Contra Wentworth on Physical Attractiveness for Men
This is a response to John Wentworth’s recent article, Why Physical Attractiveness Matters for Men’s Dating Prospects. I have no quibble with the thesis stated in the title, but a lot of the body of the article struck me as off-base. When John sent me the article, I told him the article seemed “fundamentally confused.” He asked for details, and this article is my answer.
Here I list and argue with four premises I detected in John’s article. Some of them he said in so many words; some are my (possibly-incorrect) inferences.
I have my own weird perspective on a lot of this stuff that isn’t necessarily to be trusted. To avoid just arguing purely from that weird perspective, I ran several glosso surveys to gather data. Glosso data itself is pretty sus! I could only survey people’s self-reports, which could easily be inaccurate. The surveys have pretty low N. The population on glosso is itself weird; it’s Aella’s social network, originally seeded with Aella’s slutty, high-body-count, looks-conscious friends. (I say this with love, as someone pretty firmly rooted in that social network, sharing those characteristics!) So we shouldn’t put too much weight on any of this data. I used this data source because it was readily available and better than just going with N=1.
Premise #1: Eye contact is typically on the path from “we’re strangers” to “we’re flirting”
One woman’s ungeneralizable field report
In John’s article, he seems to take it as a given that eye contact is on the path from “we’re strangers” to “we’re flirting.” This premise was the one that stood out the most to me as misguided.
I flirt a lot. I get to know people pretty easily. I’ve navigated the strangers-to-flirting transition hundreds of times. But I can’t think of a single time in my entire life that it started with wordless eye contact.
Maybe it’s just me? Maybe I’m the weird one? But this is where I wanted to start my investigation.
First, why doesn’t making a connection run through eye contact for me?
Well, because eye contact is way too fucking intimate of a place to start, that’s why. If it’s literally the first thing that happens, it’s opening the door to who-even-knows-what, and the odds of me liking the results are very low. Most humans, drawn from the population at large, are not sexually attractive to me, and I can’t tell which ones are actually interesting just by looking at them.
Eye contact is an invitation. It says, “Come over and talk to me, I’m already interested in you, you’re not going to get shot down.”[1] And that’s just not true. I’m not already interested in him. I probably am going to shoot him down. I don’t want to engage in false advertising like that, and I don’t want to suffer through a horrible, awkward conversation that I brought upon myself.[2]
So no, I’m definitely never going to start there. I’m going to gather information some other way first.
Let’s say the info-gathering goes well, and I do want to initiate contact. What then?
Well, I personally am not going to be coy about it. Making eye contact seems kind of hard to do, easy to miss, and easy to misinterpret. I’m going to go talk to him. I do think I’m weird in this way, I think many women have much more skill at non-verbal flirtation than I do. Plausibly I could work on it. But maybe looking at the inner workings of one direct and autistic girl will tell you something about other women… especially if, perhaps, dating direct and autistic girls does tend to work out well for you in the end. Hypothetically.
Okay, but what about other women, though
So… how typically is eye contact on the strangers-to-flirting path? I turned to glosso to find out.
This paints a picture that goes something like this:
she notices you and is attracted to you (a given of the questions)
she probably takes a non-obvious action to gather more info about you (54% non-obvious vs. 28% obvious)
once she decides she’s willing to make contact,
~50% chance she takes an obvious action (makes eye contact, goes up and talks to you)
~50% chance she takes a more subtle or invisible action (joins the same conversation group, becomes receptive to your advances)
I note again the the sample size is very small here, but the trends have seemed reasonably stable as data has accrued. If anything changes wildly as more data accumulates I will update this post.
A richer model of initiating contact
It seems to me that, even for women who give a lot of weight to physical attraction, you’ve got to give them more to go on before any of them are going to be making eyes at you – and some never will. You need to facilitate their info-gathering, so they’re predisposed to receive your overtures well. And even with that, you probably need to make the first move, unless you are trying to date me specifically.[3]
And if you’re John-like, you want to do all of that efficiently: you want a decent ROI on your efforts.
You’re going to need a better working model of where to direct your efforts.
We’ll come back to that later.
