Most women don’t notice most men.

I feel like men in the manosphere often get cranky because women don’t notice them.  “I’m a good man, I want commitment, I have a good job, and I’m not a jerk,” they say – as if these qualities alone naturally draw women’s attention.  (Then there’s a lot of bluffing about asshole game, moving to Thailand or Brazil, and never getting married.)  The consensus seems to be that women go around intentionally ignoring men who don’t meet their 463-point checklist.  Foul wenches!

Truthfully, most of the time, most women don’t notice most men, and it’s not any grand feminine conspiracy.  It’s just how women are wired.  Women aren’t primarily visual, and so unless the man immediately pings on her physical attraction scale, or he does something (alpha) to attract her attention, he’s just not going to register.  And because most men are not all that physically impressive, and most men don’t ever approach women, most men are going to be passively ignored by women going about their daily activities.  It doesn’t mean that women are not amenable to being opened; it just means that women are not usually on alert for the opportunity.

The situation is different, obviously, in social situations designed to put men and women in each other’s company for the express purpose of (potentially romantic) mingling:  bars and clubs, meetup groups, church mixers, matchmaking ambushes.  In these situations, women are usually putting forth extra effort to look good themselves, and they will be much more aware of every male in their surroundings (some more than others, but there is a much greater active awareness than usual).  Also, men will tend to put more effort into their appearances in these situations, which greatly helps their ability to get noticed.

The bottom line, I suppose, is that if men want to get noticed more, they need to distinguish themselves in some way, either through physical appearance (better physique, better clothes, better hair, better accessories), or through approaching with confidence and humor.  If you dress like you shop at Kohl’s and get your hair done at Super Cuts, you have muscle tone like Jell-O, and you never try to talk to any women, and still complain that your good job isn’t turning you into the new Don Draper**, then it’s probably time to rethink your strategy.

**I just finished watching season 4 of Mad Men.  How is it possible that Don Draper is not suffering from a loathsome disease?  …Well, at least that we know of.  Although I doubt that “Don Draper’s got the herp!” is going to be a storyline any time soon.

If you were a swagger coach: bassoon quartet edition.

This is the most purely nerdy thing I have ever seen on the internet.  (Pure nerdiness lacks the repulsive desperation/shame factor commonly associated with nerds.)  I encourage everyone to watch the video, but if you don’t, this is what it contains:  a bassoon quartet playing selections of score from the Super Mario Bros. video game series.  This video is special because pretty much every aspect is nerdy to the hilt.  To wit:

• Bassoon quartet.  You have to be a very dedicated band geek to play the bassoon, because bassoons are not cheap.
• The music is from a series of video games, which someone obviously had to take the time to select and arrange.
• I didn’t realize until the musicians stood up to take their bows that the blonde on the left is female.
• Everyone in the quartet is wearing glasses.
• Everyone in the quartet has a dorky haircut.
• The Asian in the back stops playing and beatboxes unironically at two different times and occasionally makes sound effects noises.
• Everyone is wearing the same custom shirt, which features four bassoons and which I assume is their group outfit.
• Everyone is wearing stone-washed jeans that look like they came straight out of 1996.

If you were a swagger coach and were hired to prep these kids for a night of sarging cheerleaders, what would you advise?

No, thou shalt not let thyself go.

Recently Boundless blogger Suzanne Gosselin highlighted an article on Rachel Held Evans’s blog entitled “Thou Shalt Not Let Thyself Go?“, in which Evans puts Mark Driscoll on blast for the following 2006 statement:

“At the risk of being even more widely despised than I currently am, I will lean over the plate and take one for the team on this. It is not uncommon to meet pastors’ wives who really let themselves go; they sometimes feel that because their husband is a pastor, he is therefore trapped into fidelity, which gives them cause for laziness. A wife who lets herself go and is not sexually available to her husband in the ways that the Song of Songs is so frank about is not responsible for her husband’s sin, but she may not be helping him either.”

Evans then says:

I fear that the sentiment behind these remarks—that the Bible holds women to a certain standard of beauty that must be maintained throughout all seasons of life—remains pervasive within certain sectors of the conservative evangelical community.

