistreat the Evolutionary-Cognitive Boundary.
Thanks, you’re right. Good catch. The whole discussion is off track.
My figure’s no good for a dress, but I do have more than one good-sized closet full of clothes.
Due to a condition, I mostly just wear sneakers. However, I do have a couple of other pairs of shoes for when it’s really important to look good or match an outfit.
I have one, which is as many as my wife has. How many do you need? I did an evaluation of which shampoo works best with my hair several years ago, and technology really hasn’t advanced enough in the past decade and a half to bother re-evaluating Pantene Pro-V (though knock-off brands do perform just about as well). I also use the same brand of conditioner, and a couple different kinds of hair product.
Not anymore. Cutting oneself shaving is an avenue for infection, and I’ve had problems with skin infection in my legs. Also, my hair grows too quickly so I have serious stubble just a couple hours after shaving. Armpits, though, are a must.
Yes. Really not impressed with the performance as compared to depilatory creams, which are much less painful.
No way. That’s terrible for your hair. I have tried colored gels, but haven’t found any that really work with my color.
Yes, but it’s always a cost-benefit analysis, as I don’t want to cut my hair shorter than I have to, and Pantene does a decent job of ‘repairing’ those sorts of problems, to some extent.
Was there a point to these questions?
Drawing any statistical conclusions from your answer would be invalid because you have self-selected to reply to me. A reply from PeterS, or lack thereof, would be more meaningful, but it still wouldn’t outweigh the data about men I know personally.
Most of this is part of some silly game which women play amongst themselves: some of it may be male-directed, but it’s definitely a minor portion. Overall, F2M seduction and “focused self-improvement” are still woefully underexplored.
Great point. Since women have an easier time finding partners than men due to greater female selectiveness (at least when perceived choice is high, which is the norm for typical dating), women may more easily reach a basic level of satisfaction with their abilities to attract and relate to the opposite sex. Or conversely, women may be less likely to reach a level of dissatisfaction that they are motivated to engage in systematic programs to improve their attractiveness and relational abilities, other than in societally typical ways such as improving physical attractiveness.
Yet I do think women would benefit from improving their ability to attract and relate to men, analogous to what pickup artists are doing. Pickup artists often study men who are “naturals” with women. Likewise, I think there are female “naturals.” I’ve known some women who do very well with men, both in the sense of attracting men, and in fulfilling their goals (typically, long-term romantic relationships). These women take care of themselves physically without being incredibly high maintenance, they are intelligent and accomplished, they are a joy to be around, they like men and understand them relatively well, a large percentage of males who come in contact with them get crushes on them. They don’t have the common complaint of trying to date guys who only want their bodies, and they are in multi-year relationships.
Clearly, there is something that these women are doing right, or something about their attitudes, personalities, and/or upbringings which is leading to across the board positive results with men, while other women of equal or greater physical attractiveness constantly experience difficulties with men. Whatever it is, it can be broken down empirically and other women can learn from it, similar to how pickup artists are breaking down the behavior and mindsets of men who are successful with women.
In fact, I would argue that a lot of the difficulties some women may experience in their interactions with any attractive men with options (including many pickup artists) is due to their lack of corresponding sexual and relational skills. To explain why this is, I’ll back up and use an analogy.
Many men who aren’t very good at interacting with women complain of various difficulties around women. A particular complaint is only being seen as a friend, rather than as a romantic prospective, and may feel that females “lead them on” and then only want friendship. Yet for men who have significant skill at attracting and relating to women, these kinds of problems simply go away, or reduce in frequency. I’m less likely to receive this response nowadays. Often I will see the “let’s just be friends” situation coming from a mile away, in which case I keep her as a friend and pursue other women. If I don’t see it coming, my understanding of female sexual psychology will offer me explanations other than the woman trying to “lead me on.” I have enough perspective to realize that she may have given me a chance to attract her, and I simply failed to convey my attractive qualities to her, or she didn’t find me attractive. Yet I’m not crushed, because I know that I will be meeting new women next weekend, and I am free to maintain a friendship with her if I so choose.