Premise #2: Being physically attractive works on enough of the right women to make it a viable mainline strategy
John’s argument here is that physical attraction matters. It matters to a large fraction of women, and it matters to the women that a John-like guy wants to meet.
How big a factor is physical attraction?
This one always sounds fake to me, because physical attraction is pretty low on my own personal list; I tend to run much more on the sorts of characteristics you notice by reading someone’s blog. But people vary, and I do see some of my female friends filtering on physical attractiveness. How much does it matter, to how many people?
First I just straight-up asked.
The mean for women was 38%; the mean for men was 56%.
My own personal answer to this is somewhere in the bottom two buckets (0-15%); it depends a lot on context. I expected other women to weight it higher than I did, and I expected men to weight it higher than women did, and I was right, but I was surprised by the magnitude on both counts. What are you people even doing. The quality of the blog really matters and I will die on this hill.
Anyway.
How efficient is physical attraction at getting you laid?
Next, I wanted to know how much that physical attraction translates into action. John’s post is saturated with the desire for efficiency. I don’t think he’s saying that every lead needs to convert to sex, but I do have the impression he’s pretty sex-driven, and that connections that are going to be impossible or very difficult to convert to sex over time are less interesting.
I had a guess. Maybe if a woman’s decision-making is fueled significantly by physical attraction, then she really doesn’t need a lot of time to make a decision; she already knows most of what she needs to know in the first five seconds. To be generous, I decided to give her five full hours to take a really good look.
My model of John is interested in women who make up their minds about connections quickly, so one important question is: are the quick ones driven significantly by looks?
My guess was that there would be two clusters: women who make sexual connections quickly and easily, with an emphasis on looks, and women whose discriminate mostly on factors that take longer to assess.
(My personal answer: I’m quick, and it’s less hotness-driven. I’m a fast and decisive blog-reader.)
So I asked:
Women: Do you typically have sex with a new partner in less than 5 hours of spending time with them? And is your decision to have sex more than 30% based on their looks?
More hotness-driven (>30%) | Less hotness-driven (<30%) | Total by speed | |
Faster (<5 hrs) | 13% | 8% | 21% |
Slower (>5 hrs) | 26% | 34% | 60% |
Total by hotness-driven | 39% | 42% | |
I don’t know | 18% |
(Note: there’s a disparity between these two batches of results; both questions agree that ~40% of women believe that less than 30% of their attraction was about looks. But the previous question had 59% saying that 30% or more of their attraction was about looks, vs. 42% saying that here, and 18% saying “I don’t know.” Perhaps the women who are more into physical attraction also had more trouble understanding the 2x2-formatted question. Or perhaps that’s just me being unnecessarily snarky.)
Physical attraction does seem like a viable pathway, but to a narrower target
My takeaways from these two questions are that physical attraction matters a lot to some women, and those women are disproportionately likely to act quickly on that attraction.
This premise is holding up okay!
It’s important to note, though, that you’ve narrowed the pool of women pretty significantly if you focus on this pathway specifically – but maybe that’s the right trade to make.
Premise #3: The effort-to-results curve on making yourself physically attractive is favorable
John’s premise here is: “You can pay an upfront cost to get in good shape, dress well, etc. You do it basically once.” And then you get results.
But do you, though? What’s the effort-to-results curve on this?
Let’s take a bunch of components of “becoming physically attractive” and order them by how much investment they will require. Cheap and easy ones first, difficult ones at the end. Here’s the list I made after thinking about it for less than two minutes.
hygiene (be clean, smell nice)
grooming (good hairstyle, facial hair that suits you)
clothing (fits you well, looks good)
weight (try GLP-1s if you are fat, but they don’t work for everyone)
muscles (effortful, takes upkeep. don’t overdo it!)
teeth (e.g. orthodontia or dental veneers. expensive)
face (e.g. plastic surgery. expensive, invasive, not always possible to do much)
height (no currently known solution)
The question is, how far down this list can you afford to go, and will that be enough? And the answer to that depends in part on what raw materials you’re starting with. Is “hot” even achievable for you? I have no idea, it varies a lot! Maybe you got lucky and you don’t need the help with the last three or four things on this list. That’s great!
