CHAPTER 4: UNDERSTAND WHAT WOMEN WANT… AND WHY
The great question… which I have not been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is “What does a woman want?”
—Sigmund Freud
Imagine a huge and powerful dragon, like Smaug from The Hobbit, that can survive for thousands of years, dominating its local ecosystem, eating whatever it wants, unthreatened by anything.
But the dragon never bothers to get out there and meet Mrs. Smaug, so it never reproduces. Sooner or later, it will die in some sort of dragon-related accident. When that happens, despite its thousands of years of dominance, it will qualify as a total Darwinian failure—an evolutionary dead end—because its genes for awesome survival abilities died out. They are gone forever.
If only Smaug had paid a little less attention to wrecking shops in tiny dwarf kingdoms and more attention to the mating game, maybe there’d be some baby Smaugs to continue their total domination of Middle Earth.
Well, you’re no Smaug. And you are definitely not descended from ancient, celibate dragons. You are descended from sexy little fuckers that developed weird fetishes for big brains and funny stories. In fact, your lineage has an unbroken line of sexual success stretching back millions of years. (Think about that the next time you’re feeling sorry for yourself, and borrow some confidence from your family tree.)
For male primates like us, it was never just about the survival of the fittest. Survival is just a means toward reproduction. And reproduction can’t usually happen without getting past the challenge of female choice: the fact that female primates will not mate with just any males that happen to be alive.
Across millions of species, males have discovered only four reliable ways to break through the female choice barrier: force, trickery, bribery, and honest mating effort. In this book, we’re talking about Door #4: honest mating effort. Because in a modern, moral society, if you want sex and relationships with women, honest mating effort is the only route.
You must make yourself more attractive to women, given the choice criteria they already have that are based on their evolutionary history, their cultural traditions, and their individual personalities and contexts. You can fantasize about their preferences being different—a pornotopia where beautiful women fall at your feet and do whatever you want. But in the real world, you can’t argue women into changing their instinctive preferences. They either find you attractive or they don’t. So your only practical and ethical point of leverage is to transform yourself into the kind of guy who completes their attraction circuits.
WOMEN EVOLVED TO WANT EFFECTIVE MEN
Women did not gather in a secret lair behind the shoe department at Neiman Marcus to watch a Bachelor marathon and decide on the definition of “the perfect guy” while their periods cycled together.
On the contrary, a huge amount of research done over the past thirty years has revealed that women’s preferences are neither arbitrary nor confusing. They are actually very clear, and, more importantly for your mating efforts, they hold true at a deep unconscious level across all women, regardless of culture, ethnicity, social groups, or tribe. Fundamentally, they pick the same male traits over and over again and for good reasons.
This is true for all normal, healthy women, whether they know it or not. Fortunately for them, they don’t need to know it (but you do) because their mate preferences and emotions do the work for them—like apps in a smartphone where you can tap on a little icon that unleashes thousands of lines of programming without you having to understand any of the underlying source code. The preferences are simple and easy to use once a woman downloads them from her parents’ DNA, but there’s a long evolutionary R&D process behind each one, with millions of beta testers and focus groups over thousands of generations
To understand what traits women want in males, you have to understand what benefits women want from males. Hollywood romantic comedies and Hallmark greeting cards have convinced much of our culture that the six most romantic words a man can say to a woman are “I love you” and “I am sorry.” This is bullshit. In fact, if you look at actual behavior and mate choice, those six words are “Don’t worry honey, I got this”—which means: we face a real problem together as a couple, but I can totally handle it as a man. I’m effective.
Females throughout nature favor effective males. To deliver effective benefits to women, you need two basic things: (1) the ability to be effective at life, based on having effective traits, and (2) the willingness to use those effective traits to do effective things and supply to females the benefits that they need for their own reproductive success.
Ability is signaled through all five of the key traits and the four key proofs that we discuss throughout the book. Willingness is signaled mostly by the tender-defender trait (Chapter 9) and romantic proof (Chapter 14). If you have amazing ability but no willingness to engage with a specific woman, you’re just an unobtainable movie star to her: useful only for sexual fantasies. If you have total willingness but no ability, you’re just a naive boy with a schoolyard crush: useful only in boosting her self-esteem, not for hooking up.
