CHAPTER 13: STYLIN’ AND PROFILIN’
(AESTHETIC PROOF)
Style is a simple way of saying complicated things.
—Jean Cocteau
A lot of men—especially in the United States—dismiss personal style and taste as the exclusive domain of the metrosexual, the feminine, and the gay. Real men don’t care about clothes, decor, or beauty, they’ll tell themselves between heated discussions about their fantasy football lineups. That stuff is for chicks and guys who like dicks!
There’s no other way to put it: men who think this way are penis pilots destined for failure and loneliness.
For many of you younger guys, it’s not your fault. Notions of masculinity have been tossed around like a ping-pong ball in a hurricane for the last fifty years. How can we expect you to have any idea what to do or how to do it when sexual and social mores keep changing and you get so many mixed messages from the media?
So let’s not talk about the last fifty years of social development; let’s talk about the last fifty thousand generations of sexual selection. Across thousands of animal species, over the millennia, females have been using the male beauty trait—otherwise known as sexual ornament—as the main signal of genetic quality in selecting their mates. Awesome male style isn’t just a new gay thing; it’s a very ancient straight thing.
In fact, Charles Darwin realized that female choice for beauty and style explains why the males of so many species evolved amazing, intricate physical traits. It’s the male peacock who has all the pretty feathers, for instance. The male cardinal is the bright red one. The male lion has the giant, lush mane. In nature, it’s the men who usually dress up, not the women.
These conspicuous displays evolved to signal to female eyes and brains that the male who possessed them was so fit, strong, and capable that he could easily afford to spend his energy lugging around all this risky, unnecessary bullshit just to get their attention. Sexual ornaments like iridescent feathers and sexy manes don’t help the male’s survival, but they do something much more important: they help him attract mates and reproduce.
This principle of attracting mates through conspicuous beauty and style extends into human courtship and mating in every culture. Self-ornamentation with hairstyles, accessories, and special clothing, for instance, is universal across both sexes in all hunter-gatherer tribal peoples and modern cultures and has deep evolutionary roots. Archaeologists found that humans have been ornamenting themselves with red ocher pigments and shell-bead necklaces for at least 90,000 years. Even Neanderthals were ornamenting themselves with cut, notched, polished talons from white-tailed eagles 130,000 years ago. There is even some evidence that our ancestors were selecting mates for their artistic skill in making stone tools since long before we were humans—over 1.5 million years ago.
Women pay a lot more attention than you realize to your stylish sexual ornaments, your artistic and musical skills, your appreciation of beauty, and the whole aesthetic dimension of your life: your grooming, scent, clothes, car, music, furnishings, apartment, Instagram feed, online dating profile, and everything else. All these things are reliable signals to women of who you are and how well you’ve cultivated your other traits—especially your mental health, intelligence, willpower, and empathy. If you neglect all these aesthetic signals just because you think they’re metrosexual, feminine, or gay, you might as well shoot your own dick off; it’s not like you’re going to need it.
Because women instinctively think about your whole appearance, lifestyle, and set of possessions as a work of art, they want everything in your life (body, clothes, car, home) to be stylish, beautiful, creative, clean, and well maintained. They want evidence of taste and thoughtfulness in what you’ve chosen to surround yourself with.
Guys who are good at aesthetic proof understand this and use good taste to guide every decision in their lives: which neighborhood to live in, which restaurant to book for a dinner date, which wine to order, which bedroom candles to buy, which condom to wear. These may seem to be unrelated decisions, but they all add up to form your aesthetic proof.
If you’re still young or a broke-dick college guy who lacks the experience and the means, don’t worry. Developing aesthetic proof isn’t just about buying the right stuff that somebody else has designed; it’s also about what you can do, make, and create. Male creativity and artistic talent are major targets of sexual selection, because they demonstrate so much about how your mind works. Females in many species, for example, choose male mates for their ability to produce pleasing sounds—as in the bird song, whale song, gibbon song, and human music. Instrumental music is at least thirty-five thousand years old—based on the ages of some ancient bone and ivory flutes discovered in Germany—so women could have been selecting men partly for their musical talent for more than one thousand generations. Your creative activities and achievements in the visual arts, performing arts, literary arts, and science even predict your short-term mating success. Successful male artists have both more sexual partners and longer-term sexual relationships.