Probably everyone who is in the dating market should do the first few things on the list, but if you are short and have an unfortunate face, then that’s bad luck. It is not the slightest bit your fault, but it does make the entire “just be hot” strategy much less viable for you. I’m sorry.
So does this premise hold up? Probably for some people! To read John’s accounts, it does not actually hold up for him. He’s in great shape and he already dresses well, but he reports that no strangers are making eye contact with him. (Sorry, John, I don’t mean to pick on you, but your data does seem to directly contradict your thesis, here.)
Premise #4: Being physically attractive saves you other kinds of time and effort
This argument, as I understood it, rests on a flirtation model that goes:
physically attractive → woman likes you → eye contact → flirtation → victory
John posed several alternative ways to make initial contact that he said “sucked ass,” such as spending social time around women so they could get to know him, learning to hit on women through banter and giving compliments, or waiting until late at night when the women were drunk and sleepy and would be amenable to hooking up.
The promise of being physically attractive is that you could skip all that, because women would decide they liked you based on looks alone.
This line of reasoning falls down in two places already covered by graphs above.
First, when a woman finds you physically attractive, she doesn’t like you yet, she just finds you hot. And as per the data above, her next move is not usually to make eye contact, it’s to gather more information somehow. In many cases, she’s observing you, trying to decide if she’s going to signal overtly or not. Whatever she’s looking for… is she going to see it? You’re going to have to attend to that, and some of the best ways to attend to it are by being pleasantly social in ways that, to John, suck ass.
Second, you still have to get from “flirtation” to “victory,” whether victory is setting up a second encounter, taking her home that night, or whatever. And yes, I get that’s much easier than getting the flirtation started in the first place. I concede the point that the initial contact is the hardest. But still… there is still some form of attraction she’s still looking for at that point; 75% of women surveyed said they derived half or more of their decision to get closer to factors other than physical attraction. So you’re going to have to round out your game somehow.
The premise that you can save a tremendous amount of time does not seem to hold up.
My prescription: Be well rounded. No, not like that.
What you want is to be attractive in many ways, while not being obviously unattractive in any ways, and do all that efficiently, so you can keep your prospect-funnel full cheaply, if you know what I mean.
I think it is most useful to think across many dimensions at once, and buy cheap and easy results everywhere simultaneously. Once that’s done, maybe you’re already seeing the results you want, or maybe you specialize further.
So yes, do the first half of the physical attractiveness list, by all means. But also do the first half of the “confidence and poise” list and the the “good banter” list and the “putting people at ease” list and the “projecting personality” list and the “good listener” list and the “good social reputation” list and the “checks out online” list and probably a bunch more. The construction of those lists is currently left as an exercise for the reader.
And finally, consider getting some wingwomen on your side. Have them spy on you in social situations and provide field notes on how you come across, which lists to prioritize. What’s already going well for you, and where are you losing prospects? Try to figure that out.
Spending more time at the gym might be a way of avoiding working on the actual bottlenecks in your game.
- ^
If you make eye contact at a sex club or a sex party, eye contact is an even bigger invitation than that.
- ^
Other women say this more strongly. They are worried that the guy will be “a creep.” I haven’t done a field study on what they mean by this, but I think it means that the guy will assume too much, get in their space, try to get handsy, stuff like that. Making eye contact with potential creeps doesn’t just feel potentially awkward, it feels unsafe.
- ^
With me specifically, the outcome of the game has usually been decided before you have even considered your first move.
This post is great! Thank you so much for writing it! The main reason I write dating/relationship posts is the hope that other people will come along and tell me what I’m missing, and this post really nailed it.
My biggest update was… five hours!?!? Going through the list of women I’ve slept with, the median is around 30 minutes of direct interaction between first meeting and sex. Granted, some of that was at RMN, but even without those cases the median is still around 30-60 minutes. Five hours sounds absolutely insane to me. That probably explains a large chunk of my confusion; apparently people are spending very large amounts of time flirting/courting/etc.
(… and yeah, I’m pretty happy to filter out two thirds of women on the basis of taking that long. I mean, if she was going to organize fun dates early on that would be another story, but that’s not normally how things work.)