In biology, effectiveness is called fitness—your statistical tendency across the whole breeding pool to survive and reproduce successfully because your adaptations fit the challenges of your environment. The relationship between fitness and survival creates a deep asymmetry in nature.
It’s why, for women, it’s even more important to be sexually disgusted by ineffectiveness than to be sexually attracted to effectiveness. Effectiveness requires a lot—thousands of genes, hundreds of adaptations, dozens of organs, and millions of neurons working together in awesomely intricate ways to produce sustained, adaptive behavior. But there are an infinite number of ways to be ineffective as a male animal, from being spontaneously aborted as a blastocyst to losing competitions to rivals, and literally every point in between. Our goal is to teach you how to be as effective as possible in as many domains as possible so that more women will find you more attractive.
Consider the best comeback ever in the history of fictional male-male competition, from The Avengers:
Captain America: “Big man in a suit of armor. Take that away and what are you?”
Tony Stark/Iron Man: “Genius, billionaire, playboy, philanthropist.”
Our point here is that you don’t need to become Tony Stark/Iron Man to find your own personal Pepper Potts. You just need to be effective—in all the main domains of life: health, family, friends, work, play, and knowledge—because that is what women want in their men. If you can become effective at these things, you will be attractive to women.
JUMPSTART YOUR ATTRACTIVENESS: REDUCE YOUR INEFFECTIVENESS
Life effectiveness reflects biological fitness, so it’s attractive to women. But for most guys, trying to increase effectiveness is less effective than reducing ineffectiveness.
Huh?
Think of it like baseball: the best way to help your team win isn’t to practice hitting 400–foot home runs every day; it’s to get better at not striking out all the time. It’s the same way with mating. First, stop sucking. That gets you in the game. Then, work on being awesome. That wins the game.
Effectiveness is sexually attractive to most women most of the time, but ineffectiveness is sexually disgusting to all women all of the time.
No woman in any culture is erotically attracted to ineffectiveness, whether it’s powerlessness or joblessness or sexual impotence or getting flustered by crises or failing to protect a baby. Thus, apart from cultivating signs of effectiveness, it can be even more important to stop showing signs of ineffectiveness. In most species, in fact, a lot of female choice is about avoiding the bad rather than approaching the good. This is why women usually have such a strong, visceral, sexual disgust toward psychopaths, narcissists, creeps, crazies, stalkers, slackers, losers, morons, etc.
A relationship with a kind, generous boyfriend could help nurture and protect a woman’s body for a few months—but a relationship with a psychotic, violent boyfriend could result in permanent disability or immediate death in the blink of an eye. A one-night stand with a Mr. Olympia could result in one great baby with great genes—but a one-night stand with Mr. Syphilis could result in lifelong sterility (losing many potential babies) and premature death. For this reason, a lot of female choice is very risk-averse—the potential losses from Mr. Wrong loom larger than the potential gains from Mr. Right.
So what does this mean for you? It means you can work the asymmetry to your advantage by identifying and fixing your weak spots rather than staying stuck trying to perfect yourself in life domains that you’ve already handled well. Don’t fixate on six-pack abs; worry about not having a keg for a stomach. Don’t obsess over perfect test scores; just make sure you aren’t a mouth-breathing frat douche. Plug your gaps; don’t just polish your medals. You might have been overlooking a few of those gaps—but women always notice them.
THE THREE BASIC FORMS OF EFFECTIVENESS
When you first meet a woman, she does not care about your needs and desires. She doesn’t owe you anything. You can catcall her on the street, but she does not owe you a smile. You can make her laugh in a bar, but she does not owe you a phone number. Your sexual desires are as irrelevant to her as the surface temperature of Mars.
Remember: this woman’s female ancestors did not pass along their genes by giving random blowjobs to strangers. They did not reproduce by taking pity on malformed mutant-boys or forgiving abusive psycho boyfriends or getting pregnant with flakes who were likely to abandon them. They reproduced by selecting boyfriends who offered as many of the prerequisites for effective fatherhood as possible, which ultimately shaped their mate preferences and their assessment of your mate value. In essence, they are here because their ancestors usually picked the best guys to have sex with.
Women have three main concerns in assessing your value:
1. Does he carry good genes?
For women, the ultimate evolutionary fantasy is finding a new male lover who has awesome traits that testify to his great genetic quality, who is from a strange new tribe that offers genetic innovations unavailable domestically, and who is worth getting pregnant with tonight even if he gets killed in battle tomorrow. (There, you now understand 90 percent of women’s sexual fantasies and romance novels.)