That should tell you all you need to know really: whether you just want to get laid or get married, having some demonstrable personal style, creative abilities, and aesthetic appreciation puts you way ahead of all those bros who think of “the arts” as mysterious, pretentious fields that only women and gay men appreciate.
Plainly put: A high level of aesthetic proof doesn’t make you a pussy; it drowns you in it.
WHY WOMEN CARE ABOUT AESTHETIC PROOF
Women interpret aesthetic taste, as they do material proof, as a sign of good underlying traits, like intelligence, openness, worldliness, confidence, and social savvy.
If you wear Crocs on a first date and she excuses herself to the bathroom and never comes back, that is her aesthetic judgment (“Gross!”) about one aspect of your aesthetic proof (shoes) that instantly leads her to make inferences about your deeper traits, like mental health (“What kind of crazy person wears plastic gardening shoes on a date?”), intelligence (“Who doesn’t know that Crocs are awful?”), and willpower (“Does he just not give a shit about this date?”).
And it turns out that women are right to select for aesthetic attractiveness. Evolutionary psychologists have found that beauty does often predict deeper traits that make for better partners. This halo effect also applies to products for similar reasons: good aesthetic design predicts consumers’ ratings of product usability and practicality. This aesthetic dimension of product design isn’t just hot air; it’s the reason that Apple is the most valuable company in HISTORY.
The logic of aesthetic-based selection makes even more sense when you consider that physical beauty signals good genes. Across thousands of animal species, females use male sexual ornaments as indicators of genetic quality. Darwin realized that this is the reason that animals evolve so many amazing, diverse ways to flaunt their beauty. Recent studies show that Darwin was right: sexual selection has been central in the evolution of impressive visual displays among male peacocks, bowerbirds, primate faces, and primate sexual swellings and in the evolution of impressive musical displays among male songbirds. Aesthetic sexual selection has also shaped male genitalia, from those of insects to the human penis, through females favoring copulation with males that best stimulated them. Selection for beauty has roots much deeper than human culture, and it’s a powerful way for females to get good genes for their offspring.
Furthermore, a dad with good aesthetic skills also makes a great mentor and playmate to kids of all ages. A man who’s interested in the arts is a dad who’ll have fun taking his kids to concerts, plays, museums, galleries, Hobby Lobby, and Home Depot. Women instinctively anticipate that kids will feel happier and safer in an aesthetically appealing home, so they’ll favor men who seem likely to offer that. They know that kids will be more entertained by a dad who can draw, paint, sing, play instruments, and make things. Kids can also learn those skills from their fathers and increase their own popularity and mate value.
IMPROVE YOUR AESTHETIC PROOF
There are lots of ways to improve your aesthetic proof. The easier ways that you can tackle right now are in the “Display Aesthetic Proof” section, because for most of you guys, just doing them will be an improvement. Here we are going to talk about adding new skills and expertise over time to build a stronger foundation of aesthetic proof. These take longer and usually require some reading or training, but so few guys bother doing them that you can get a big mating advantage from just a little effort.
1. Learn to dance: Dance is ancient and universal across cultures, has its own distinctive aesthetic psychology, and is incredibly important to women. Yet a vast majority of men hate to dance and have never taken the time to be anything but horrible at it.
You either do the middle school Frankenstein, or you look like one of those inflatable dancing men outside car dealerships along the highway. There’s really no excuse for not learning how to move your body in a way that does not look like you just climbed out of a glacial crevasse or had a seizure. If Napoleon Dynamite can do it, you can too. From how men dance, women can accurately judge their physical strength, their conscientiousness and agreeableness, and their tendencies toward sensation seeking and boredom.
These are the most useful forms of dance to learn for modern mating: basics (nightclub two-step, country two-step, hustle), East Coast Swing (ECS/Lindy hop), West Coast Swing (WCS), ballroom (waltz, foxtrot, quickstep), electronic dance (EDM/house dance), hip-hop dance, and Latin (merengue, rumba/mambo, cha-cha, tango, salsa). Don’t worry about learning all of these; just pick a couple that use the music you like that’s played in the kinds of places that attract the women you prefer. Dance classes almost always have a low male-to-female ratio, so they’re also a great place to meet women.
