Following hot on the crooked heels of yesterday’s BOTM nomination, a new study is out which gives support to the conventional wisdom that skanks, fugs and other assorted low value women are the ones most likely to employ the cuckold strategy (or, looking at it from a different angle, the ones least likely to be concerned with the consequences of impulsively cuckolding their boyfriends or husbands).
Menstrual Cycle Changes in Mate Preferences for Cues Associated with Genetic Quality: The Moderating Role of Mate Value
Abstract: The purpose of the study was to explore the influence of mate value and fertility status on women’s implicit and explicit preferences for male traits associated with genetic quality. It was hypothesized that a woman low in mate value would experience greater fluctuation across her menstrual cycle in her preferences for characteristics associated with genetic quality than a woman high in mate value. Specifically, a low mate value woman during the non-fertile part of the cycle would experience a reduction in a desire for traits associated with health and reproductive success. To test the hypothesis, the college age female participants completed two measures of mate value and a self-report measure designed to gauge fertility status. Then the participants performed an Implicit Associations Test (IAT) designed to measure implicit associations with a male trait related to genetic quality and a questionnaire designed to measure their explicit responses to the same trait. As predicted, mate value moderated the relationship between fertility status and implicit preferences. […]
Inherent in Gangestad and his colleague’s reasoning about cyclic changes in [female] mate preferences is the proposition that the mixed mating [cuckold] strategy would be most adaptive for women who are unable to obtain mates that are high in both genetic quality and resources. Women who can attract both high genetic quality and resource rich males for long-term relationship have less need to acquire high quality genetic material through short-term mating. For this type of woman, the costs incurred from infidelity are less likely to outweigh the genetic benefits. An individual difference that is likely to play a pivotal role in woman’s ability to attract high quality mates is mate value (Fisher, Cox, Bennett, and Garvik, 2008). Although there are a variety of different definitions of mate value, most conceptualizations suggest that mate value is determined by observable characteristics that indicate the persons quality as a sexual partner (Kirsner, Figueredo, and Jacobs, 2003) and ability to increase the reproductive success of mates (Sugiyama, 2005; Waynforth, 2001). Not surprisingly, research has already demonstrated that a woman’s mate value influences many male behaviors and emotions, e.g., mate retention behaviors (Jones, Figueredo, Dickey, and Jacobs, 2007; Miner, Starratt, and Shackelford, 2009) and jealousy (Phillips, 2010). Further, numerous studies have found a woman’s perceived attractiveness influences her mate preferences (e.g., Feinberg et al., 2012; Little and Mannion, 2006; Penton-Voak et al., 2003; Vokovic et al., 2008).
It seems very probable that women who are low in mate value will have more difficulty in attracting long-term mates that possess both genetic quality and resources than women high in mate value. Hence, for low mate value females it may be adaptive to pursue a mixed strategy forming long-term relationships with lower genetic quality males and pursuing high genetic quality males for extra pair couplings. For these women, this is the best way to obtain the benefits of a long-term relationship and obtain high quality genetic material.
This is yet another study which validates scores of maxims propounded over the years by the Chateau for your reading pleasure. It’s almost as if being a layman simply observing how the world works with open eyes is as precise a method for discovering universal and lasting truths as being a credentialed scientist with a lab full of hardware drily measuring every jot and tittle of human interaction!
The study is very interesting in the details, both for what it reveals and for the inherent limitations it must work around, and I suggest you read all of it. Using a combination of explicit self-reporting and implicit association measures of attractiveness of stimuli (how desirable the men were to the women) and self-attractiveness (how desirable the women consciously and subconsciously thought themselves), the researchers confirmed their hypothesis that low mate value women — ugly, fat, crass, skanky hobags, or 3/4ths of American womanhood, in other words — are more likely to feel a desire to cheat on their beta male partners during their window of ovulation to acquire higher value male seed on the sly. Higher quality women — the cute babes PUAs target — are less likely to cheat or to feel a desire to cheat on their partners because they are the kinds of women who get what they want in a man, and are therefore more fulfilled with their romantic relationships.
(If you’re the type of person who enjoys aesthetic ornamentation on your dose of ugly truths, it helps to read this stuff while imagining a bulbous, half cyborg Cacodemon God of Biomechanics enthroned in the void firmament belching lube and smoke from his clanking flesh gears, cruelly laughing from his cosmic perch at his insignificant experimental human subjects toiling on earth below.)
As mentioned above, the study had to deal with some limitations present in the subject matter; specifically, the reliability of (explicit) self-reporting for measuring self-attractiveness, and the general reliability of implicit association tests. (Note that implicit association tests have been used to claim that white people are innately racist, conveniently forgetting the social context within which whites form their implicit associations, and the mitigating variables which influence them.)