If a guy doesn’t offer these kinds of good genes, there’s no point in reproducing with him because natural selection will cull his inferior offspring in the next generation. Sorry to be blunt, but that’s just how life works. All female animals, ever since the origins of sexual reproduction 1.2 billion years ago, want to get the best genes they can into their offspring so their offspring in turn can survive and reproduce effectively.
This might sound like a mating death sentence at first if you’re not exactly setting the world on fire with your genetic profile. But all it really means in the modern mating world is that you need to accept your natural limitations, marshal the traits and proofs you do have, and step your game up in the two other ways women assess your value.
2. Will he be a good partner?
Most of the human babies born in the last million years were not conceived in short-term flings or hookups but in relationships between socially acknowledged “mates”—boyfriends and girlfriends. This means that for women, getting a good boyfriend has long been the most reliable way to ensure that your children lived past infancy and reproduced themselves.
A good boyfriend offers a fun, safe, sexy, nourishing relationship that brings the woman concrete benefits, even if she ultimately doesn’t combine her eggs with his sperm, and even if they don’t end up raising kids together. These benefits can be material (food, home, land, resources, money), social (reputation, popularity, status, prestige, self-esteem), protective (keep away predators, creeps, harassers, and rapists), pleasurable (his jokes make her laugh and his tongue and cock make her come), or anything else that a woman wants.
Food is a prime example. Females in thousands of species benefit from males giving them food (“nuptial gifts,” “courtship feeding”) before or after copulation. So any trait that predicts ability and willingness to give food can be attractive—from intelligence (learning to hunt effectively), to physical health (ability to run after game and carry back meat), to social proof (having friends who can help you hunt and butcher larger game, like giraffes or mammoths). Females across species also benefit from known males protecting them from unknown males and male gangs, so women tend to favor any bodyguard traits that make male protection more effective and reliable.
Cultivating your good boyfriend traits is important even if you don’t want a girlfriend yet because the vast majority of women are more attracted to “good relationship material”—a guy who seems like a quality boyfriend or Mr. Right—than to a “player” or “boy toy.”
Even a woman who is really just cruising for some hot sex will enjoy you more and feel less vulnerable to slut-shaming if she can fantasize about you being a great boyfriend. The sex will be hotter too, because most women’s brains just will not let them reach orgasm if they know that you’re worthless as anything other than a penis with a body attached (even if that’s exactly what she’s using you for). Her body will respond better if her brain’s convinced that you’re worth sleeping with more than just once. That’s how women’s sexual circuitry works.
So if you make yourself into an attractive potential boyfriend, then your sexual options become unlimited. You can downshift into a short-term hookup if you want; you can upshift into a marriage. But if you only practice being a player who pursues short-term mating, you will repel the majority of women, who want more than that.
3. Would he make a good dad?
Human males are better dads than any other males, ever, in the history of evolution. We are the masters of paternal care—helping babies and kids survive and prosper through our provisioning, protection, role-modeling, and mentorship. Think about it: male hawks might offer their kids a variety of fish, crabs, and mammals, but do they teach their kids about model rockets and Mongol battle tactics and pay for Christmas and college? No, even hawk dads suck compared to us, and they’re fucking hawks!
We’ve been playing important roles in our children’s lives for at least two million years. This isn’t just because our male ancestors woke up one day and thought, Wow, I really should man up and pay some attention to these kids running around. Our paternal abilities evolved because women wanted to mate with guys who would make good dads and stepdads.
Many animals favor mates that are likely to make good parents. It’s called the “good parent” process of sexual selection, and it’s especially important in humans. As a result of good dads evolving, for instance, human females developed year-round sexual receptivity and the ability to pump out babies much faster than chimps or gorillas can, even though our babies need a lot more care and protection.
This paternal commitment matters immensely to women and their children. You can have great genes that produce superbabies, but if you flake out at the most critical time, it’s a disaster for the woman and for the child’s survival. As we said, we know from anthropological studies of hunter-gatherer societies that if a guy abandons a woman or has a fatal hunting accident, the likelihood of her baby surviving can drop a lot. Abandonment, in all its forms, exacts a huge cost, the evolutionary defense against which has resulted in exquisite creep-detection radar and attraction circuits calibrated toward dedicated, protective, caring men.
