Tove, the visual "not-interested-in-casual-sex" badge wouldn't work at all. The problem is, many (most?) women are interested in both long-term and casual relationships. Let's imagine that the no-casual badge gets popular and everybody knows that's what good girls wear - that would make not wearing it an obvious sign of being a slut (and…
Tove, the visual "not-interested-in-casual-sex" badge wouldn't work at all. The problem is, many (most?) women are interested in both long-term and casual relationships. Let's imagine that the no-casual badge gets popular and everybody knows that's what good girls wear - that would make not wearing it an obvious sign of being a slut (and maybe most men would then be reluctant to raise kids with such non-wearers). As a result, to preserve their reputation, almost all women, except the absolutely most socially uncaring, would wear that badge, while totally ruining its signal value by engaging in casual sex anyway. I suspect this has already happened before, with covering-your-head or being-covered-from-head-to-toe-Victorian-style as visual signals.
Are you sure it wouldn't work? I see women who dress nonsexually all the time right now, and it seems to be pretty effective. There's already spectrum of styles ranging from frumpy "Leave me alone, it's laundry day" to dyed hair, makeup, heels and revealing clothes. Women available for long term rather than short term relationships tend to dress formally and carefully, with restrained makeup and jewelry. So far as I can tell, this is just how it is in America.
Yes, dressing style actually does affect the "reputation" and increases or decreases attention. But still, remember that many women want both long and short-term attention, they will therefore inevitably muddle the signaling environment. As an example, when I was young and unmarried, I tried to dress in a feminine but non-slutty way (so it was a mid-range signal? Looked quite prudent and good-girly) hoping to get as much attention as possible (short or long-term) without ruining my reputation. It didn't get me loads of short-term attention because a) that's not so easy to get in the geographical area where I live (N-E Europe), and b) I was very shy and fended off many suitors because I was terrified of socializing with them. Still, whenever possible, I totally misused the prudent-dressing signal. It wasn't a trustworthy signal.
Hm, I don't know exactly how you looked, but I think I could usually tell the difference between long and short pretty well. I will admit, though, that the short term signal is much *stronger.*
>>I will admit, though, that the short term signal is much *stronger.*
I say like Unirt here below: How do you know it is a short-term signal, really? I can't open a newspaper without seeing a successful man next to a plantinum blonde bombshell with that typically post-plastic surgery nose and half a centimeter of make-up and revealing clothes. Are such wives of high status men really signalling sexual availability? Or are they signalling that they are really, really valuable to the man who gets the privilege to have sex with them?
Women seldom change style abruptly when they enter a relationship and thereby aren't available for the short-term market anymore (I mean, most people actually intend to follow that rule). Instead, I think the style you call long-termist is more of a work-related compromise: Looking like a night-club queen is usually not appreciated in middle-class occupations. I had at least two acquaintances who ran the night-club look until about 30, when they sensed that it didn't make a good impression at work.
> Are such wives of high status men really signalling sexual availability? Or are they signalling that they are really, really valuable to the man who gets the privilege to have sex with them?
I think this can be explained in terms of mate-value matching. In evolutionary terms, we will always aim to mate with someone with a mate-value as close to our own as possible. When the mate-values of a couple gets out of balance, it is often a really bad sign for the relationship.
This is deeply embedded in our psychology. It is part of our language "she's out of your league", "marrying down", "he could do better". Even looking at a couple where there is obvious unbalance in mate-value makes us uncomfortable.
For better or worse, men can improve their mate value by increasing their status (by wealth, fame, etc...), while for women mate-value (in the evolutionary sense) is mostly improved by increasing their sexual desirability. So I can see how women in relationship with high status men can end up overcompensating on looks, as that is their main avenue to ensure they are matching in mate-value.
Yes. But there is more than one way of being a high-value woman. Being sexier than the others is one way, and being special in some other, less visible sense is another. Men who choose super-sexy women as wives do not only show they are high status. They also show they are playing in a league were sexiness is highly valued.
I think "less visible" is the key word here. Mate-value is also (primarily?) a social construct. We all use it to judge if people fit together, and to work for that it has to be visible in some sense.
When a high status man enters the room, there is a lot of subtle signals that we all pick up on, everything from how they dress, act and how others act towards them. We are rarely in doubt who is high status. I think most people can look at a group of people and roughly order them by status, especially if they have a bit of time to observe them.
The problem is how women can communicate status in a visible form. Youth and beauty are the classics, but you also see it communicated with things like $20,000 hand bags. The problem with those things (apart from the ridiculousness of attributing so much value to veblen goods) is that they only really work for status between women. It usually goes totally over the head of men, or if they do notice, it actually reduces their view of the woman.
