NorthWind wrote:
Closet Genious wrote:
Something you learn in science, is that to prove any sort of correlation, you have to isolate the independant variables.
If we were to make a list of traits, that correlate most with female attraction.
Intelligence on it's own, loses to good looks or wealth on their own.
That's true, and I think it's another thing where people often talk at cross purposes. You, and some other men, talk about what influence a man's chances of getting sex the most. Some women were simply talking about what they personally find attractive or which traits also matters. It's not even necessarily a disagreement as people are not talking about the same thing.
hale_popp is also right about the biased sample as young women who are into casual sex will probably be over-represented in the samples of a lot of men trying to figure out what women are into. That's the ones most relevant for men who are looking for casual sex but a woman who is not among this group might rightfully think that it's not a very good representation of herself. (I don't think the sample bias makes the results completely wrong just that some things are more extreme for certain subgroups of women than others)
Lastly, what influences a man's chances at getting sex and what a woman feels attracted to especially when it's not about casual sex don't need to be the same things.
E.g. the only guy so far I ever fell in love with was not bad looking but definitely didn't look like a porn-star or anything like that. Yet, if he was very obese and absolutely hideous I'd probably not have felt about him that way and neither would have some other women who felt anything that has something to do with sex or relationships about him. Therefore, being good enough looking is definitely important for his chances with women. But I didn't feel like what I liked about him were his looks. During that time I met hundreds of other guys with equally good or better looks. The looks were not what made him special. What made him special was his sense of humor, his intelligence, that he had a lot of opinions that I shared or liked anyway, that he had opinions and thoughts about things most people don't even have opinions or thoughts about, that he could think and talk about something completely hypothetical (but not random in the sense that someone just blurts random stuff) and not every thought or idea needed a practical purpose or consequence, that he treated me like a human being (I had some other issues back then in addition to autism, such as social anxiety (I didn't delude myself into thinking I could actually be good enough for that guy) and most people ignored me, treated me badly or were on a superficial level too nice, therefore it was nice to be treated like a person) and so on and so forth. That's why, if I tell someone what I like about him, I'll probably mention other things before I mention looks.
I agree with you, we are speaking from two different perspectives, none of them necessarily wrong.
I am speaking from the perspective of simply getting sex, because relationships don't appeal to me, so there's no benefit to me establishing "long term attraction". At the other end, a person who is interested long term relationships might not get much benefit or see the value in "short term attraction".
Sadly, for myself, I've always been better at the long term attraction, and I've always envied the guys who were better at the short term attraction game. So you see, my intelligence might have benefited me in long term attraction, but it never benefited me in the way that I wanted. I got much much higher grades in high school than most of the guys who were scoring left, right and center, for example, you can see how I find hard to see any sort of correlation between intelligence and attraction, from my perspective. I got to be in several relationships, but that was never what I wanted.
04 May 2018, 4:56 am