She then calls out Christian authors Dorothy Patterson and Martha Pearce, as well as unnamed pastors in her own life, for telling women that they should remain beautiful and sexually satisfy their husbands to the point where the husbands will have zero temptation to stray.

Evans warns:

The message is as clear as it is ominous: Stay beautiful or your husband might leave you.  And if he does, it’s partially your fault.

Evans goes on to say that nowhere in the Bible are women commanded to remain physically beautiful for their husbands and instead highlights the usual verses about how beauty is fleeting, yada yada yada.  But Evans then goes one step further and labels the advice to stay attractive misogyny.  She contends that Scripture affirms that beauty decreases with age and childbearing, and – SHAMING ALERT! – “frankly, the suggestion that men are too weak to handle these realities is as emasculating as it is unbiblical.”  (Anytime someone starts a sentence with “frankly,” it’s an alert that condescension and/or shaming is imminent.)

Evans ends the article with this hamsterrific, projection-tastic piece de resistance:

Rather it is to help set women free—from the lie that God is disappointed when our bodies change, from the lie that it’s our fault when men cheat, from the lie that we become worthless as we grow older, and from the lie that that the Bible is just another glossy magazine whose standards of beauty we will always fail to meet.

While reading this article, I questioned whether Evans knows anything about men, or about women.  I don’t know anything about Evans, but it seems like she’s projecting her own insecurities onto men at large, and in trying to defend herself is actually propagating more garbage.

Very few men expect their wives to remain as physically attractive over time as they were on their wedding day, so Evans’s contention that there is some sort of churchian imperative never to age just seems totally bogus.  What men do expect, however, is that their wives care for their looks.  There is a big difference between showing natural signs of aging and packing on fifty pounds and wearing sweatpants all the time.  A wedding ring isn’t a license to start eating Ho-Hos to your heart’s desire, or shoving all your makeup in a drawer that will never again see the light of day.  So yes, this means that a woman who completely neglects her appearance and expects her husband to “just deal with it” is a woman who enables her husband to stray.  She doesn’t cause him to stray, but in neglecting her appearance, she makes it easier for another woman to catch his eye.  The reality that Evans seems to be most ignoring is that to a man, his wife’s investment in her appearance is a sign of respect for him.  And a man usually interprets his wife’s respect as love.  So man whose wife doesn’t care for her appearance tends to think that she doesn’t love him.  And a man who feels unloved is an unhappy man who is a prime target for temptation.  It’s up to your man to stray, but you can make it easier for him not to.

Does the Bible contain positive commands to women never to age or to work as hard as they can to retain their beauty?  No.  But the Bible doesn’t contain positive commands NOT to do so, either.  When the Bible tells women that their greatest beauty is in their spirit and demeanor, it’s not a permission not to care about their looks; it’s a reminder that the true beauty of a person comes from within, not that their looks have NO place of value.

But even if you buy everything Evans is selling, consider the shoe on the other foot.  Would Evans ever consider it okay for men to stop caring about making a living?  Would she be okay with a man deciding, “Well, I’m married now.  That’s a lot of responsibility, so I just can’t work as much as I used to.  I don’t think I should be expected to keep making more and more money, anyway.  That’s an ominous lie of materialism and there is no biblical command to make a lot of money.  So, yep, I think my wife should be okay with me not making $100,000 a year and keep loving me the same now that I’m only bringing home $20,000.”  Yeah…I don’t think so.

All I’m saying really boils down to one thing:  do things that make it easier for your spouse to love you.

P.S.  I glanced at the comments.  Oy, vey.

[ETA for reference: Suzanne Gosselin’s referring article, “Thou Shalt Not Become Ugly.”]

Self-portrait.

In the last thread, commenter La-Riss was so overwhelmingly complimentary about me that I felt compelled to draw for you readers a self-portrait.  I think I’m a pretty typical single Christian woman.  (All physical resemblance to Cartman completely coincidental.  I’m not a professional artist, people!)