2. Learn to make music: Musicians attract groupies for a reason: their skills make women swoon, and you don’t have to be a rock god to reap the rewards. Music composition and production require good general intelligence and depend on diverse brain areas and diligent practice. Singing well is useful for serenading women, doing karaoke, building confidence, and improving your speaking voice, so take some voice lessons. Even better, learn how to play one of the most commonly available musical instruments: guitar, drums, or keyboards. And free computer programs like Audacity offer powerful ways to create your own music without needing instrumental skills at all.
Make no mistake about it: guys are into music because it works. Women like it.
3. Learn to make stuff: Craftsmanship—like working leather, machining metal, or making furniture—is a huge turn-on to women, not so much for what it is as for what it represents.
No woman is losing her composure over your leather punch or a miter saw. But the fact that you can harness the power of potentially lethal tools to create something beautiful and functional where before there were only hunks of wood and steel is incredibly attractive. And by learning to think like a craftsman, you’ll understand better how everything is designed, put together, and works. So, your crafts skills will attract women and protect you from buying crappy consumer products that break easily and wear out quickly.
4. Learn to draw: Women love guys who can draw them accurately and observantly (as when Rose, the high-class heiress in Titanic, poses nude for Jack, the Irishman in steerage). Traditional artistic skills require a lot of intelligence, conscientiousness, practice, and manual dexterity, whether you’re doing representational art (e.g., drawing a portrait of a woman) or ornamental art (e.g., carving a complex pattern into a wooden table).
The key thing here is to cultivate actual skill rather than indulge in modernist expressionism or abstract art. The poet John Ciardi pointed out, “Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at women and persuade themselves they have a better idea.”
5. Learn to be a better storyteller: Storytelling is an ancient and sexy art. You don’t need to write novels to tell stories that attract women. Tucker’s career so far has been based on his ability to tell funny stories about his life to women and to tell funny stories about women to men.
The best way to start getting better at storytelling is to listen to how stand-up comedians and great politicians tell stories. Read classic short stories. Pay attention to how your friends tell stories well or badly. Practice telling your best stories—especially the short version of your life story—again and again, refining the plot, pacing, and word choice based on people’s reactions.
Beyond that, there are dozens of books and an entire field of study on the mechanics of story, so we’re not going to dive into all that minutiae. What you need to understand about telling a story is that often the “what” is the least important part. People who are bad at storytelling often get stuck in this mode of reporting facts one after the other: “And then… and then… and then…” without paying any attention to the context that gives those facts relevance. Your audience—especially women, who are incredibly deductive listeners—cares less about what happened than why it happened, when it happened, how it happened, to whom it happened and, most important of all, how you feel about it. Put all that detail into a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end, and you’re on your way to not boring the shit out of everybody with the otherwise irrelevant details of your life!
DISPLAY AESTHETIC PROOF
We are going to get very specific in this section, because you might think you know what we’re talking about, but you’ll probably go out and fuck it all up. We’re not going to let that happen—partly for your sake and partly so you don’t blame us for failing to get a woman’s number when you unironically show up at a sorority function in pleated khakis and a Bill Cosby sweater.
Of course, different women and different subcultures have different tastes. Goth women like black leather; hipster women like brown leather; kinky women like red leather. Laying down your own electronic music dance tracks in FL Studio software will impress more women in San Francisco than in San Antonio, and vice versa for playing Conway Twitty songs on the banjo.
We are not going to tell you that there is just one way to dress, or one car you must drive, or a specific shaving cream you must use. That’s all bullshit.
The point is not which specific product you use but whether you are tasteful and thoughtful about what you’ve chosen and whether you display it with some flair and confidence. Instead of sweating what to buy or use, think instead about your mating market, your mating goals, and your mate preferences—what kind of style would the kind of girlfriend you’d like to attract want to see you display? Try things; if they don’t work, try different things. Developing your own best personal style takes time, experimentation, and feedback.
