Hmmm, I can't speak for all women, but as a girl who finds it easy to flirt and enjoys meeting strangers, I can tell you I actively avoid eye contact with almost all strange guys no matter how attractive.
The issue is that sustained eye contact is actually a fairly "expensive" signal while giving almost no information value about if the guy is a "creep". By which I mean, a guy who will get you in trouble and make your night significantly less fun. I think there are very few of such guys, but the cost is so high that they are worth actively avoiding!
Instead, if I find a guy attractive I will plausibly-deniable move myself much closer to him. If he is in a group, I'll try to join that group, while generally not focussing on him. I'll try to chat to different people, including him.
Why?
So I can quickly gather information about if he is likely to be chill and safe to show interest in! This process generally only takes me a few minutes, and if he does stuff that is not my vibe, I can easily continue without risking being the target of a potential 1% (or whatever ass number)
I have no clue how much my strategy generalizes for women at large, but I can at least say that eye contact really is not the primary way to flirt with strangers for some of us, for pretty logical reasons.
PS: It is a "natural" way of flirting and the reason I also "naturally" stopped is getting too many negative experiences with this at an early age. I would guess this is a common teenage rite of passage for girls, but I'm not sure.
1Out of personal curiosity, once you've decided someone is chill/safe to show interest in, how do you show interest, if at all?
Good question! I wish I had a satisfying answer for you. My preferred style of ‘flirting’ is not distinct from my general form of socializing, so mostly the above step serves to check if it is ‘safe’ to disinhibit my natural social and emotional instincts. All of these seem to work really well for me and are quite black boxy. I suspect my social cognition is high and fairly neurotypical and I can’t tell why I do what I do, or even entirely notice what I am doing in the first place [shrugs helplessly] sorry that I don’t have something more satisfying XD ❤️
I suspect you're right about the core premise, but I'm not sure about the conclusions. What are the parameters and tradeoffs?
How strikingly hot are the men these women are holding eye contact with? Top 5%? Top 1%? How hot do you suppose you've got to be before you're meeting women without spending much time on any of the other routes?
One obvious elephant: how much time should you spend becoming physically attractive if you're not above average height?
One response is that becoming attractive sucks at least as much as any of the other time-sink approaches. The only difference is that being physically fit benefits you somewhat. I'm not sure carrying an amount of muscle mass that makes you top tier in physique is actually particularly helpful for health or energy, and it takes a lot of time.
Having the level of grooming and fashion to put you in top tier is less time consuming, but may carry a downside: you are now physically presenting as a bit of a ladies' man, and that may have costs as men correctly recognize that you are out to take the women they're interested in.
And I'm not sure any level of grooming makes you hot enough without being tall, jacked, or some combination of the other types of attractive.
Being moderately physically fit and well groomed benefits you in other ways and is probably worth the time; but it seems these won't get you to top tier, perhaps unless you happen to be very tall.
So in all, I'm not sure you're right that this is a time saver.
Two other routes seem equally efficient. One is being a positive pickup artist/skilled social butterfly. If you apply it equally to people you're not wanting something from, it does not carry downsides, just upsides.
The second is one you don't mention. That is being nice. Being exceptionally pleasant or helpful also has benefits in getting both sexual interest from women, though more as partnership, and friendship/goodwill from everyone.
And it probably bears mentioning that women are going to have different criteria for what they find attractive; particularly analytical women who've put some thought into what they actually want from a romantic or sexual encounter. And I think this extends to the physical domain; people have types that are probably imprints from past experiences.
Edit: another critical factor is population composition. If you're in the bay area, you're playing on hard mode.
So I would think that a variety of combinations of strategies could be maximally efficient for men with different preferences on how to spend their time.
One obvious elephant: how much time should you spend becoming physically attractive if you're not above average height?
I'm between 5'3" and 5'4", so this is a very pertinent question for me. (For context, that's around second percentile for male height in the US. Most women prefer men who are taller than them, and the average woman in the US is 5'5". This is a pretty brutal constraint on top of my otherwise pretty solid dating fundamentals.)
That said, at least some women definitely find me physically attractive. I can tell because they've either told me so, or told me that they would have sex / are interested in having sex with me.
Those women have ever commented approvingly of my muscles (I'm notably muscular, with a lean build, when my shirt is off), my hairstyle, and my manner of dress. I think that all of those are secondary to my demeanor—socially confident and self-assured, emotionally attuned, fun / funny etc. But I think my appearance is totally a relevant factor, even despite being very short for a man.
I think that wearing clothes that fit you well, and finding a hairstyle that women think looks good on you, are cheap up front costs that often makes a big difference. If you have acne, I think solving that is also a big boost (though I didn't have that problem and so don't speak from personal experience). YMMV.
I'm not sure carrying an amount of muscle mass that makes you top tier in physique is actually particularly helpful for health or energy, and it takes a lot of time.
The amount of muscle that a very attractive male actors is not the amount of muscle that someone participating in a body building competition has. Those things that actually translate that actually make you physically more attractive to women probably do translate into more health and energy.
It's just that getting more muscles than what you need to maximize physical attractiveness doesn't give you more health and energy.