^Click for the full, clear image.  I had a little program crash just as I was about to add angry eyebrows, and this is the best I could salvage.

The difference between a young woman and an old woman.

According to men on the internet:

All art by moi.

Do you have a type?

In the last post’s comments, the subject of “having a ‘type'” came up, with the dual assertions that (a) men don’t stick to “types” because they find many types of women attractive, and (b) women DO stick to “types” and refuse to date anyone outside of the parameters of the favored type.  Of course, these assertions were from men.

Based on my observation, I think men are more likely to marry their type, but women are more likely to date their type.  This is because men can grow a woman’s interest, whereas women are pretty much stuck with the yay-or-nay of a man’s first impression.  So, while a woman will hold out during her dating years for her ideal, a non-ideal man could slip in and start flirting with her until she decides he’s cute enough to marry.  Men, on the other hand, will only target the women who interest them, and for many men – NOT ALL; do you hear me, INLTs? – this means a type.  (See:  Bruce Willis – his current wife is a total Demi clone.  Or Rod Stewart’s wives:  all interchangeable blonde models.  Or the Sister Wives guy:  his wives are all, um, plump Caucasians.  Okay, I’m sure there’s a better example out there….)

Before the comments get rolling, I think it’s worth defining what a “type” is.  I have always thought of it as more of a suite of physical characteristics along with some personality traits, e.g., “tall, smart, athletic.”  I’ve gotten the impression, though, that men in the manosphere define “type” as the woman’s 463-bullet point checklist, which includes job, salary, car make and model, hairstylist, and feelings about soy.  Most women are not that picky.  If you’re running into this kind of woman, who will advertise this list to all those around her, you’re probably in a bar or on a college campus, and the woman is either quite young or divorced and bitter against her ex-husband.

It’s also worth repeating that “type” is an ideal and often is just what knee-jerks attraction, not what sustains it.  I prefer men with full heads of hair, for example, but a full head of hair is not what’s going to love me when I’m old and shriveled.

Why women overrate their looks.

In the last thread, I had mentioned that based on some experiences I had recently had, I was starting to wonder if most women overrate their looks/SMV.  I think a couple of commenters agreed, and commenter CAB mentioned that he had seen an instance of this in a blog thread that I had linked to where a female commenter had estimated herself to be in the 7-7.5 range.  The only problem, CAB noted, was that a few weeks prior, this same commenter had posted a link to her Facebook page, which had allowed him to see some photos of her…and she was no 7-7.5.

Roissy maintains that all women intuitively know where they stand on the 1-10 scale and that it is delusional, hamsterrific vanity that makes them score themselves higher than they ought.  He is right…mostly.  I don’t think most men realize that female self-image is a maelstorm of a lot of competing messages and ideas, some of which can contradict each other yet still be held concurrently by the same woman.  Basically, women’s opinions of themselves doesn’t occur in a vacuum, and it is these exterior and interior pressures and suggestions that mold and re-mold that opinion throughout each day.  (This is partly why a woman can feel perfectly fine about her body at noon and be in tears about it an hour later.)

Before I start discussing different factors that contribute to a woman’s overestimation of her looks, I want to state upfront that no woman alive is satisfied with her body.  Every woman probably has at least a half dozen things she would like to change about her body, and that is a very conservative estimate.  This includes women who are famous for being beautiful and have bodies and faces that are the envy of most women.  Actually, those women are probably the ones most paranoid and insecure about their looks since their looks are literally their primary source of value and there is new, younger competition coming on the scene every day.  Women who claim to be truly content with their bodies either are lying or have reached a point in their lives where they’ve given up on their looks.  Sometimes the lady truly doth protest too much.

Probably the strongest factor in women’s overrating of their looks is women’s conflation of personality with physical beauty.  Just as a woman will find an average-looking man with a good personality handsome, she will also consider an average-looking woman with a good personality prettier than she objectively is.  So if a woman believes herself to have a good personality, she will probably give herself an extra point or two that a man would not give her if he saw her across the bar – or across the church foyer.  In most women’s minds, a number rating includes a consideration of personality.  And, well, how many women truly think they have dud personalities?  Have you ever noticed how many average- or below average-looking women claim to have beautiful, gorgeous, amaaaazing friends who are funny, witty, and smart to boot – and then you meet them and one is slightly cross-eyed, one is top-heavy, and one is inoffensively unremarkable, even though they’re all dressed tastefully in Banana Republic?  Which brings to me to my next point, which is….