Similarly, many women complain of a situation where they have become sexual with a guy who is “just not that into her.” In fact, this seems to be a fear of some women who hear about pickup artists: they think pickup artists are going to go around seducing them and then moving on. Yet whether a man will move on from a woman after having sex depends on his perception of her appeal for a relationship. This variable is partly under the woman’s control. If she can display qualities that make her appeal to him as a relationship partner, and differentiate herself from other women of equal or greater attractiveness, then he is less likely to move on. Furthermore, with a better knowledge of male sexual psychology, she can more easily guess in the first place whether he would be plausibly romantically interested in her, and move on if not.
There are genuine cases of women taking advantage of men non-sexually, and of men taking advantage of women sexually, by lying about their intentions. There are other cases in which people are ambiguous about what they are looking for, and negligently lead another party who wants something more with them into false beliefs about their availability. Yet in my view, the problems underlying “let’s just be friends” and “pump and dump” scenarios that are equally as common really lie at the feet of the “friend,” or the “dumped.” And those problems include the following:
Lack of qualities that attract the member of the opposite into wanting the same thing as the guy friend or dumped woman does, or presence of unattractive qualities
Presence of attractive qualities, but lack of ability to display them in a timely fashion (e.g. I once went out with a girl who got drunk on our first few dates, which made it hard for me to connect with her real personality, and almost prevented me from realizing how intelligent and accomplished she was)
Lack of understanding of the psychology of the opposite sex, leading to over-investing that will not be reciprocated, walking blindly into rejection, and then blaming the other sex for it
People tend to use their sexual and relational skills to seek what kind of arrangement they want with members of the opposite sex. Yet if members of sex A want arrangement X with members of sex B, while members of sex A are lacking qualities, skills, and understanding necessary for members of sex B to want that kind of relationship with members of sex A, then we have a curious zero-sum situation: a member of sex B’s goals will be different from a member of sex A’s goals with each other. Since members of sex B finding members of sex A underwhelming in a certain way, their preferred arrangement will be to have a narrow interaction in which they get what they want, while members of sex A do not get what they want (and perhaps feel “used”). However, if members of sex A had more “game” (or whatever you want to call it), then they would be less likely to encounter the situation of members of sex A only wanting them in such a narrow way, in which case members of sex B would use their own “game” in order to seek arrangements that are desired more mutually.
Either men or women are A or B depending on the context. Imagine a matrix of group A’s level of game crossed with group B’s level of game (where I define “game” as ability, conscious or otherwise, to understand the psychology of the opposite sex, and to attract and induce members of the opposite sex to be more likely to want the kind of sexual/romantic situation that you desire with them; I have reservations about the word “game”, but it’s late and I need to save typing):
Neither A nor B have game: mutual blundering
A has more game than B: A “uses” B because A only wants a narrow kind of interaction with B
B has more game than A: B “uses” A, reverse of above
A and B both have considerable game: both groups are more likely to want non-zero-sum interactions with each other because they both desire each other in the ways that the other desires them, and members of both groups can more easily identify and avoid potentially zero-sum situations where an asymmetricality of desires occurs
In short, a woman with relational game should be less likely to fear men with seduction ability, because men will be more likely to fall for her.
Assuming that individuals cannot systematically change the preferences of the opposite sex, the best way for both men and women to get want they want sexually and romantically is by members of both sexes:
a) maximally understanding the preferences the of the opposite sex, and b) maximally learning to fulfill the preferences of the opposite sex, subject to certain basic constraints of authenticity, ethics, and one’s own preferences
Rational and empirical investigation would be helpful in pursuing these goals. For now, people will have to do this on their own, or with like minded people. Yet in the future, rather than make everyone reinvent the real, these abilities should be instilled by general socialization. To some extent, they already are (at least if you were popular when growing up). But the average quality of advice about the opposite sex is laughably bad for both sexes (especially for men) in society, and dominated by oversimplified stereotypes (e.g. “men only want one thing”) and true-but-useless platitudes (“just be yourself,” “every woman wants something different”).