That being said, there are some fundamentals you need to understand about grooming, clothing, and possessions that apply across most styles and mating markets:
1. Grooming
Grooming has deep biological roots; it’s not just a cultural invention. All animals clean themselves—especially primates. The stereotype of the disheveled, dirty caveman is bullshit.
Unfortunately, a lot of guys have the wrong idea about good grooming: they think, like everything else aesthetically related, that it’s superficial, feminine, or gay. This is wrong biologically—males of every species groom themselves to present their sexual ornaments in the best possible condition. And it’s wrong historically—men throughout most ages and cultures took great pains to keep their hair, beards, clothes, accessories, weapons, armor, horses, livestock, and homesteads tight.
Women are attracted to guys who take care of themselves. They interpret grooming as a signal of your conscientiousness/willpower, one of your deepest personality traits. If you’re well groomed, women automatically infer that you’re likely to be mature, ambitious, and active. Lucky for you, all the great things that conscientiousness brings in the long term can be signaled to women by just a few more minutes of grooming each morning.
Take a good, hard look in your bathroom mirror. Inspect your head hair, beard, skin condition, teeth, fingernails, toenails, and pubic area. Are they all clean, trim, orderly, and pleasant? Would you want your sister to date a guy who takes care of himself the way that you take care of yourself? If you don’t like the thought of welcoming a crusty garbage person to your Thanksgiving table every year, you need to get your grooming act together. Let’s start at the top and work down.
1. Head Hair
Lots of different hairstyles can work on men, but whatever look you choose, give it at least a minimal amount of care. That means washing your hair every morning in the shower with a good conditioner; conditioners have plenty of cleaning power on their own, and unlike shampoo, they won’t strip protective oils from your hair and scalp and promote dandruff (you need shampoo only about once a week). That also means getting regular haircuts from a good professional barber who gets to know your personal style.
Accept your hairline, whatever it is. Don’t try to hide a receding hairline or baldness; work with it to find a haircut that works for you. It’s OK to have a receding hairline that you accept (Bruce Willis, Vin Diesel, and Jason Statham have shaved their heads for years because they’re going bald); it is extremely unsexy to do obvious things to try to hide it, such as comb-overs and two-tone dye jobs like your head is a ’64 Impala with candy paint, sittin’ on twenty-four-inch rims.
2. Eyebrow/Nose/Ear Hairs
Why are stray hairs poking out of your head and face in all directions? Get a good nose-hair trimmer and use it up your nostrils and in and around your ears at least once a week. Those hairs evolved to keep parasites out of your orifices; they didn’t evolve to attract women. Unless you spend a lot of time rolling around with ticks and lice, you don’t need those hairs.
Eyebrow maintenance is simple: your barber should trim them with every haircut so you don’t look like an elderly Oxford professor, and your unibrow needs to be split in half with tweezing so you don’t look like a mobster. Remember, conspicuous precision in grooming is a key signal of conscientiousness (willpower).
3. Facial Hair
Beard or no beard? Research shows that most women are most attracted to guys who haven’t shaved for a few days or who’ve already succeeded in growing a proper, well-groomed beard. This makes sense evolutionarily: men wouldn’t grow beards at all if ancestral women hadn’t liked beards. In most cultures, men let their facial hair grow, and they style it carefully. In twentieth-century America for some reason, the clean-shaven look took over; it’s fine as well and usually gets a neutral response from women.
In-between is bad; avoid the “trying to grow a beard but can’t” look. If you grow a full beard, make sure it’s well groomed in length and around the edges. If you’re going for the hipster look, your beard can be mountain-man scruffy, but your head haircut must be tight, crisply parted, and conscientious so the unkempt facial hair looks purposeful. If both your beard and your head hair are messy and uncut, you come across as a homeless schizophrenic.
4. Skin Care
Many guys avoid face washing because they got soap in their eyes once during bath time when they were five years old and that was that—never again! If you are a chronic non-face-washer, it’s time to process your toddler traumas and change your habits.