Groups of female friends tend to become an echo chamber of inflated rankings.  Most women do not have close friend groups that include 3-point spreads of beauty.  It’s far more likely that the “pretty one” of the group is at best a half to one point better-looking than the others.  The plainer friends then normalize their rankings relative to the pretty one’s, and because they’re not that far away from the pretty one and they’re all factoring in personality points, a group of 5s can easily see themselves as 7s.  Also, girl etiquette requires friends to praise each other’s looks and insist that their friends are pretty – “You look terrific!” “You were so pretty in that dress!”  “I love your hair!” “Girl, you look HOT tonight!” – so no woman is going to say to her friends, “Um, actually…you’re sort of busted.”

A corollary to this is the opinion of Mom and Grandma.  Many mothers refuse to believe the fruit of their loins is anything but gorgeous, and grandmothers are genetically programmed to think their granddaughters are beautiful.  But if Mom and Grandma see beauty that no one else does, well……..

Another strong factor is environment.  If you’re a 7 and you live in a town of 4s, people are going to treat you like a 10.  (And, because your church and women’s groups preach against the unrealistic image of female beauty in the media, your “real” beauty is going to be even more valuable.)  People do, to a certain extent, normalize their expectations to their surroundings.  This notably includes the tendency of horny alphas to slum.  If you’re a female 5 who hooks up with a few male 8s, you’re not going to think you’re a 5 anymore; you’re going to think you’re pretty hot and those guys who used you are just big fat entitled jerks.  Then again, sometimes any male attention, period, is enough to convince a woman that she’s hot.  It’s not uncommon for a single woman in her mid-30s to have a longtime beta orbiter from high school or sleazy alpha friend who’s always looking for sex.  That the woman can reject these men leads her to believe her sexual power is greater than it is in the wider market, even as the same woman complains that she can’t find any attractive men who want to date her.

Women also have a tendency to disregard the toll that age and weight take on their looks.  A woman who was an 8 at age 18 will probably not rank herself lower than a 7 at age 38, barring a colossal weight gain or other drastic change.  Additionally, most women do not think that a 20-pound weight gain is that damaging to their appearance.  So Mabel got a little chubbier since high college…it doesn’t matter because she’s still got a great personality, great hair, and great fashion sense!  That tire around the middle?  Oh, that’ll go away when she finds time in her busy schedule to go to the gym…someday…soon…ish.  Anyway, she’s still a cooler chick than all of those vapid girls who only care about exercising and eating salad.  Men are so shallow!

Finally, yes, there is an element of delusional vanity, too.  It is just incredibly, unspeakably painful for a woman to accept that she is not beautiful and is actually not all that appealing to look at.  It is equally painful for a woman to accept that she has lost all of her beauty, especially if she was known for her beauty in her youth.  (That is why in Los Angeles it is not uncommon to see borderline grotesque-looking women in their 50s and 60s sporting immobile faces, duck lips, and breast implants as they exercise themselves into their skinny jeans after trips to the salon.  Or, see:  Madonna.)  For these women, the most delusional shred of hope is better than no hope at all.  This is also why – in my opinion – the modern evangelical church stresses inner beauty so much to young women.  If you have inner beauty, then no loss or lack of outer beauty can really hurt you.  Not that this message has no merit, but if the message is that Jesus, the Ultimate Lover of Your Soul, is relentlessly, passionately, daringly pursuing you, and not just you, but you as you actually are, not the idealized version of you that sticks to her diet and does her makeup and hair every day – like Edward Cullen a regular lover might, except for all of the icky horniness – then where is the motivation to spruce up the physical body?  Jesus already loves you as you are, and isn’t it the job of men to be more like Jesus?  The responsibility is therefore on men to be like Jesus, rather than you conforming to the world, HELLO.

