women's feedback loops for determining their attractiveness are broken

Women are often the subjects of attacks on the internet for the crime of being miscalibrated to their sexual market value. It generally goes like this:

Internet woman is hit on by internet man. Internet woman harshly rejects internet man. This, generally accurately, is seen by observers as internet woman making a claim about her own sexual market value. Specifically, she is positioning herself as too good for internet man. Observers disagree, and then freak out and attack internet woman.

There’s some variation in what this ends up looking like; but, often enough, the observers are basically correct. Not in attacking her, but in pointing out that she clearly isn’t out of his league.

I feel pretty sympathetic to women in these cases.

Hookup culture systematically breaks the feedback loop women would otherwise use to calibrate to their market value.

Alongside some really understandable and predictable confusions about the opposite sex, that can be quite disastrous.

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Women’s sexuality resembles extreme picky eating. They could have not eaten for days, and still, if eggplant is the only thing available, they will reliably choose to continue starving.

The average woman would rather go her entire lifetime without sex than sleep with the repulsive sloppy drunk guy hitting on her at the bar if he were her only option.

Men, however, are different.

Men have standards too, but are generally only as picky as they can afford to be. For the average man, the prospect of going a lifetime without sex feels far more horrifying than the prospect of sleeping with someone they find unattractive.

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If you’re a man, reality will usually hit you in the face. If you’re attractive, the women you want to sleep with will sleep with you. If you’re unattractive, the women you want to sleep with will not sleep with you. And in general, the fact that women are quite picky with who they’ll sleep with makes it pretty likely that if she’ll sleep with you, she’ll also date you. The feedback loops for figuring out your position in the sexual marketplace are highly functional.

For women, this is not the case at all.

Although women generally have some model of men as being less picky than they are, they often don’t realize the magnitude of the difference.

When men go looking for casual sex, they’re scanning for the women they have a chance with, not the women they find most attractive. When women go looking for casual sex, they will almost always go for the person they find most attractive.

This creates a highly confusing dynamic.

Humans (not just women) are prone to typical mind fallacies — they model others as being like themselves. Women will often find themselves implicitly modeling men as approaching hookups the way they do (i.e., if he’ll sleep with you, it’s a reasonable signal he’d date you). However, the men they end up sleeping with are likely to have either: a) approached them because they seemed accessible, but have no interest in dating them; or b) agreed to sleeping with them because the opportunity was available, but would never date them.

From the perspective of the man: everyone in the dynamic wanted sex, and everyone is benefiting from having had it. The prospect of a relationship exists independently of the sex.

From the perspective of the woman: even if the prospect of a relationship exists independently of the sex, the fact that sex is happening provides a false signal that a relationship could happen.

Their hookups then result in women sleeping with the men they find most attractive, and then believing that this is their “league.” Unfortunately, this leaves women quite befuddled about why they aren’t finding a partner.

It’s not just painful to admit that their place in the sexual market is lower than they’d thought; it’s genuinely highly confusing. Men are just operating completely differently when it comes to casual sex. This dynamic still holds even when men regularly sleep with the woman they don’t want to date, which ends up being even more confusing.

Sex differences vary in magnitude across different domains.

You won’t find almost any difference between men and women in their food preferences, and you’ll find absolutely massive differences in their physical strength. Mating strategies are usually somewhere in between, just enough to cause maximal trouble.