Having clear skin is important to women, because skin blemishes signal infection, disease, and poor health. The best way to have clear skin is to starve the bacteria in your pores that cause acne: avoid soda, sugar, grains, refined carbs, and caffeine. Most skin issues can be resolved by improving your diet and washing your face daily with a moisturizing soap. If you want a woman to kiss you, at least do her the courtesy of not having to worry about feeling like a napkin on a slice of pepperoni pizza.
5. Mouth and Breath
For mating purposes, your goal with oral care is to get your mouth into a condition where women will want to kiss it and keep kissing it. Kissing is how women sample your biochemistry and unconsciously assess your health. Rough, cracked, chapped lips are gross to kiss; drink more water and use lip balm.
Once women get past your lips, they’re into the bacterial cesspool of your mouth, the dirtiest place in your body. Manage your mouth. You can control which bacteria species are dominant by changing what you eat; our nutrition recommendations will make your breath a lot better by reducing sugar-dependent bacteria.
And you can control how many bacteria a woman can taste in your mouth through good oral care. Brush your teeth with a good manual toothbrush when you wake up in the morning and with an electric toothbrush before you go to bed at night; dentists say this combination is better than using either alone. Also floss and use a tongue scraper after breakfast and again before you go to sleep.
Visit the dentist regularly to get cleanings, fix your problems, and motivate your daily oral hygiene (there’s nothing like a cute dental hygienist praising your oral care regime to motivate regular flossing). All of this oral care will automatically protect you from bad breath, so you’ll feel more confident talking and canoodling with women.
6. Body Hair
Most women want your chest, armpits, stomach, lower arms, and legs to show a bit of that manly hairiness. Women perceive hairlessness as coding for little boy, chemo patient, or porn star, so unless you have a ten-inch penis, don’t shave off all your body hair.
At the same time, women don’t like really hairy backs, shoulders, or butts, all of which code as terrorist, werewolf, or grandpa. If you can French-braid your back hair into your chest hair, it’s time to visit the spa (or the local sheep shearer). For the most part though, as long as your body hair is not excessive in either direction—little sickly boy or Wolverine—then it’s not a big issue for most women.
Same with pubic hair: most young American men keep some pubic hair so they look like they’ve gone through puberty, but they trim it so women aren’t also flossing during blowjobs.
7. Hands
Women pay a surprising amount of attention to hands—the size, proportions, strength, hairiness, skin condition, nail condition, and vascularity (how prominent the veins are, a signal of strength and masculinity).
The most common complaints are that men don’t keep their nails trimmed or their hands clean. Washing your hands isn’t just good for their visual appeal; it’s also one of the most powerful ways to protect yourself from colds and flu.
Once a week, clip your fingernails, scrape the dirt from under them, and push your cuticles up. You don’t need a professional manicure, just enough nail shortness and cleanliness. A woman should be confident that if your hand gets inside her panties, it’s not bringing a petri dish from the CDC with it.
Don’t worry that good hand care will make your hands look feminine; what makes your hands look feminine is having no visible vascularity or grip strength from failing to lift heavy weights regularly.
8. Feet
Most guys have sexually repulsive feet, and women notice. Many women dread that moment when a guy first takes off his shoes and socks to have sex with her. They’re bracing for the stinky, hairy, long-nailed horrors within that confirm they are, in fact, about to fuck a centaur. Don’t have feet like a centaur, a hobbit, or any other mythical woodland creature.
Keep your toenails clipped and your feet clean, and sort out any calluses, bunions, rough patches, and fungal infections (athlete’s foot). Wear clean socks every day. And for the love of god, when you’re having sex, take them off! Women HATE when you keep them on.
9. Scent
A man’s scent is hugely important to women. Sometimes his pheromone symphony smells so good that a woman can’t resist. More often, a guy shows up for a first date, thinks he probably smells OK, but there’s something just a bit “off,” so there’s no sex and no second date. Few women will admit he just didn’t smell right, but the research on sex and scent says that’s often the reason there is no “chemistry.”
Your body scent has a complicated physiology influenced by what you eat, how you exercise, how much you sleep and hydrate, how much you sweat, and what your hormone levels are. This means your natural scent is a pretty informative signal of your overall health.