My second biggest update was… apparently about half of women will not offer a visible sign of interest at all until a guy approaches first? That means half of women are basically only open to guys who are playing the numbers game, i.e. just making advances on tons of women prior to them showing any interest, most of whom will not turn out to be interested. I suddenly have way more appreciation for the guys who play the numbers game.
(I am still not going to play the numbers game myself, because as you correctly noticed, I am all about not spending insane-to-me amounts of marginal time and effort on dating/courtship. I have other stuff to do with my time.)
Those sure were some updates. Thank you again.
Man, sometimes I don’t even know what data to offer you, because I would not have guessed that “five hours” would be an update. In fact, I think five hours is a very small amount of time to invest by most people’s lights.
Really glad my post helped. You’re welcome.
Agreed, it’s probably a bit bimodal, but I suspect that, for the median human, the median time they invest before sleeping with a partner is counted in weeks, even months.
I think that The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists claims 7 hours on average of interaction. But in the olden days, you were only supposed to date every week, so that could easily turn into weeks depending on the person.
What I’m getting from this comment is your goal in relationships is to have as much sex as possible as fast as possible with as many women as possible? IMO, when you’re writing advice articles, you should probably state explicitly that that’s your goal, and you don’t care for romance and such. Most men aren’t in your target audience, after all.
I mean… sorry for stating the obvious, but have you considered finding women that you really like spending time with? (The sex is way hotter that way too!) Correct me if I’m wrong, but it sounds like from your perspective, going on dates and spending time together is a painful cost you pay, to get the benefit of sex. Surely there are women for whom the time spent together is a benefit, not a cost? (Speaking from personal experience—I’ve been in love once, in a many year relationship; it was the kind of relatiomship that made me understand where all those silly romantic cliches romantic about love came from, you know? And spending time with her was always the most fun and pleasant and enjoyable option any given day, putting sex entirely aside.)
But yeah if that doesn’t apply to you, I think you should label your advice columns “Relationship advice for aromantic men” or something.
Not at all. But I’m definitely coming in with an attitude of “How soon is interacting with this person going to be net positive for me?” and “How soon is she going to pull her weight in our interactions at all?”. In practice, sex is by far the most common way to get a positive answer to those questions quickly. (Other paths to a positive answer in-principle include unusually good dancing or her organizing fun outings or me learning interesting things from her. But all of those are rare, and it’s extremely rare for any of them to be as good as my typical sex.)
I’m not fully aromantic, but I’ve only felt limerance toward one person in the last ten years and that was pretty brief, so in practice basically yes, aromantic is a reasonable way of looking at it. And of course there’s the whole no oxytocin thing.
The interesting part of this is how you ground “net positive”, and what this does to your strategies.
To give a toy example, say you meet a woman who teaches you how to change a car tire, which comes in handy down the road when your tire blows out. It sounds like you think “Yep, value acquired” at step 2, because “this is interesting” which can serve as a proxy for “might become useful to me someday”. But you could also think “Nothing this woman has told me has been useful at all” right up until your tire blows out—at which point you think “Ah, she’s starting to pull her weight!”.
It’s just a different point at which you measure the expectation of value. Do you recognize “this is useful in expectation” because you know flat tires happen, or do you wait for it to be proven that you will get a flat tire? Or hold out even further with something like “Yeah, but maybe someone would have stopped and helped if it didn’t look like I was already taken care of it, so she still hasn’t proven value?”
This can go in the other direction too, with “Ooh! Interesting person! Value acquired!” before she tells you this fact at all, because you recognize in expectation that she’s likely to tell you things which are then likely to prove useful. If you do this, people can become positive sum much more quickly just because the accounting is changed to incorporate longer time horizons and more abstract abstractions. You don’t need her to save you from a flat tire immediately, so long as you can predict immediately that she’s likely to provide value in some way down the road.
The relational strategy you describe is very Kegan stage 2, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it does suggest there’s a lot of value in understanding what stage 3 would look like and how it might outperform stage 2 for you even by your own values. For me, it was a very eye opening experience to see what it’s like taking an inherent interest in people. Before having this experience I would have written it off as “But what use is this person to me? There’s nothing interesting here, so ‘taking an interest’ would be fake and wrong”, but it turns out I was missing what it’s like to do it right. Done right, “inherent interest in people” still serves the self, just with implicit recognition of the fact that at some point trying to add every detail to the ledger costs more than it pays for.
