nourishing obscurity

If you have a mindset which still sees itself as part of the dating game [perhaps 10 to 55 years of age], then Vox’s post is devastatingly good. Here it is [almost] in full:

Most men understand it when the most attractive women consider themselves too good for the average joe. Because, in short, they are, and few men have much of a problem with that. Where men get confused and irritated is when a woman who is manifestly NOT too good for them by any reasonable objective metric acts as if she genuinely believes that she is. The reason is exactly as Occam’s Razor suggests. She does. And here’s why.

Women have a strong preference to date and mate up. Men, on the other hand, are much more inclined to date broad-spectrum and mate down. And while most men understand that the definition of “up” varies according to sex – men placing extra value on looks and sexual history, women placing emphasis on social status and wealth – they don’t understand the logical consequences of women dating up and men dating down. And these consequences are further exacerbated by men generally being the pursuers and women the pursued.

Look at it this way. A woman who manages to attract the passing attention of a higher-status man, even if she does so through taking the role of the pursuer, is quite reasonably, if incorrectly, inclined to consider herself worthy of the attentions of higher status men in the future despite the declining marginal utility of her youth and sexual history. This is why a woman will always identify her status by the football star, the surgeon, or the singer in the band with whom she once spent a few hours rather than by the nondescript fellow who was her boyfriend for several years, regardless of how long ago it was. Roissy had an amusing post about a woman who had dated Anthony Kiedis a long time ago and actually carried around pictures of them in order to show them to people she had just met.

This creates an essentially Austrian problem of false signals leading to malinvestment. Because women do not distinguish between the quantity of male attention and the quality, the conflation encourages them to a) overrate their own attractiveness, and, b) invest their time and attention in men who are not likely to have any interest in them beyond the immediate term. So, the female 6 considers herself an 8 by virtue of the times that a male 9 decided that she was the best available at the moment, and quite logically feels insulted when she is approached by a male 5 or 6. Meanwhile, the male 6 is standing there in astonishment, staring at what he believes is quite clearly an appropriate counterpart and wondering who in the world she thinks she is.

What this means is that thanks to modern hook-up culture, the average woman now tends to consider herself a 7 or 8 rather than a 5, which is one of the many social factors that make it hard for her to eventually “settle”.

On the train each day, there is a woman who is exceedingly shy. She buries herself in a book in a window seat and never looks round. She’s not all that beautiful but her body language is. Her dress is fairly ordinary – sensible and smart rather than stylish and her jacket is … nice … ordinary … that’s all. Her hair just is. On Vox’s scale, she’d be a 5.  In my third book, she was the character Sara.

On my scale, she’s an 8 or 9 and is devastating – she plays on my mind the whole time if she’s in the same carriage and as I violently refuse to look across at her, I’m terrified to say something to her so she’d think I was a boorish male or a stalker. It’s the old story of less being far, far more. When I get off the train, the pain eases.

She’s English.

In a workplace I was once in, there was an obese woman who kidded herself that she was attractive, always going on about how she had to move on from this lover or that and interpreting her being in a roomful of males as somehow related to them seeing her as attractive.

When her behaviour exhibited the worst elements of the female plus added sense of entitlement, women-are-betterism, lack of femininity and don’t-you-oppress-meism, her possible 6 on Vox’s scale [due to her being bubbly] was now dragged down to a 2 or 3 through all this garbage.  The saddest part was that the men gave each other quick, surreptitious grins, which she didn’t see while she was carrying on in her fantasy world or else she saw but ignored them.

She was English too.

Unlike Anna Chapman, most Russian girls I know who do themselves up to the nines to appear to be a 9 are, in fact, artless in many ways and their anxiety that they’re not, in fact, 9s, drops them to a 5 on that scale, which immediately makes them a 9 in my book. It’s the very anxiety and lack of airs which zooms them up the scale.

On Friday, an English girl asked me how I knew, before we’d spoken, that the Russian girl I’d met some days ago was Russian. “She moves differently to an English girl,” I replied. Actually, she looked different as well but I didn’t mention that – not better, just different.

In a recent survey I saw in our train rag, women were asked about what made them beautiful.  There were various factors, such as good health and no one would really argue with those.  What did not surprise but was a bit worrying, was that 65% said that confidence made them beautiful.

This is pure female angst.  It’s something constantly on a woman’s mind every time she checks her compact or gets herself in order before going into a room – the purely physical.  However, it is not on discerning men’s lists of what makes women beautiful – quite the opposite in some cases.