This should be a top-level post. It would counter both the pervasive misunderstanding of what PUA is about and Eliezer’s point about PUA being locker-room man talk.
I would consider cleaning it up and re-writing it as a top level post if others request, and/or consider it out of place in this thread.
Please do. It deserves to be top-level.
Downvote explanation requested. I am already considering moving this post somewhere else; it is on-topic for the comment it is responding to, but it may drift from the topic of the thread. Objections to the argument of this comment, or of the language and framings it contains, is also invited.
Perhaps use “positive sum” instead of “non-zero-sum”
It is possible that I have misunderstood your comment. So, I hope that you will not mind if I reiterate in order to make sure that I have understood correctly: Women spend time on “clothing lipstick etc” primarily because they are concerned about the impression other women will form of them.
I’m afraid that any response will be purely anecdotal: but I can say that I am much more likely to shave my legs when I go to have coffee with a group of women, as compared to with a group that contains men. And I am almost certain to shave my legs before going to coffee with a man who I would be interested in dating.
Best, rela
Systematically?
Also, a whole lot of that stuff (most?) is for intra-women signaling.
What do you mean by “systematically”? There’s lots of magazines for females that discuss the exact set of topics I enumerated, add sex and relationship advice into the bargain, and very little else. This approach works, so women don’t need to study evo-psych or whatever PUAs study.
I defy your claim about signaling because it seems wildly improbable to me. Why would women want to signal their attractiveness to other women? Give a citation or something.
Shoes and handbags are probably an adequate citation. Clothing as well, perhaps, but that’s at least somewhat ambiguous. There may be a lot of men out there who pay close attention to the shoes and handbags of the women they are interested in, but I can’t say I’ve met any of them. I’m not entirely sure what the motivation is for women who buy these things (I dated a woman with numerous $500+ purses, and she was in college), but I am pretty sure it’s unrelated to attracting men, and it would make a great deal of sense if it’s status signaling towards other women.
There may be a lot of men out there who pay close attention to the shoes and handbags of the women they are interested in, but I can’t say I’ve met any of them.
That’s a strawman argument. Of course men don’t pay close attention to the individual aspects, only the general impression matters. The point is to make the guy want you, not make him want your handbag. I don’t mentally note the price of girls’ shoes and purses, but I certainly note when they fit in with and “enhance” the rest of their attire; knowing some girls with an extraordinary sense of color and style taught me to perceive this stuff consciously some years ago, but it’s always had an unconscious influence as far as I feel.
On the other hand, I can’t dismiss the idea of signaling as completely as before. I just haven’t yet heard a convincing explanation why women would benefit from signaling high status to each other, as opposed to (say) signaling friendliness and caring.
I don’t think it’s a straw man argument. Yes if a woman is wearing a nice dress and a pair of Crocs, that’s an issue, but from what I’ve seen the marginal effect of shoes is pretty small from most men’s perspectives. My impression, both from personal experience and from popular culture, is that women actually notice accessories and men do not. That sounds like signaling towards women; in fact, women I know who spend a lot on accessories have admitted as much to me. If someone has actually gathered hard data on this, I can’t find it and would love to see it, but I’d be really surprised if women who shop for accessories seriously are doing so to attract men.
So? The behaviour either happens or it doesn’t. Your ability to explain it is totally irrelevant. Granted my evidence is undesirably anecdotal, so you may have not seen evidence that women buy accessories for other women to see. Still, the fact that you can’t explain it (especially that you can’t explain it with ev-psych specifically) does not preclude or remove the event from existence. I’d still believe men have nipples even if I couldn’t figure out how it were evolutionarily advantageous.