The tricky part about this is that it’s not really about “conscious recognition of these facts”, but the lenses we use to experience the world. Sex feels “inherently good”, for example, whereas talking to some girl might not. But casual sex can lose the reward once we reflect on whether this formerly-expected-value is actually cashing out anywhere, and talking to new women can begin to feel rewarding once we realize that this one actually might. What can feel like “my terminal values, not to be fucked with” often turn out to be cached instrumental values for which we’ve lost the audit trail. The value here is in redoing the calculations so that we’re not left valuing the wrong things by our own (smarter, more reflectively coherent) values. And the trick is that until you can represent what it’d feel like to to have great sex and be “meh” about the great sex, and why that might be desirable, it’s hard to even see the distinctions being updated.
You know, I used to take an interest in people by default, at least to a much greater extent than I do now.
Five years of living in the Bay Area EA/rat community beat that out of me. In hindsight, years later, taking an interest in the people around me by default cost huge amounts of time, it never did pay off overall, and it probably never will. Experience mostly taught me that marginal time just doing my own work is more valuable than marginal time at conferences, marginal time talking to other researchers, marginal time at house parties, etc.
I didn’t end up here by failing to try the “inherent interest in people” thing. I tried it, for years. It did not actually pay off, on a long timescale. Turns out reality is under no obligation to make people worthwhile to interact with.
Clearly you have very unusual preferences/opinions, and ordinary relationships are highly unlikely to satisfy you. I’d say that your best bet is to become famous/impressive enough that an exceptional woman sends you a dating application (the Eliezer Yudkowsky/Scott Alexander strategy).
He’s already on it.
I’m not talking about “by default”. Of course that is going to fail, for the same reason as “assume by default that every scoop of dirt has a diamond in it” will fail. Most people aren’t interesting, and if you’re paying attention to how the expected payoffs evolve, it doesn’t take years to notice that you need to be interested a lot fewer people.
The fact that you frame this as “I tried it, for years” shows that you’re taking a very low resolution long feedback loop approach to this. The things I’m talking about don’t show up at this resolution, and take too many feedback loops to develop on these timescales.
The question isn’t “Is it better to assume every scoop of dirt has a diamond in it, or give up altogether”, it’s… well, a bunch of things, but “Does this particular scoop have a diamond in it?” is one. “What am I even mining for, anyway?” is another. Who did I take an interest in, why did I think they were worth being interested in, how did I get that wrong, what is the updated set of criteria for someone to be interesting? How much can I trust my own predictions about who will prove worthwhile?
What I’m pointing at has nothing to do with the answer you have to any specific question. If you think most people are uninteresting, fine. Me too man, me too.
What I’m pointing at is that the presuppositions you’re using, and the way you frame things, heavily suggest that there are specific questions you’re not asking—or at least, not sitting with for long enough for the answers to shift. There’s a fluidity to be had, which allows for better conformance to reality, which isn’t showing up in how you’re writing about these things.
Great points, well-stated. Perhaps worth a top-level post if you feel so motivated. I mean people would definitely benefit, but it’s your time and I’m not likely to do it even though I agree with all of this and find inherent interest in people to also be valuable to me personally.
Kegan 2 and Kegan 4 often look pretty similar to each other when all you have is a quick glance from the outside. I will grant you that nothing John said in his post or his comment would persuade you he’s running 4, though!
This feels like the wrong read. Guys who do well here are not necessarily “making advances” or “playing the numbers game”. I think they’re probably just talking to them and getting to know them a bit like a normal person and at some point they may show a sign that they are interested (or become interested! I think you’re still working on the premise that women have decided if you are attractive right at the start when they first see you, and then are waiting to reveal this later on, when in fact it can happen minutes, hours, days later).
The “numbers game” guys aren’t normally showing genuine interest or really treating women like people at all. They’re just shooting their shot and then leaving when it doesn’t work.
In my world the typical time is more like 5 weeks or months :)
Actually, limb lengthening surgery is a thing. It just sucks. I know about this because my partner, who really likes height differences, sometimes flutters her eyelashes at me and coos about how maybe I oughta go get some “shinplants.” I’m 6′.