If you are really healthy and you stay reasonably clean, you’ll probably smell really good to women. If you aren’t healthy, you can’t mask a bad body scent with bad cologne; you’re just building a more layered tapestry of awfulness.
Beware: Cheap, nasty, unsubtle scents are added to most men’s toiletries—soap, conditioner, hair gel, antiperspirant, body spray, and shaving foam. Avoid that shit. Buy unscented. Quality women don’t fall for men who use Axe Body Spray.
Do not bathe in that stuff either, like you live inside a Long Island nightclub. Cologne is like saffron or hemlock—a little goes a long way (Geoff’s favorite cologne is D.S. & Durga). Use just enough that a woman will consciously notice it only if she’s well inside your personal space and sticking her nose into your neck. If someone can smell you from more than a foot away, you are using WAY too much.
The same principles apply to scent in your clothes, car, and home. Use unscented laundry detergent and fabric softeners so your clothes smell like you, not like “Pure Sport” Bounce dryer sheets. Don’t hang some nasty pine scent “air freshener” in your car to mask the fast-food smell; just clean out your car and it will smell fine.
Don’t overwhelm your bathroom with Lysol spray just before a woman comes over; just keep it clean. Don’t use cheap scented candles or scent diffusers in your bedroom; women having sex want to smell you, not your Glade Plugin air freshener. If you keep your bedroom clean and open the windows a little at night, it’ll smell fine.
2. Clothing
You were born with a body that you can change only to some extent. Fortunately, you can pick all the clothing you ever put on, so you have a huge amount of control over the style, quality, and fit of your clothing and the signals it sends to women.
Think about job uniforms. You want your airline pilot to be professionally dressed with a tie, jacket, epaulets, and the little winged pin rather than sporting a Dave Matthews Band T-shirt and flip-flops. You want your doctor in a white coat and stethoscope, not black leather bondage gear. And guess what—dressing the part actually makes patients respond better to doctor care.
Women assess your outfit in the same way when you are on a date. They want you to look the part of “cool potential boyfriend.” They don’t just judge how well dressed you are in terms of your style and wealth, however; they also judge how much effort you put into looking good for her. Most young men under-dress for dates, failing to understand that “looking casual and laid back” to them means “looking careless and uninterested” to women.
That said, almost anything can be appropriate to wear on a date (besides Crocs of course), depending on where you’re going. Board shorts are fine if you’re going to the beach. A suit is appropriate if you’re going to the ballet. The reverse is not true, which we hope is obvious to you.
Fundamentally, whatever you choose to wear has to be clean, well fitted, coordinated, and socially appropriate.
Don’t just throw on whatever was within reach and doesn’t smell like the inside of a bus terminal. Don’t look like you got dressed in the dark or you picked your outfit from a hobo’s bindle. Be purposeful and considerate.
1. Own Your Clothing Signaling
Maybe you’re an uppity rebel who resents women judging you by your clothing. Too bad. This is a game you can’t opt out of. Every outfit, no matter how informal or thoughtless, sends all kinds of signals to every woman who sees it.
Dressing like a slob to show that you don’t care about clothing is still a signal; to most women, it’s a signal of immaturity, poverty, or, worst-case scenario, a big red flag about potential depression issues. So recognize what signals you want to send the world about yourself, and consciously select the clothing that best approximates those signals.
If you want the world to know you’re a serious person who means business, choose darker, muted tones and more formal clothes (slacks when you could have worn jeans, an Oxford when you could have worn a polo) that button you up and appear professional.
If you want everyone to think you’re sharp and irreverent and youthful, funny vintage-type T-shirts and stylish accessories (shoes, hats, bags, etc.) are going to be a staple for you. The key is to balance them with high-quality pants and jackets; otherwise, “youthful” becomes “immature,” and “sharp and irreverent” can become “silly and ignorant.”
2. Dress Appropriately for Your Age and Social Context
If you’re a college student, dress more or less like a college student. If you are a young corporate professional, dress like one. There is some variance here of course, because different situations and subcultures call for different personal styles.