So the question is, how do you as a women visibly show that your mate-value match that of your man (assuming your man is high-status)?
>>So the question is, how do you as a women visibly show that your mate-value match that of your man (assuming your man is high-status)?
I think the answer is: You don't. On the mating market, a high-status man is higher status than any woman. Women who marry high-status men face a choice:
1. Be sure enough he values your companionship that he will resist all polygynous temptations laid before him
2. Accept a precarious position
3. Look desperate in your attempts to match his visible status.
For the above reason, I have always suspected that high-status men aren't that attractive after all.
Well, I said I was going to write a post celebrating beta males as the pillars of civilization. Maybe I could write something about their excellent qualities as life partners too.
I was personally never interested in short term mating, only long term. And it could just be that when women dressed and acted like that, I immediately looked elsewhere.
Exactly. Night-club queens AND platinum-blonde rich men's wives seemed like a low-brow contingent to me (whether they actually were or not) and I didn't want anyone to accidentally place me into that bucket.
Yeah. I think women, and people in general, use their appearance to show for what they want to be valued. The sex-pot look indicates that a woman prioritizes to be valued as a sexual object. The less sexed appareance indicates the she hopes to be valued for other reasons. It says little about under which circumstances she actually wants to have sex.
How can you make a difference when the person has both short and long term interest? It's impossible. Anyway I'm sure I generally would have looked like "long" to you; this was partly a true signal because I was quite interested in long-term relationships, and partly false as I was also quite interested in short-term.
I'd say my wife successfully signalled long term interest without short term interest: clean, well-groomed, long hair brushed out, no makeup or cleavage, but occasionally bare thighs. Bright-eyed, friendly when approached, conversationally engaged.
OK, but how would this look: long skirts, no low cleavage, no visible makeup, but clothing fitted nicely to the waist, showing a feminine form. Long or short? The correct answer, at least in some cases, would be "both".
Alright, I must grant you that, it does have some signal value, but it's not so strong that a man could reliably know what that woman dreams of. I even suspect that many of the heals-and-cleavage girls frequenting night clubs are actually hoping to attract long term spouses there (from what I've heard some of them say). They are either uninformed and take time to figure out that this is not a way to do it, or perhaps this is how women are supposed to look in their social circles and they actually do find their husbands eventually, from among the nightclub-going men?
As to that, I don't really know what they're thinking; they certainly had no hope of attracting my attention... though in all fairness they weren't really looking for me. I never attended night clubs, and regretted every party I ever went to. My own strategy was to major in a hard science and find intelligent women in college. It worked very well for me, but I wouldn't recommend it for most people, as there are far more men than eligible women who enroll in differential equations!
I haven't been to America, but according to my experience, in Europe dress is not decisive for the amount of sexual attention. The most important thing is location and time of the day.
I always dressed very casually and I never wore make-up. I still got my fair share of unwanted attention (but not more than that). Especially when traveling alone. At last, I cracked the code: Get into a hostel before 7 PM. Go to bed early. Get up early. That way, very little unwanted attention. Europeans seem to think that evenings are "sexy time", to borrow a phrase from Borat. Avoiding that time and locations where flirtation is normal does the trick.
Yes, all culturally imposed chastity symbols have been corrupted this way. Once I got the idea to buy a black Saudi style protective dress (including a face veil, otherwise I don't pass as real) and walked around in a city with a large Muslim population. My purpose was to see whether people would be racist toward me. One older man gave me an angry look. Otherwise, everyone behaved very correctly. Except for a short, overweight man who said he had come from Iraq six weeks ago, and not had sex during all that time. He was married and had children, he explained, but his wife was in Iraq so now he needed a stand-in for her. He asked if I would take that role. In my normal clothes, I have never got such brave offers while walking through a Swedish city.
The question is: Can't Western societies be more open to choice that traditional societies? For example, people openly say that they are poly. Isn't that quite much like saying "I'm slutty"? And still, it is socially accepted among many people.
Isn't that sign that all men aren't that into female chastity after all? I think that when marital rape became a concept, the value of female chastity decreased. As long as women were more or less obliged to have sex with their husbands, chastity was higher valued. Nowadays, being caught in a marriage with a too chaste woman who doesn't want to have sex at all is a real risk men face. For that reason, I'm not sure women signalling no thanks to casual sex would be the most popular.
I live in semi-rural America in the Deep South. I can assure you that while people don't speak in terms of "polyamory" they behave just like people everywhere do.
That's because they aren't forced to pay one percent of their taxes to a public broadcasting monopoly! A year ago a local friend told me about the hilarious idea that there can be three people instead of two in a relationship. He just saw that on TV, he said.