Holy crap, everything in Gattaca is already true.
1) I think getting taller still belongs at the end of the difficulty list, even with that.
2) Dude. Just get some platform shoes. I’m sure they’re just as sexy.
I’m curious as to what makes for an attractive blog in your eyes? If someone was optimizing to pick up blogophiles like you, what tips would you have for them?
My advice is both obvious and pretty hard to execute on. Have great, well-reasoned insights and write well.
You should be wary of simply asking people how much they care about attractiveness and treating the responses as accurate. This is well-studied and it’s one of those classic questions where revealed preferences diverge significantly from socially desirable stated preferences.
Yup. As I said right up front, one of the main reasons the data is sus is that it’s self-reported.
Let me add an interesting perspective to this. The reason I dare to call my own viewpoint ‘interesting’ is because it’s one you don’t come across very often. I was assigned male at birth and am currently in my first year of feminizing hormone therapy. This means I’ve been taking prescribed anti-androgens and estrogen for about a year now. That process has brought about a massive shift in how I experience physical attraction to others.
To cut to the chase, I completely agree with your post! While your post included a brief survey to reduce sampling bias, my own experience observing men also tells me that situations where ‘things progress beyond flirting just through eye contact’ are incredibly rare. Eye contact is important, of course. But I view it more like a handshake in a business setting. It’s not the ‘deal’ itself. I also agree that just because you aren’t inherently ‘hot’ in physical traits that are hard to change, you shouldn’t just let yourself get out of shape and excuse it by saying, ‘I’ll invest in other types of charm instead.’
I’d like to share a recent experience regarding this. A while ago, I had a psychiatric appointment. The doctor was a middle-aged man with a ‘Nordic god’ build—chubby but with solid, muscular forearms—and he was wearing a mask that made it hard to see his face. However, I quickly noticed that he wasn’t the typical psychiatrist who just hands out pills and rushes you out the door. When I asked him about it, he explained that he used to be a professor at a university hospital, got completely fed up with that approach, and now genuinely wants to counsel his patients.
Right off the bat, I found this far more attractive than awkward eye contact (I was actually looking away the whole time). He examined my chart with clinical detachment, but his prescription was based entirely on our lengthy conversation. His office was packed with heavy medical textbooks, yet playfully decorated with Legos. His build was rugged, but I could sense a delicate quality in his eyes. Faced with these contradictory charms, I found him ‘sexy.’ Honestly, if he hadn’t been wearing a doctor’s coat, I would have slept with him.
As this example shows, looks aren’t everything. He was chubby, and his face was covered, after all. However, his physical appearance interacted with his other contradictory traits (his gaze, his build, etc.) to play a decisive role. Walking out of that clinic, it hit me that this kind of delicate dynamic is what truly determines whether a woman will sleep with a man or not.
I really enjoyed reading your post.
Looking back at what I wrote, I think this could be triggering to some people. Please know that nothing serious actually happened and these are entirely my own thoughts. I hope you won’t take it too seriously.
I think this is pretty different from the options that John classified as “suck ass”. The issue with those is doing things that are high cost just to get to the same point:
Spending large amount of time at activities not because you are intrinsically interested in them but because it increases the exposure to women.
Spending a lot of time cold approaching and developing a level of “woo” that makes women interested in you.
Note that even after those, the women will still only be at the information gathering step, so the same basic personal qualities are required anyway. However, one can do it on his own terms, without targetedly changing his hobbies or dealing with the psychological cost of cold approaches.
Physical attractiveness in men matters to women, a lot.
There seems to be a lack of awareness to the extent to which it does.
I think a lot of this is crossed wires
He’s focusing on what get you laid the most You’re focused on how do most women behave
I think you can both be right
There’s a fairly small percent of women who would have sex fairly quickly, not tiny but far less than most
Among that percent it’s very likely that a high percent do make eye contact easily and it does lead to something, because they are on some level looking or open for that
It’s a self-selection factor that won’t show up in your stats
I also believe that attractiveness is probably more important than you’re giving it credit for
But that it does need to be paired with broadly good social / conversation skill, and I don’t think it’s a hack to just be good looking by itself
I do think that most men care more about what you’re describing than what he is describing