But, in spite of all this, is it really all that bad for women to overrate their looks?  Most women end up marrying, and chances are, their husbands rank their wives’ beauty higher than the average man does.  (What else can explain the abundance of men on the internet who claim to be dating/married to female 8s?)  And what man wants to be with a woman who feels bad about her body, anyway?  So maybe it all works out in the end, and very few are any worse off for it.

Note: I have turned off threaded comments, so when you are replying, please specify to whom.

Man as a mirror.

I wasn’t going to write about Karen Owen and her, uh, list, figuring I’d have nothing new to add to the conversation, but I had an experience over the weekend that changed my mind.

I had arrived at Borders to meet some female friends for our weekly Bible study.  While two friends went and got coffee, I held down the table.  Having just awakened from an out-cold nap just about 30 minutes prior, I was still feeling a little groggy and trying to snap out of it.  I tried to telepathically will my friends to hurry back to the table so that I could order my own overpriced cup of coffee.  Tragically, my telepathy failed.

A large, hairy, possibly somewhat Armenian-looking guy with cornrows dressed in the drab guy uniform of knee-length shorts and an enormous T-shirt sat in the armchair to my right with his beat-up MacBook and headphones.  I didn’t really notice him until he got up and went to unplug his power cord near my table.  As he passed behind me, I heard him talking out loud.  I think he was trying to be lighthearted and jovial and attract my attention that way, but I was still groggy and didn’t care what a large, hairy, badly dressed man wanted to say to me if he wasn’t going to engage me directly.

I guess he also figured out that his indirect approach wasn’t working, so when he sat back down, he spoke to me directly, using my shoes as an opener.  He asked if they were Burberry.  I said no, they were $14 from Payless.  He said they looked like Burberry because of the plaid pattern.  I said that the plaid was the reason I liked the shoes.  He then asked if I was there for a Bible study.  (He must have seen my Bible with its gilded page edges.)  I answered affirmatively, and he went on to ramble about how he think it’s good to read the Bible, even if you don’t believe, because there’s good stuff in there with good morals and Jesus had a lot of good things to say, etc. etc.  I nodded a couple of times and agreed with him but didn’t encourage the conversation to continue, all the while trying to decide if this guy was legit or weird and wondering if I was being a bad Christian for not asking him where he thought he would spend eternity if he died tonight or doing other Christian Outreach Moves especially when he clearly had a positive attitude about Christianity and my goodness I REALLY needed some designer coffee or food so I would be more pleasant and awake.  Finally he concluded and decided to leave, and we bid adieu.

Later on that night, I thought about what had happened and concluded that I would have snapped to far greater attention had the guy who approached me better-looking, better-dressed, more articulate, or wittier.  I would have acted more interested and possibly even thrown out some charm if he had been more in line with the type of man I find attractive.

Then I thought about Karen Owen and how her List only featured athletes and how most people believe she was only discriminating in reporting her adventures, not in having such adventures in general.

I’ve read before that men consider the looks of their wives/girlfriends to be a reflection of their own quality as men; that men do think of women as arm candy, and the better-looking the woman, the higher-status he must be.  In a way, a woman is a mirror back to the man of the type of man he is.  I think the inverse is true for women as well, that the status of the man or men they’re associated with is a mirror validating their beauty and worth as women, the logic being that high-status men choose high-status women, therefore if a high-status man chooses me, I must be a high-status (read: beautiful, sexy, alluring) woman.  For someone like Karen Owen, an attractive but not pretty girl, the drive to secure a mirror that reflected what she wanted to see was pretty all-consuming.  That she apparently picked and chose who made it onto the List supports this theory, since a girl who gets the best must be one of the best herself.  A lesser man’s inclusion on the List would only have lowered her value in her own eyes, and in the eyes of her friends.  If men typically go only for what they think they can get, then it’s pretty depressing if the only men who are coming after you are unimpressive, because that means you must be unimpressive, too.