Trends change quickly though, so don’t focus so much on trying to stay on trend as much as identifying the common fashion denominators for the mating market you’re in. Doing that is pretty simple: pick your head up from your phone, point your eyeballs in the direction of the guys your age who are getting attention from the kinds of women you want to attract, and then wear some version of what they’re wearing. Only after you learn how to play around with your personal style within the box of the social norms for your age and group should you try to play outside the box with more radical looks.
Many guys end up dressing inappropriately for their age, in ways that women find sexually repulsive. In grade school, the kids who dressed like old men were the ones who got destroyed. In high school, the cosplayers in superhero capes were the ones doing something else on prom night. In the adult mating game, it’s the older men who dress like college kids at Coachella that get shut out.
3. Fit Trumps Fashion
Cutting-edge fashion is overrated; good fit is underappreciated. Never wear anything that a male model would wear on a runway at a fashion show, especially if it’s by a designer whose clothes you’ve never seen in the menswear section of a decent department store (Macy’s, Nordstrom, Neiman Marcus, etc.). Very few women want to date a fashionable guy, but many women want to date a stylish guy who wears tasteful clothes that fit well.
Most young men wear clothes that are too big: baggy pants, tentlike shorts, shapeless T-shirts, and saggy coats. This repulses women in several ways. It says, “I’m insecure about my size,” “I don’t want you to see what shape my body really is,” “I can’t be bothered to try on clothes in a store and see if they fit before I buy them,” and “I’m so sexually insecure that I don’t want to be mistaken for a gay guy who dresses well.”
Look at how the leading men in romantic comedies dress; women can see their shoulder-to-waist ratio, their muscles, their amount of gut fat, their butt shape, their thigh strength, and so on. Your clothes don’t have to be tight, but they should look like they FIT your body.
Your goal over the long term should be to throw out all your clothing that doesn’t fit and start buying clothing that does. For now, set aside a couple of hours this weekend to go through every piece of clothing in your closet, one by one. Try every piece on, in daylight, in front of a mirror. Be brutally honest about whether it fits you. If you’re lucky enough to have a high shoulder-to-waist ratio, shirts will fit you only if they are “fitted”; if they balloon out at the waist, they don’t fit. Throw them out (or donate them to your younger brother or nephew if the shirts actually fit them; otherwise, donate them to a charity shop or your local landfill). If your jeans don’t make your butt and legs look great, throw them out. If your coats don’t fit, abandon them.
Your inner frugal granddad brain will object: “It’s a perfectly good shirt; keep it; you paid for it, so it’s worth something.” No it isn’t. It’s cock-blocking you, costing you potential mating opportunities every time a woman sees it.
Dressing well in clothes that fit does not require expensive custom-made clothing. You can get 80 percent of the aesthetic benefits of a $6,000 bespoke Savile Row suit from a decent wool $299 Men’s Wearhouse suit that you have tailored to fit your frame—as long as it’s matched with a good pair of leather shoes.
That doesn’t mean you should trot it out on a first date, or a second or a third, but it’s an important piece to have in your arsenal for when you get deeper into relationships with women and are more likely to go places with her where a suit is appropriate (weddings, funerals, anniversary dinners, etc.).
The simpler you keep your tastes, the easier it is to display a personal style based on clean lines, classic looks, and good fit. The photo editors of most major magazines implicitly understand the attractiveness of simplicity. It’s why you see stars of today channeling stars of yesteryear in basic looks that fit impeccably—uncomplicated jackets like a dark gray blazer, flat front wool slacks, and crisp white button-down shirts.
Paul Newman publicity photo for his first film (1954)
Jon Hamm publicity photo for the Emmy’s (2015)
When buying these simple, clean, classic clothes items, it’s still important to get advice. Not everything is going to look good with your skin tone, hair color, or complexion, so bring along female friends who understand men’s clothes and styles. If you’re still working on your social proof and have no tasteful friends to bring along, find the most experienced, intelligent salespeople and learn to read their signals. “That color looks great with your eyes” means “That doesn’t fit at all”; “That makes you look amazingly hot!” means “That might fit OK.”