But I’ll try to offer an explanation (and an alternative). People seek social status. That simple. Women may also want to signal friendliness and caring (they’re not opposed to status), but they benefit strongly from being high-status. Similarly, it may simply be a social thing. My parents encouraged me to dress one way and not another. Clothing is a significant indicator of social status. Thus, people come to believe a certain style is “right,” and what style that is does a lot to signal what social niche they come from. This lets the whole thing operate without any consciousness of signaling.
An alternative. People value looking good for obvious reasons. The only evaluation they can make of “looking good” is by their own criteria, thus they seek primarily to look good to themselves. Thus, if some women like accessories, they will seek them out seriously, because they want to look good and they view them as vital to achieving that end, even if men don’t agree.
Hah. Neither of your offered explanations discriminates between men and women (the first one would actually imply men dressing up more, because men have more to gain from status), and neither explains why women consciously try to stand out from the group when dressing up, e.g. get upset when they see some other woman dressed identically (both explanations would imply the reverse reaction). My obvious explanation of sexual selection accounts for both.
Your “obvious” explanation of sexual selection does not explain why (some) women spend inordinate amounts of time and money seeking out accessories that men don’t notice or care about, and continue to seek these out well after they have married and (sometimes) over the objections of their spouses. Also, I was talking about accessories, not clothing.
My explanation does not discriminate between men and women; society does. Each has a different method of showing off status. Men show off status via different accessories, namely gizmos like phones and watches and conspicuous consumption and in some cases shoes and jewelery (and cars, but those signal between genders, as well). And just because men may have more to gain by signaling status, that does not predict that they will gain status through the same mechanisms. Men who spend a lot more on clothes than their actual status justifies tend to be looked down upon by other men—status is one of those things that if you try too hard to show you have it, you lose it. The same standard (to my knowledge) does not generally apply to women.
Or, more simply, most men don’t really see much about how they dress (or their appearance generally) as relating to their social status, where more women see it as being more important. This would be an evolutionary motivator (show high status) operating through a social outlet (by dressing a certain way).
I was explicitly not talking about clothing, but about accessories, so the “same outfit” really is a straw man. Though I am uncertain how sexual selection explains it better than status signaling (if someone is wearing the same thing as you that seems like it would obviously dilute your status signal heavily), but that’s not the point since I was talking about accessories specifically.
My “people value looking good” also explains both of these phenomena FWIW; men don’t see nice clothing as necessary to looking good, and women might have their self-image of looking good (and special) harmed if they show up dressed exactly like another woman.
Since I don’t care as much about what I wear as most women (evidence: I own exactly one pair of shoes, typically wear no jewelry except a digital watch, and usually go at least several months between reluctant visits to clothing vendors), I can’t access a lot of this psychology via introspection. However, I suspect that when women dress up, the idea is to display a skill, at least as much as it is to display status. The skill is to create a unique, yet suitably mainstream-attractive look (or to hit some sweet spot of quirkiness). Showing up in duplicate outfits impugns the skills of both women (or more, if you wind up with a situation like that scene in “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying”). If you wear expensive things, most other people cannot afford those articles and you get an automatic “uniqueness” edge; this explains why people who can afford very expensive accessories deplore knockoffs.
I agree pretty much entirely; I didn’t want to get into the issue of displaying skill and taste, since it gets even more complex and my post seemed long enough.
I’m not sure about the distaste for knockoffs coming from a desire for “uniqueness.” I don’t think that rich women mind that other rich women have the same, say, Luis Vuitton bag; I think they mind when any woman who wants it can have a Luis Vuitton bag that looks like what they spent serious money on. It ceases to be a clear status symbol. It seems that the effect on signaling is greater than the effect on uniqueness.
I’ve seen a different evolutionary explanation, which is that females’ gene propagation is best served by cultivating uniqueness, in order to convince a man that there is no one else like her. Whereas a man’s gene propagation is best served (if he’s not the leader of the group, that is) if all men appear to be the same.