One lady wrote here in a comments thread some time back: “You just want a demure woman.  You can’t stand her having a personality.”

The whole key to that is the word “personality”.  If, by that, she means a sweet nature and intelligent conversation, then yes – that’s most desirable and would be the same, whichever sex.

If however she means “bubbly” – code for “can’t shut up” – or “confident”, meaning sense of entitlement, women-are-betterism, lack of femininity and don’t-you-oppress-meism, then no, her “personality” is anything but attractive and is, in fact, surplus to requirements.  If she’s snooty, then it’s goodbye before we even begin.  My experience of such “personality” is that this type of person turns savage very quickly and then the real lack of upbringing and lifelong rejection of sound values comes through.

Bradley Gerstman, Christopher Pizzo and Rich Seldes, in the book What Men Want, wrote:

“Women are astonished when we tell them what many professional men look for in a woman on the first date—besides chemistry, of course. Are you ready to hear what men hope to find in a woman they are dating for the first time? Men like women who are nice. Men are suckers for kindness and consideration. We love women who are affable, flexible, easygoing. Most men cannot resist a sweet woman” (page 68). Women who are gracious and kind are attractive.

It just stands to reason, doesn’t it?   But what is “kind”?  Agatha Christie, in After the Funeral [1953], had this dialogue:

“Susan reminds me of her uncle. She has the vigour, the drive, the mental capacity of Richard Abernethie. It may be my fancy that she lacks some of the kindliness and the warmth of my old friend.”

“Women are never kind,” remarked Poirot, “Though they can sometimes be tender. She loves her husband?”

“Devotedly, I should say. But really, Poirot, I can’t believe – I won’t believe for one moment that Susan could have – “

“That is natural, mon ami. As for me, I am not so sentimental about beautiful young ladies,” said Poirot.

And let’s go back to the word “nice”.  It clearly means different things to different people and to one sex or the other.  It seems to me that men who complain that women don’t want nice guys think, by extension, that they themselves are nice guys, probably failing to see that it might be other negatives which turn the women off – the nice guy rationalization might well be just that – a rationalization.

What is nice – is it being polite?  Opening doors?  LOL – I can see a charmer opening a door to the restaurant for a woman and saying, “Gee, you’ve lost so much weight,” then seating her at the table for two and in the nicest possible way, adding: “Oh no, there it is.”

Does a woman appreciate the following sort of polite?

… and later:

Wonder what the real issue was there.

In a restaurant, as occurred last Wednesday, a woman will always try to penetrate my secrets while I’m turning it back on her, trying to penetrate hers. Giving “just enough” doesn’t seem to satisfy and the criticism that’s always been levelled at me is that, having almost deluged her with info about my past, in the end she still feels she hasn’t learned all that much. Another is that I can feel so under the spell one day and am largely indifferent to her charms the next.

That might sound incredibly cold and heartless and she might put it down to “solitariness” on my part but actually, in my eyes, this only occurs when the veil falls away and I see that she’s not kind and gentle after all.  If she’s not “nice”, then no matter what sort of goddess she might look, physically, it pales for me and I lose interest. This is why femme-fatales leave me cold while other men are swooning.

The world might say that this is a pathetic little 6 [me] having the gall to turn down a 9 [her], equally as bad, if not worse than the obese 2 mentioned a few paragraphs earlier but in my case, I don’t see myself as special at all.  It’s just that I won’t put up with rudeness and gracelessness in a woman and as for lack of warmth and kindliness – it just leads me to rapidly lose interest in her.  No doubt it works the other way too.

Anger is a completely different thing – at least that showed [in that clip] that Emmanuelle Beart cared.

When I’m opening the door for her, it’s certainly not on the mind what she does at that point – what’s on the mind is getting her seated without mishap and seeing that she’s attended to – but if, at the door, she says something like: “I can do it myself, thanks; I’m a big girl,” then unless something happens to improve the situation, that’s the last time for me and her.

Similarly, the way my 8 or 9 girlfriend [according to many men] used to walk slightly ahead of me, drinking in the adulation, instead of paying attention to me, showed she had it all wrong about our respective roles and then she wondered why I was not head over heels for her that evening.

Throughout this entire post, the issue might have struck many readers that, irrespective of gender, it comes down to opening up and letting the other person in, caring and paying attention – that’s what we all want and it applies equally to both sexes.  The partner who pays us serious attention always seems so much more beautiful to us.

Filed under: Society & human issues