I don't think this is right. Male actors sometimes report extreme amounts of exercise and dietary discomfort the achieve their "ideal" physiques. It's not as bad as body builders, but it's bad. They may have energy, but they spend a lot of time and emotional energy to get it. And they're frequently reportedly taking steroids or similar muscle boosting substances.
The bar has been raised.
There are male actors that want to play a role for which they need a lot of visible muscle and take steroids to achieve that. When they do that they aren't optimizing for attractiveness to women. The question isn't whether there are actors that report extreme amounts but whether there are actors that are seen as beauty ideals that aren't.
I'm not sure carrying an amount of muscle mass that makes you top tier in physique is actually particularly helpful for health or energy, and it takes a lot of time.
It may be worth mentioning that short timelines gives most of the audience a comparative advantage in using steroids, i.e. the shorter your timelines, the less you care about long term health issues so that's one way in which this audience should be more open to steroids than the general population that this sort of looksmaxxing advice is usually aimed at.
I wrote a response post: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ytzrakjgcvCfLCCZp/contra-wentworth-on-physical-attractiveness-for-men
h/t to @Seth Herd and @Shoshannah Tekofsky, both of whom made excellent comments here that informed my response.
1John I think you should read this post with your ‘if I had a regular experience of oxytocin’ goggles. This is a very vintage, pre-oxytocin-revelation JSW post. I thought we weren’t doing these anymore.
[could be that it’s just really hard for you to run that simulation, or even know when it would be beneficial to run, in which case my tone may be too flip!]
I'm not quite sure what you're seeing here. Is the idea that people with regular experience of oxytocin usually want to form some oxytocin-bond before sex? ... Even if that is the idea I'm still entirely not sure what's off about the post.
... also despite me not getting it yet this is probably helpful feedback, so thank you!
You’re at a party/bar/whatever. Across the room, you see an attractive stranger. Your eyes meet. You hold her gaze for a moment. She glances away, then back again. You both look at each other, quietly staring. So begins the flirtation.
A month ago, I went to a sex club for the first time. One big thing I noticed: the classic “your eyes meet” trope absolutely did not happen at that club. And I don’t just mean it didn’t happen to me - every single woman there avoided meeting the eyes of anyone. The only exception was people the women already knew, as indicated by greeting them with a wave or a “hey, how are you” or similar.
Since then, I’ve been on the lookout, and noticed much the same at both sex parties and regular house parties. Just last week, I was at a sex party, and several women did hold eye contact… but it was exclusively women I already recognized, not strangers (even though the party had about a hundred women I did not know). The strangers included multiple cases of women who were there alone, and absolutely would not make eye contact with anyone. Yet apparently those women wanted to be hit upon - as evidenced by (a) being at a sex party, and (b) by them seeming very pleased later when guys ignored their cold signals long enough to make something happen.
Last time I went to a regular house party was two weeks before that. Again, several women did hold eye contact with me, but it was exclusively women I already knew.
What’s up with this?
Simple obvious answer:
Interestingly, even though we’re talking about in-person encounters, this is the same problem as dating apps. Women will only swipe right on guys they find at least somewhat attractive, and the things most women find attractive are generally not visible in a few photos. Thus, extremely low rates of right-swiping.
The in-person analogue of “women very rarely swipe right” is “women very rarely maintain eye contact with guys they don’t already know”.
With that in mind, an obvious guess: just like very physically attractive guys get lots of right swipes on dating apps, very physically attractive guys get a lot more sustained eye contact from women they don’t already know. The whole “you see an attractive stranger and your eyes meet…” thing basically only happens to guys who are hot enough that a nontrivial fraction of women will find them attractive immediately, just based on looks and posture and perhaps a second or two of seeing them move.
Now, it is absolutely possible for guys to make do without the physical attractiveness to inspire those moments of eye contact with strangers. Some options:
Problem is, all of those options suck ass.
Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of guys out there who are social butterflies and hang out in social circles with a favorable gender ratio; for those guys, physical attractiveness really doesn’t matter. But if you’re not naturally a social butterfly, then maintaining that kind of calendar is an enormous time sink and not fun. And if your preferred social circles are male heavy (mine tend to be about 4:1), then good luck. And even if you are a social butterfly, you’re just not going to connect with that many women this way; your options will be inherently limited.
And don’t get me wrong, there are guys who enjoy the challenge of pickup artistry - hopefully the non-toxic versions. But again, it’s an absolutely massive time sink. And if you’re not naturally into chatting up a girl who’s displayed no interest whatsoever, trying to generate attraction from scratch for the love of the challenge, man, that shit sucks.
And don’t get me wrong, there are guys who love getting shitfaced and partying until 4 am with shitfaced women. But again, if you don’t love that sort of thing, it’s a massive time sink, and it absolutely wrecks your ability to do anything else with your life. Once again, it sucks.
The promise of physical attractiveness, for men, is that you can pay an upfront cost to get in good shape, dress well, etc. You do it basically once. And then, connecting with new women doesn’t take an enormous amount of time. And you don’t need the absolutely miserable skill of trying to build attraction from scratch. You can just flirt with women who already like you, at least enough to make any move at all. Such opportunities will show up frequently, even without having to pack your calendar with social events. It’s all about making that very first contact easier, because the very first contact is the biggest pain point for guys.