Tove, the visual "not-interested-in-casual-sex" badge wouldn't work at all. The problem is, many (most?) women are interested in both long-term and casual relationships. Let's imagine that the no-casual badge gets popular and everybody knows that's what good girls wear - that would make not wearing it an obvious sign of being a slut (and maybe most men would then be reluctant to raise kids with such non-wearers). As a result, to preserve their reputation, almost all women, except the absolutely most socially uncaring, would wear that badge, while totally ruining its signal value by engaging in casual sex anyway. I suspect this has already happened before, with covering-your-head or being-covered-from-head-to-toe-Victorian-style as visual signals.
Are you sure it wouldn't work? I see women who dress nonsexually all the time right now, and it seems to be pretty effective. There's already spectrum of styles ranging from frumpy "Leave me alone, it's laundry day" to dyed hair, makeup, heels and revealing clothes. Women available for long term rather than short term relationships tend to dress formally and carefully, with restrained makeup and jewelry. So far as I can tell, this is just how it is in America.
Yes, dressing style actually does affect the "reputation" and increases or decreases attention. But still, remember that many women want both long and short-term attention, they will therefore inevitably muddle the signaling environment. As an example, when I was young and unmarried, I tried to dress in a feminine but non-slutty way (so it was a mid-range signal? Looked quite prudent and good-girly) hoping to get as much attention as possible (short or long-term) without ruining my reputation. It didn't get me loads of short-term attention because a) that's not so easy to get in the geographical area where I live (N-E Europe), and b) I was very shy and fended off many suitors because I was terrified of socializing with them. Still, whenever possible, I totally misused the prudent-dressing signal. It wasn't a trustworthy signal.
Hm, I don't know exactly how you looked, but I think I could usually tell the difference between long and short pretty well. I will admit, though, that the short term signal is much *stronger.*
>>I will admit, though, that the short term signal is much *stronger.*
I say like Unirt here below: How do you know it is a short-term signal, really? I can't open a newspaper without seeing a successful man next to a plantinum blonde bombshell with that typically post-plastic surgery nose and half a centimeter of make-up and revealing clothes. Are such wives of high status men really signalling sexual availability? Or are they signalling that they are really, really valuable to the man who gets the privilege to have sex with them?
Women seldom change style abruptly when they enter a relationship and thereby aren't available for the short-term market anymore (I mean, most people actually intend to follow that rule). Instead, I think the style you call long-termist is more of a work-related compromise: Looking like a night-club queen is usually not appreciated in middle-class occupations. I had at least two acquaintances who ran the night-club look until about 30, when they sensed that it didn't make a good impression at work.
> Are such wives of high status men really signalling sexual availability? Or are they signalling that they are really, really valuable to the man who gets the privilege to have sex with them?
I think this can be explained in terms of mate-value matching. In evolutionary terms, we will always aim to mate with someone with a mate-value as close to our own as possible. When the mate-values of a couple gets out of balance, it is often a really bad sign for the relationship.
This is deeply embedded in our psychology. It is part of our language "she's out of your league", "marrying down", "he could do better". Even looking at a couple where there is obvious unbalance in mate-value makes us uncomfortable.
For better or worse, men can improve their mate value by increasing their status (by wealth, fame, etc...), while for women mate-value (in the evolutionary sense) is mostly improved by increasing their sexual desirability. So I can see how women in relationship with high status men can end up overcompensating on looks, as that is their main avenue to ensure they are matching in mate-value.
Yes. But there is more than one way of being a high-value woman. Being sexier than the others is one way, and being special in some other, less visible sense is another. Men who choose super-sexy women as wives do not only show they are high status. They also show they are playing in a league were sexiness is highly valued.
I think "less visible" is the key word here. Mate-value is also (primarily?) a social construct. We all use it to judge if people fit together, and to work for that it has to be visible in some sense.
When a high status man enters the room, there is a lot of subtle signals that we all pick up on, everything from how they dress, act and how others act towards them. We are rarely in doubt who is high status. I think most people can look at a group of people and roughly order them by status, especially if they have a bit of time to observe them.
The problem is how women can communicate status in a visible form. Youth and beauty are the classics, but you also see it communicated with things like $20,000 hand bags. The problem with those things (apart from the ridiculousness of attributing so much value to veblen goods) is that they only really work for status between women. It usually goes totally over the head of men, or if they do notice, it actually reduces their view of the woman.
So the question is, how do you as a women visibly show that your mate-value match that of your man (assuming your man is high-status)?
>>So the question is, how do you as a women visibly show that your mate-value match that of your man (assuming your man is high-status)?
