This is a response to John Wentworth’s recent article, Why Physical Attractiveness Matters for Men’s Dating Prospects. I have no quibble with the thesis stated in the title, but a lot of the body of the article struck me as off-base. When John sent me the article, I told him the article seemed “fundamentally confused.” He asked for details, and this article is my answer.

Here I list and argue with four premises I detected in John’s article. Some of them he said in so many words; some are my (possibly-incorrect) inferences.

I have my own weird perspective on a lot of this stuff that isn’t necessarily to be trusted. To avoid just arguing purely from that weird perspective, I ran several glosso surveys to gather data. Glosso data itself is pretty sus! I could only survey people’s self-reports, which could easily be inaccurate. The surveys have pretty low N. The population on glosso is itself weird; it’s Aella’s social network, originally seeded with Aella’s slutty, high-body-count, looks-conscious friends. (I say this with love, as someone pretty firmly rooted in that social network, sharing those characteristics!) So we shouldn’t put too much weight on any of this data. I used this data source because it was readily available and better than just going with N=1.

Premise #1: Eye contact is typically on the path from “we’re strangers” to “we’re flirting”

One woman’s ungeneralizable field report

In John’s article, he seems to take it as a given that eye contact is on the path from “we’re strangers” to “we’re flirting.” This premise was the one that stood out the most to me as misguided.

I flirt a lot. I get to know people pretty easily. I’ve navigated the strangers-to-flirting transition hundreds of times. But I can’t think of a single time in my entire life that it started with wordless eye contact.

Maybe it’s just me? Maybe I’m the weird one? But this is where I wanted to start my investigation.

First, why doesn’t making a connection run through eye contact for me?

Well, because eye contact is way too fucking intimate of a place to start, that’s why. If it’s literally the first thing that happens, it’s opening the door to who-even-knows-what, and the odds of me liking the results are very low. Most humans, drawn from the population at large, are not sexually attractive to me, and I can’t tell which ones are actually interesting just by looking at them.

Eye contact is an invitation. It says, “Come over and talk to me, I’m already interested in you, you’re not going to get shot down.”^[1] And that’s just not true. I’m not already interested in him. I probably am going to shoot him down. I don’t want to engage in false advertising like that, and I don’t want to suffer through a horrible, awkward conversation that I brought upon myself.^[2]

So no, I’m definitely never going to start there. I’m going to gather information some other way first.

Let’s say the info-gathering goes well, and I do want to initiate contact. What then?

Well, I personally am not going to be coy about it. Making eye contact seems kind of hard to do, easy to miss, and easy to misinterpret. I’m going to go talk to him. I do think I’m weird in this way, I think many women have much more skill at non-verbal flirtation than I do. Plausibly I could work on it. But maybe looking at the inner workings of one direct and autistic girl will tell you something about other women… especially if, perhaps, dating direct and autistic girls does tend to work out well for you in the end. Hypothetically.

Okay, but what about other women, though

So… how typically is eye contact on the strangers-to-flirting path? I turned to glosso to find out.

This paints a picture that goes something like this:

• she notices you and is attracted to you (a given of the questions)
• she probably takes a non-obvious action to gather more info about you (54% non-obvious vs. 28% obvious)
• once she decides she’s willing to make contact,
• • ~50% chance she takes an obvious action (makes eye contact, goes up and talks to you)
  • ~50% chance she takes a more subtle or invisible action (joins the same conversation group, becomes receptive to your advances)

I note again the the sample size is very small here, but the trends have seemed reasonably stable as data has accrued. If anything changes wildly as more data accumulates I will update this post.

A richer model of initiating contact

It seems to me that, even for women who give a lot of weight to physical attraction, you’ve got to give them more to go on before any of them are going to be making eyes at you – and some never will. You need to facilitate their info-gathering, so they’re predisposed to receive your overtures well. And even with that, you probably need to make the first move, unless you are trying to date me specifically.^[3]

And if you’re John-like, you want to do all of that efficiently: you want a decent ROI on your efforts.