So to bring it back around to my experience with Big Borders Guy, on the one hand I tried to feel flattered that this guy was doing a daygame cold approach – and I am not approached very often, much less cold, so I should have felt extra flattered – but on the other hand, he was not the reflection of myself that I wanted to see at all, and I think it would take a toll on my ego if BBG-types were the only ones who approached me.  The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak. Or, perhaps more accurately, the spirit is reluctant, and the flesh is weak.

(Also, let this be encouragement to men to dress better.  If you look like you just rolled out of your parents’ basement and you try to approach women with minimal game, it’s probably not going to go in your favor.)

What is “hot”?

As much as physical beauty can be objectively quantified – as in, how much a person’s proportions conform to a mathematically-crunched aesthetic ideal – it is not synonymous with “hot.”  “Hot,” to me, is a confusing, vague term that, at least when used by men, seems to indicate anything from “not fat” to “younger than 23” to “conforms to the ideal woman in my head” to “old but I’d still hit it” to “facially beautiful” to “not wearing very much clothing.”  Because of the breadth of meanings of the term, I am never quite sure what men mean when they say something like, “I went to the Squiggly Piggly with my bros on Saturday night, and there were all these hot girls there!”  Does it mean that the majority of women had beautiful faces?  Does it mean they were only attractive from the neck down?  Does it mean they were non-blubbery and wearing very little?  Does it mean they were all young?  Does it mean they had good hair?  (When I was in high school, all of the “hot girls” spent a lot of time styling their hair.  Their facial beauty seemed kind of optional.)  It’s confusing, because when I think of “hot girls,” I think of women who are clearly in the 9-10 range, who have beautiful faces, stunning hair, and bodies that most women would kill to have.  But it seems like in the real world, men are much more lax with their definition.

As for women and their definition of “hot”:

Usually a “hot” man falls into one of two categories:

1. He has a precision-toned body.
2. He is confident and dominant.

Occasionally a man will be confident and dominant and have a great body.   Those guys are too good to be true.  If he’s confident and dominant and has a great body AND has a great face, then he’s just scary to all but the most brazen of women.

Try-hard: dog-walker edition.

I’m dog/house-sitting this weekend and took the pooches out for a morning stroll before I have to rush off to church, and before it gets too hot for the big, old dog.

On my way down the hill, another dog-walker passed me at a run.  He looked like he was in his mid-40s, clean-cut hair, physique of one desperately fighting the middle-aged spread.  Not too exceptional – except for the fact that he was running (a) shirtless, and (b) had “Mi familia, Mi vida” tattooed across his back between his shoulders in gothic lettering.

Game aficionados might be saying, “Ooh!  Contrast game!”  After all, it’s not common for middle-aged wealthy white guys to have thug-lite, Spanish tattoos on their backs.  And obviously he must have been very confident to run shirtless, right?

This didn’t strike me as contrast game, though…it struck me as “very misguided try-hard game.”  There will always be an exception to the rule, but for the most part, rich white guys, especially when they’re older, need to be very careful about adopting, er, cultural markers not their own.  It’s too easy to cross the line from “pleasant, intriguing surprise” to “unfortunate SWPL poser” where the woman’s brain is going, “Okay, dude…REALLY?”

Now, I don’t know this guy and have never seen him before.  Maybe he has a colorful, unpredictable past, and the tattoo is a vestige of that life.  Maybe the words have real, deep meaning to him.  But given his looks, his general demeanor, where he was running, and the type of dog he had, I’m thinking that he had a SWPL-y impulse to do something “rad” – so rad it would be permanent, because it was rad and meaningful – and the tattoo is the end result.

I think the reason tattoos on wealthy white guys are so off-putting is because of what they say.  They don’t say that the man has a dangerous, exciting edge; they say that the man leads such an innoculated life that a tattoo is his most dangerous means of feeling blood.  That’s not what women respond to.  Also, tacky tattoos are pretty ubiquitous these days.  (Of course, in Los Angeles, it is completely plausible that such a man could also be a druggie alcoholic with ten mistresses and escorts on speed dial.  But I’m speaking more generally.)