The article I read about this discussed dancing as an example of this phenomenon, noting that in nearly every known culture, traditional dances done by females are either individual or emphasize individual characteristics, whereas dances done by men are synchronous group affairs in which they all try to look the same, in order to disguise their individual differences and conceal their relative skills.
There was also a bunch of stuff about scent, martial ability, and other signals being read in male/female dances, how certain male-female dance moves common to many cultures have the function of bringing a woman’s face past a man’s underarm so she can smell his genetic compatibility or lack thereof, how men’s skill at individual dance affects both their perceived desirability as sex partners by women and how likely they are to stray… even an explanation of why men are generally far more reluctant to dance or learn how to do so than women are, unless they are confident they’ll be highly skilled at it.
Anyway, the strong implication I got was that women would likely have evolved to have a negative reaction to looking the same as another woman, because it would make them appear more interchangeable, and thus less likely to sustain the commitment of a man through pregnancy and childbirth (vs. “losing” the man to her lookalike competitor).
Whatever form this reaction manifests in—whether as just a feeling of being gauche or unskilled, or as an elaborate theory of “objectification”, there would certainly be a strong evolutionary benefit to such an adaptation, and quite likely a bigger benefit than would come from merely displaying skill to other women. Of course, it might also be that skill at presentation also signals to other women, “I am a strong competitor, so don’t try to take ‘my’ man” (whether ‘my’ means the one they have, or the one they’re going after).
In reality, the wealthier you are, the less personal skill is involved, to the point where red-carpet celebrities are dressed by couturiers (i.e. at x event so-and-so was dressed by Marc Jacobs). I suppose the less status you have, the more skill you need, but I think that skill is employed for the purpose of faking higher status.
You can still go very, very wrong despite spending a lot of money. Celebrities with couture designers are in kind of a special position, since no matter how bad they look, they have a significant power to define what counts as fashionable. Rich people who are not fashion icons can go very very wrong, even (and in some cases especially) if they buy whatever couture the celebrities were wearing.
I don’t like your explanations because they don’t really explain anything, just shuffle complexity around. “See, there’s this thing called phlogiston, err status, that says you have to do this if you’re a man but something different if you’re a woman, for reasons unspecified.”
Take a woman to a store and you’ll see that the process of buying a handbag is guided by reasoning very similar to the process of buying a dress. The dress is clearly for attracting mates; what if the handbag is just a side effect, some clever marketer’s way to hack the mate attraction instinct?
Easy. Price and conspicuous branding. There are many, many accessories (and regular clothing) that do not look all that much different from cheaper substitutes, yet cost a very large amount of money. Think in particular of products that display very large logos or brand names—you think people buy these because the logos look so good? My favorite example is “celebrity”-style sunglasses—the huge sunglasses some celebrities wear in order to make them hard to recognize. This is a product that attractive people wear for the express purpose of hiding how they look. Yet (among some subgroups) these are quite popular, and I know women who will drop several hundred dollars on a designer pair of these, despite having a face that they are not served by hiding.
It is clear that (some) women (and men) value such products precisely because they cost so much. Mate selection does not explain why people would spend a whole lot more on an item that does not make them look better. Status signaling explains this quite well; the purpose of the $1000 bag isn’t to look good so much as it is to say, “I spent $1000 on this bag.” An ev-psych approach would explain why men would want to show this off, hence the Ferrari, but I don’t really see how showing off wealth would help women attract desirable men, certainly not to the extent that some women spend on these things, and certainly not after they already have a mate.
And phlogiston? You sincerely believe that men and women signal status by doing the same things? Or do you not believe that social status exists? Do you think that a man and a woman both owning a red Ferrari signal the exact same things? Do you think people will view a man with a $1000 handbag just like they’ll view a woman with a $1000 handbag? “Phlogiston” makes a delightful straw man, but a terrible argument. Social status exists, and men and women do actually do different things to express having it, because society expects different things of men and women.