This is true even for young women who are twenty years short of this issue being immediately relevant or who don’t want kids yet, if ever. Remember, an eighteen-year-old female under ancestral conditions was not twenty years away from thinking about having kids—it was more like twenty minutes. She would start having kids within about a year of starting to have sex. Every woman alive today is descended from an unbroken chain of successful mothers who raised healthy offspring, usually with a lot of help from good dads.
Ideally, a man possesses all three of these attributes—good genes, partnership, fatherhood—but women will settle for different distributions of them depending on their mating goals. That holds true even if a woman is only looking for a short-term hookup and not just if she is looking for a boyfriend or “the One.”
WOMEN CONSIDER ALL THE TRAITS THAT MIGHT BE RELEVANT TO FUTURE REPRODUCTION
In many species, females pay attention to just one thing, one key sexual ornament—like a peacock’s tail or a frog’s croak—that sums up the male’s whole genotype and phenotype. Some writers have claimed that female humans are the same—that they really pay attention to only one key trait, such as wealth, status, masculine energy, or emotional intelligence.
Those writers are idiots. Think about how ridiculous it would sound to you if some women’s magazine blogger wrote, “Men only care about ONE THING: big boobs. That’s it. Everything else is bullshit. Legs, hair, face, kindness, sense of style, professional success, sexual reputation—all bullshit.”
You’d instantly realize the absurdity of that claim because you’ve met plenty of women with amazing boobs who you didn’t find attractive because all their other traits weren’t up to your standards (e.g., the big boobs were attached to a forty-five-year-old alcoholic mother of six who was ringing you up at the dollar store).
The same holds true for women. Whenever some guy writes, “Women only care about ONE THING…,” women feel exasperated disgust. And they should. They can think of dozens of creeps who had that one thing and whose presence made all the blood drain from their faces and into their feet. Wealth? Women think of Donald Trump’s comb-over. Status? Women think of Vladimir Putin’s psychopathy. Masculine energy? Women think of Mike Tyson’s rape conviction. Emotional intelligence? Women think of that annoying acroyoga guy at Burning Man—or pretty much anyone at Burning Man.
Human relationships are much more complicated. Many traits, signals, and proofs are necessary to convey all the information we need to assess in choosing mates, but none by themselves are sufficient for social and reproductive success, and some aren’t even “choices” at all. Let’s be very clear about this:
Attraction is an emotional, unconscious reaction to the suite of traits men present to women; it is NOT a conscious decision that they deliberate about.
This is why human courtship is long and complicated and often frustrating for both men and women. Trait assessment is, in many instances, a lightning-quick instinctive process that focuses on the deep, general, stable, heritable qualities that predict your future behavior as a genetic sire, a boyfriend, and a potential father. And that instinctive checklist of what constitutes Mr. Right or Wife Material can get pretty long.
The checklist of traits and proofs might seem daunting. But the fact that women care about many different things in men is actually great news for you. How depressing would it be if you were a peacock with a mediocre tail? You’d have no hope. Great tails evolved because they’re hard-to-fake indicators of good genes and good health. If you don’t have a great tail as a peacock, you’re fucked—you can’t just steal feathers from other dudes and glue them on your ass. This isn’t Burning Man.
That’s great news for the average guy: We are members of a species where females are attracted to many different traits that we can cultivate and display, not just one. This means you have many options on your path to attractiveness, and all are equally valid, as they each signal effectiveness in their own way and predict a higher likelihood of social and reproductive success.
This is also why women are always digging beneath your surface. Your behavior is never just your behavior. It’s always a clue to your underlying traits. Once you really understand this, a lot of blurry confusion about women will snap into sharp focus.
The more of your traits you improve, the more joy you bring to women.
Takeaways
• Women evolved to want effective men. To be an effective man, you must have the ability to be effective at life and the willingness to use that effectiveness to deliver benefits to women.
• One of the best ways to jumpstart your attractiveness is to reduce your ineffectiveness because to most women ineffectiveness is more sexually repulsive than effectiveness is sexually attractive.
• There are three primary forms of effectiveness that women consider when assessing your value:
1. Do you carry good genes?
2. Would you be a good partner?
3. Would you be a good dad?
• Attraction is not a conscious decision; it is an emotional, unconscious reaction to the suite of traits and proofs you display to women.