4. Wash Your Damn Clothes
Your clothes should be washed regularly, look clean, and smell fresh. Any daytime clothing item exposed to sweat from your groin, feet, or underarms needs to be washed after each wearing—this includes underwear, socks, undershirts, and casual shirts. Nightwear (pajamas) and shirts worn over undershirts (e.g., dress shirts) need washing every couple of wears unless you spill shit all over them, obviously. Wash pants and jeans every three to four wears, unless you spill on them too. Suits, jackets, and outerwear need brushing after every couple of wears and dry cleaning twice a year. If you’re wearing a collared, dressy shirt on a date, take the trouble to iron it—women appreciate your effort more than they notice your ironing skill. Even better, make ironing a nonissue by folding your sweaters and T-shirts properly and hanging up your shirts and pants on thick, quality-plastic or wood hangers to prevent wrinkling. The floor is not a dresser or a closet.
5. Shoes Matter
Your shoes matter more to women than you can imagine. Most American guys handicap their mating with horrible “casual” shoes that no European man would be caught dead in. Women evaluate the seriousness of your interest in them by the formality of the shoes you wear on dates. Shoes for almost all dates, except very casual or athletic activities, should be leather (or suede). Good leather shoes set you apart from the man-boys still running around in grade-school Nikes or high-school Vans. They instantly make you seem more mature, dominant, confident, and datable. Take good care of your shoes, with regular cleaning, polishing, and use of shoe trees.
3. Car and Home and Other “Stuff”
Realize that everything you take for granted about your car and home is all too apparent to a visiting woman. As a Polish proverb says, “A guest sees more in an hour than a host sees in a year.”
1. Keep All Your Stuff Clean
Remember, women code “clean” as “safe,” “mature,” “reliable,” and “responsible”—four very desirable qualities in a boyfriend. Keep your car washed outside and clean inside.
To most women, a tidy Toyota is more attractive than a BMW filled with fast-food wrappers, old gym bags, and used condoms. A small, clean apartment feels sexier and more romantic to most women than a luxury condo with a stinky fridge, pee stains on the bathroom floor, and filthy bed sheets.
It’s especially important to keep your bathroom and kitchen clean. These are the two make-or-break areas that women pay attention to, whether they’re house shopping or boyfriend shopping. If you get in the habit of doing a weekly clean for just an hour or two, it’ll make your car and home much more appealing to women. You do NOT want to be the guy who brings a woman home only to have her run away in terror because she refuses to sit on any of your furniture in a skirt.
2. Clean up Clutter
Most guys have too much shit in their homes, even by their early twenties. Once a week, tidy everything that’s “out,” and before you put it “back” where you usually keep it, ask yourself whether it’s adding any value to your life and your attractiveness. Is it truly useful, valuable, or beautiful? If not, why do you have it? Do you really need all eight of those enormous plastic souvenir cups from the 2010 Alamo Bowl?
Normal women hate clutter, because they’re much more sensitive to the perils of dirt, dust, and vermin that could spread disease and make babies die. Being surrounded by clutter, chaos, and useless junk is also a symptom of psychosis, depression, obsessive hoarding, drug addiction, and/or unconscientious laziness. Err on the side of minimalism in your decor.
Takeaways
• The first step in improving your aesthetic proof is eliminating common errors that make men sexually repulsive to women—fixing your grooming, clothing, car, and home to eliminate things like nose hairs, zits, bad breath, dirty fingernails, nasty scents, baggy clothes, plastic shoes, car trash, and home clutter. All these problems signal poor mental health, questionable intelligence, low conscientiousness, immaturity, social isolation, and poverty to women.
• Women have been judging men based on their style, taste, aesthetic appearance, and artistic skills for more than a hundred thousand years. Modern women will judge you partly by the aesthetic proof you offer through your grooming, clothing, car, home, and artistic and musical skills. So don’t worry that caring about beauty in your life will make you seem feminine or gay. Instead, take charge of your attractiveness.
• Once you’ve got yourself and your spaces looking tight, cultivate active performance and creative skills that are aesthetically attractive to women—things like learning to dance better, sing, play instruments, make things, draw, and tell stories. These skills all signal openness, playfulness, happiness, intelligence, willpower, and social popularity.