Some things, particularly human social customs, are really, really complicated. The fact that you would prefer a simple and elegant answer does not change this brute fact.
Peruse Vogue any time. None of that stuff is for males. it signals things like: I’m rich, I’m young, I’m cultured, I’m upper-class, I’m able to devote effort to display, I’m socially well-connected...
What evolutionary reason could a woman have for wanting to signal being rich and cultured to other women? ’Cause it doesn’t make those other women want to become her allies; rather, it aggravates them. And do you consider it a weird coincidence that all the things I listed (tan, lipstick etc.) also increase the woman’s attractiveness to men?
I’m sorry, but that’s just a wierd question. Why wouldn’t women want to play status games?
Most of those things were originally developed as seduction aids and do double duty, but they have been adopted as status aids and probably are more important in that role. (Signaling only to men, women can get away with much less work—compare porn.)
In their original pure seduction aid role, some stuff—lipstick and perfume for example—used to be extremely disreputable.
Also some obvious fashion fetishes are void of signal to males—handbags are an example.
It seems to me a lot of this has to be female-female signaling as proposed. Most men do not seem to care what I’m wearing, and would probably prefer it was ‘nothing’. I have NEVER had a guy bring up something I’m wearing unless it was clearly being used as an opening for chatting me up.
For the record (I don’t think this is objectifying, but my calibration’s pretty confused lately), yes we’d probably prefer it was ‘nothing,’ but we still notice what you’re wearing and respond strongly to it, and no, it’s not as simple as “less is better”.
Well, I wouldn’t say that women can not wear clothes that men find attractive/unattractive, or otherwise interesting. But I know from conversations that many men consider a good majority of what women wear to be pointless and stupid looking. All the guys I know are practically offended by those baby-doll dress, or stuff like shoes with bows on them.
I have to agree. I mean, I like dressing up, but there is definite limit of like an hour which I will not go beyond. If an hour of work can’t make you look good, no amount of time will.
I assume ‘chatting me up’ is being used here to mean something involving dating? An internet search for the expression just turned up synonyms for “making conversation”, which wouldn’t make sense in context.
Curious… where are you from?
ETA: thanks to anonym below.
In that case, it seems odd to me that guys you know never bring up anything you’re wearing. Do you have many male friends? Maybe this is a cultural thing, or am I the ‘odd one out’ here?
“Chatting me up” == “hitting on me”. It’s a British colloquialism.
Thanks! I’m a student of the British language, but I’m hardly fluent.
I’m residing in the northwest USA. Pretty much all of my friends are males. No, literally all of them.
You didn’t answer. Why would women play status games? Men play status games to rise in the dominance hierarchy and ultimately get many girls; that’s the obvious evolutionary reason.
My working hypothesis for now is simply that women claim they strive to look good primarily to show off to other women, and you’re accepting this claim uncritically. The reason they claim that (and actually believe that, evolution’s weird) is that explicitly admitting that you dress up to steal high status men from other women would make those other women feel threatened, so this behavior has evolved into a harmless “game”. That also addresses your objection why women adopt those ornate displays instead of just undressing.
There actually are reasonable-sounding evolutionary hypotheses behind status competition for women in addition to competition for males: competition over food, particularly food for infants.
Further reading: Male, Female by David Geary Mother Nature by Sarah Hrdy
Also recommended: Anne Campbell’s A Mind of Her Own: The Evolutionary Psychology of Women, which has chapters on status, competition, and aggression amongst women.
Thanks! I found this review, and at first look it seems to support me more than y’all: unless I’m reading it wrong, it says that women’s desire to look good is explained only by competition for good mates. Now, I’m a total amateur and would love to be corrected, but the arguments offered so far just aren’t very convincing.
Pecking order.
Evolutionary reason? Sounds like you’re automatically discounting the possibility that the specific status games of a specific group of people in our specific society are a result of cultural development that has no particular basis in evolutionary psychology.