If we artificially constrict the sexual market to include only money and looks as variables, we can get a pretty good idea of the emphasis that women (and men) place on both as criteria in opposite sex mates by using heavily filtered dating website data. (h/t chris)
Really what we want to do is observe people’s choices directly which is why dating websites are so useful to us. Here’s an example. What if I have a hypothesis that when choosing a mate, men care more about their potential partner’s appearance than her income and women care more about her potential partner’s income than his appearance. Imagine the following experiment. A woman/man can choose between communicating with two people. One earns $60,000 a year and is more attractive than 9 out of 10 people on the market. The other earns X dollars per year and is less attractive than 9 out of 10 people on the market. Every other observable characteristic about these two people is identical. We can use the information that tells us who individuals choose to communicate with to determine what X would have to be in order to make a woman/man prefer the less attractive person.
Researchers have done this* and find that for men there is no amount of income that the woman in the bottom ten percent in terms of appearance can earn to make men prefer her over women in the top 10 percent. That is, looks really matter to men relative to income. For women though, if the man in the bottom ten percent in terms of looks earns more than $248,500, they will prefer him over the more attractive guy earning $60,000. My students often interpret this result as saying that women really care about money, but that is not what it says at all—$186,000 is a huge difference in income. If women didn’t care about looks and only cared about money, the figure would be much, much lower. This says that despite the impression that on the marriage market women really care about income, the evidence suggest that they also care about looks. They just care about income too.
Men are the reproductively expendable sex (sperm is cheap and plentiful and has no expiration date) so it is no surprise that men’s attractiveness qualifications for a woman are so much less complex than the attractiveness criteria that women have for a man. What men want is a hot bod, a cute face, and a lot of residual reproduction value (aka youth). Anything more than that is gravy.
What women want is a far more extensive list of attractive male traits, because a woman can less afford to submit her rare and depleting resource of eggs to the inquisitive probings of subpar sperm.
The results of this study align with the real world observations of anyone who’s spent a day in his life outside the home interacting with women in human settings:
Women value money *and* looks.
Men value looks.
On paper, this means a very ugly man’s ugliness carries a $186,000 per year premium to access the same hotties that a good-looking man can get. Which also means that it is possible for an ugly man to buy his way into prime pussy. In practice, an ugly man can fake the appearance of wealth to cheat his way into prime pussy (while a good-looking man who is poor will have trouble getting past the first date if his Game is weak).
On paper and in practice, no amount of money will make an ugly woman attractive to men. So ladies it’s time to ditch those PhD in patriarchal deconstruction degrees for a gym membership and an MRS.
This is yet another study (as if one was needed) that repudiates the ONLY LOOKS MATTER queefiing chorus of quisling cuntboys. The bigger picture is even more unfriendly to the looks crü. When we examine the sexual market as it functions in reality — that is when all metrics and multivariate attractiveness traits are thrown together in the search for a lover — we discover (and science confirms) that men’s attractiveness to women is greatly influenced by nonphysical factors.
Men are visual.
Women are holistic.
The rest is commentary.
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