I think the answer is: You don't. On the mating market, a high-status man is higher status than any woman. Women who marry high-status men face a choice:
1. Be sure enough he values your companionship that he will resist all polygynous temptations laid before him
2. Accept a precarious position
3. Look desperate in your attempts to match his visible status.
For the above reason, I have always suspected that high-status men aren't that attractive after all.
That seems like a controversial topic worth exploring in depth. Maybe worth its own blogpost?
Well, I said I was going to write a post celebrating beta males as the pillars of civilization. Maybe I could write something about their excellent qualities as life partners too.
I was personally never interested in short term mating, only long term. And it could just be that when women dressed and acted like that, I immediately looked elsewhere.
Exactly. Night-club queens AND platinum-blonde rich men's wives seemed like a low-brow contingent to me (whether they actually were or not) and I didn't want anyone to accidentally place me into that bucket.
Yeah. I think women, and people in general, use their appearance to show for what they want to be valued. The sex-pot look indicates that a woman prioritizes to be valued as a sexual object. The less sexed appareance indicates the she hopes to be valued for other reasons. It says little about under which circumstances she actually wants to have sex.
How can you make a difference when the person has both short and long term interest? It's impossible. Anyway I'm sure I generally would have looked like "long" to you; this was partly a true signal because I was quite interested in long-term relationships, and partly false as I was also quite interested in short-term.
I'd say my wife successfully signalled long term interest without short term interest: clean, well-groomed, long hair brushed out, no makeup or cleavage, but occasionally bare thighs. Bright-eyed, friendly when approached, conversationally engaged.
OK, but how would this look: long skirts, no low cleavage, no visible makeup, but clothing fitted nicely to the waist, showing a feminine form. Long or short? The correct answer, at least in some cases, would be "both".
Fine, but wouldn't that suggest long-but-not-short more often than shirt skirts, cleavage, makeup, and heels?
Alright, I must grant you that, it does have some signal value, but it's not so strong that a man could reliably know what that woman dreams of. I even suspect that many of the heals-and-cleavage girls frequenting night clubs are actually hoping to attract long term spouses there (from what I've heard some of them say). They are either uninformed and take time to figure out that this is not a way to do it, or perhaps this is how women are supposed to look in their social circles and they actually do find their husbands eventually, from among the nightclub-going men?
As to that, I don't really know what they're thinking; they certainly had no hope of attracting my attention... though in all fairness they weren't really looking for me. I never attended night clubs, and regretted every party I ever went to. My own strategy was to major in a hard science and find intelligent women in college. It worked very well for me, but I wouldn't recommend it for most people, as there are far more men than eligible women who enroll in differential equations!
I haven't been to America, but according to my experience, in Europe dress is not decisive for the amount of sexual attention. The most important thing is location and time of the day.
I always dressed very casually and I never wore make-up. I still got my fair share of unwanted attention (but not more than that). Especially when traveling alone. At last, I cracked the code: Get into a hostel before 7 PM. Go to bed early. Get up early. That way, very little unwanted attention. Europeans seem to think that evenings are "sexy time", to borrow a phrase from Borat. Avoiding that time and locations where flirtation is normal does the trick.
Granted.
Yes, all culturally imposed chastity symbols have been corrupted this way. Once I got the idea to buy a black Saudi style protective dress (including a face veil, otherwise I don't pass as real) and walked around in a city with a large Muslim population. My purpose was to see whether people would be racist toward me. One older man gave me an angry look. Otherwise, everyone behaved very correctly. Except for a short, overweight man who said he had come from Iraq six weeks ago, and not had sex during all that time. He was married and had children, he explained, but his wife was in Iraq so now he needed a stand-in for her. He asked if I would take that role. In my normal clothes, I have never got such brave offers while walking through a Swedish city.
The question is: Can't Western societies be more open to choice that traditional societies? For example, people openly say that they are poly. Isn't that quite much like saying "I'm slutty"? And still, it is socially accepted among many people.
Isn't that sign that all men aren't that into female chastity after all? I think that when marital rape became a concept, the value of female chastity decreased. As long as women were more or less obliged to have sex with their husbands, chastity was higher valued. Nowadays, being caught in a marriage with a too chaste woman who doesn't want to have sex at all is a real risk men face. For that reason, I'm not sure women signalling no thanks to casual sex would be the most popular.
Nobody openly declares a polyamorous preference in rural America. (Bless their hearts, no one knows what the word even means in rural America.)
I live in semi-rural America in the Deep South. I can assure you that while people don't speak in terms of "polyamory" they behave just like people everywhere do.
Well... maybe not everywhere: https://www.richardhanania.com/p/the-east-asian-package
That's because they aren't forced to pay one percent of their taxes to a public broadcasting monopoly! A year ago a local friend told me about the hilarious idea that there can be three people instead of two in a relationship. He just saw that on TV, he said.