On the first limitation, although women may be prone to overestimate their own attractiveness, it seems safe to conclude that such overestimation, because it presumably occurs in all test subjects, would still provide useful information on the relative rankings of all the women in the study. But that is of course open to debate. For instance, hotter women may be less apt to over-rate their looks, and may even downgrade them a bit to make uglier women feel better about themselves. (There are those people, too, who would assert that female beauty is subjective and thus unable to be accurately assessed, by either an observer or the subject. But those people are stupid.)
On the second limitation, although Implicit Association Tests are regarded as being less susceptible to “social desirability distortion” (i.e., peer pressure and social expectation to answer correctly), a problem arises that implicit feelings can vary based on hormonally-influenced or otherwise-influenced fluctuations in self-perception. Nonetheless, implicit association appears to be more trustworthy than explicit self-reporting, at least as regards the measuring of sexual desirability and sexual preference. As stated in the paper:
Contrary to the expectations, the study did not find the moderating effect of mate value when explicit responses were measured. Both high and low mate-value women expressed an explicit preference for muscular arms.
Why did mate value act as a moderator with implicit preferences but not with explicit preferences? One possibility is that the processes involved were operating without conscious awareness, limiting the participants’ ability to explicitly state preferences. Remember that an explicit preference is a positive or negative evaluation that is retrievable from memory and directs behavior. Whereas an implicit attitude is the product of positive or negative associations with an object (muscles) that can no longer actively be retrieved from memory. This explanation is consistent with the notion that many evolved processes operate passively without deliberate thought (Cosmides and Tooby, 1995; Tooby and Cosmides, 1989). Yet it is puzzling why participants would be able to explicitly state preferences influenced by the menstrual cycle but not by mate value. Another possibility for the divergence between implicit and explicit responses is that the participants’ were giving socially desirable explicit responses. The women may have believed that expressing positive attitudes towards the muscles was the expected or correct response, i.e., normal women should like muscles. Consequently, both the low and high mate value women gave positive explicit ratings of the muscular arms. On the other hand, the Implicit Association Test used to measure the women’s implicit preferences was able to detect the moderating role of mate value because the Implicit Association Test is less susceptible to this type of social desirability distortion (see Cvencek, Greenwald, Brown, Snowden, and Gray [2010] and Steffens [2004] for a discussion of Implicit Association Test’s resistance to response distortion).
Chateau Heartiste has been at the forefront inculcating the masses with some very valuable knowledge, primary among the oeuvre that men should never listen to what women say; instead they should watch what women do in order to learn what women really want in men. And this study, with its findings that there exists a discrepancy between what women explicitly self-report and what they implicitly feel, is another vindication of that hallowed CH principle. Recall that a woman’s brain has no fucking clue what her vagina is up to. Or, more precisely, women’s frontal lobes are not consciously aware of what their vaginas are feeling. For that, you must peer into their ids.
The sexual market works this way: on a subconscious level. In fact, it MUST work this way. It must, because it is the medium for the barter and trade of genetic material, the tiny, invisible Chief of Operations which is the ultimate beneficiary of all human motivation and goal-directed behavior. Dispiriting, sadistic, conscious awareness of the workings of the sexual market adds a level of unnecessary complexity that would not have been favored by natural or sexual selection.
So now you know… the rest of the story.
Moral of the study: Don’t marry a low value woman!
Better yet, don’t even bang a low value woman. If she gets pregnant and is unable to dupe her beta provider to stay with her and raise your illegitimate hellion, she may hit you with a paternity claim. But why would you bang low value women in the first place? If you’re that desperate or lacking in taste, porn is a more satisfying pressure release valve.
PS The study results show that high value women — aka hotter women — are not as subconsciously attracted as uglier women are, during the ovulation stage of their cycles, to bigger muscles in men. So if you are a womanizer who prefers the company of truly exquisite ladies, you don’t have to swole out to achieve your dreams. But if you like your broads a little slutty and road-worn, hit the gym hard. Probably explains why I see so many meatheads dating harsh-looking gym rats on the fast track to cougarville.
PPS This doesn’t mean muscularity, all else equal, won’t help you with the ladies. It just means that it’s one input among many which trigger female attraction modules, and it’s not as vital an input for attracting better looking, more feminine women as it is for banging out the substandard whores of pathetic cuckolds on the make for a fly-by-night injection of cad cream. Personally, I love the post-lift feeling I get, so I take some pleasure in knowing that I can exploit the flirty attentions of skanks to inspire jealousy, and improved sexual performance, in my sweeter lovers.
PPPS One other thing I would point out is that low mate value and IQ likely correlate. A beautiful woman is likelier to be smarter, and hence more conscientious and less impulsive (all these positive, K-selected personality traits correlate with IQ) than an ugly woman. So perhaps another unidentified operational factor that this study has uncovered is the notion that smarter girls grasp the negative consequences of cuckoldry better than do dumber girls, and are therefore better at resisting their temptations.
PPPPS You might also title this study “Ugly Chicks Must Settle for Beta Males, and That Makes Them Sad and Unfaithful”. Isn’t love grand!
[crypto-donation-box]