You’re going to need a better working model of where to direct your efforts.

We’ll come back to that later.

Premise #2: Being physically attractive works on enough of the right women to make it a viable mainline strategy

John’s argument here is that physical attraction matters. It matters to a large fraction of women, and it matters to the women that a John-like guy wants to meet.

How big a factor is physical attraction?

This one always sounds fake to me, because physical attraction is pretty low on my own personal list; I tend to run much more on the sorts of characteristics you notice by reading someone’s blog. But people vary, and I do see some of my female friends filtering on physical attractiveness. How much does it matter, to how many people?

First I just straight-up asked.

The mean for women was 38%; the mean for men was 56%.

My own personal answer to this is somewhere in the bottom two buckets (0-15%); it depends a lot on context. I expected other women to weight it higher than I did, and I expected men to weight it higher than women did, and I was right, but I was surprised by the magnitude on both counts. What are you people even doing. The quality of the blog really matters and I will die on this hill.

Anyway.

How efficient is physical attraction at getting you laid?

Next, I wanted to know how much that physical attraction translates into action. John’s post is saturated with the desire for efficiency. I don’t think he’s saying that every lead needs to convert to sex, but I do have the impression he’s pretty sex-driven, and that connections that are going to be impossible or very difficult to convert to sex over time are less interesting.

I had a guess. Maybe if a woman’s decision-making is fueled significantly by physical attraction, then she really doesn’t need a lot of time to make a decision; she already knows most of what she needs to know in the first five seconds. To be generous, I decided to give her five full hours to take a really good look.

My model of John is interested in women who make up their minds about connections quickly, so one important question is: are the quick ones driven significantly by looks?

My guess was that there would be two clusters: women who make sexual connections quickly and easily, with an emphasis on looks, and women whose discriminate mostly on factors that take longer to assess.

(My personal answer: I’m quick, and it’s less hotness-driven. I’m a fast and decisive blog-reader.)

So I asked:

Women: Do you typically have sex with a new partner in less than 5 hours of spending time with them? And is your decision to have sex more than 30% based on their looks? 

(Note: there’s a disparity between these two batches of results; both questions agree that ~40% of women believe that less than 30% of their attraction was about looks. But the previous question had 59% saying that 30% or more of their attraction was about looks, vs. 42% saying that here, and 18% saying “I don’t know.” Perhaps the women who are more into physical attraction also had more trouble understanding the 2x2-formatted question. Or perhaps that’s just me being unnecessarily snarky.)

Physical attraction does seem like a viable pathway, but to a narrower target

My takeaways from these two questions are that physical attraction matters a lot to some women, and those women are disproportionately likely to act quickly on that attraction.

This premise is holding up okay!

It’s important to note, though, that you’ve narrowed the pool of women pretty significantly if you focus on this pathway specifically – but maybe that’s the right trade to make.

Premise #3: The effort-to-results curve on making yourself physically attractive is favorable

John’s premise here is: “You can pay an upfront cost to get in good shape, dress well, etc. You do it basically once.” And then you get results.

But do you, though? What’s the effort-to-results curve on this?

Let’s take a bunch of components of “becoming physically attractive” and order them by how much investment they will require. Cheap and easy ones first, difficult ones at the end. Here’s the list I made after thinking about it for less than two minutes.

• hygiene (be clean, smell nice)
• grooming (good hairstyle, facial hair that suits you)
• clothing (fits you well, looks good)
• weight (try GLP-1s if you are fat, but they don’t work for everyone)
• muscles (effortful, takes upkeep. don’t overdo it!)
• teeth (e.g. orthodontia or dental veneers. expensive)
• face (e.g. plastic surgery. expensive, invasive, not always possible to do much)
• height (no currently known solution)

The question is, how far down this list can you afford to go, and will that be enough? And the answer to that depends in part on what raw materials you’re starting with. Is “hot” even achievable for you? I have no idea, it varies a lot! Maybe you got lucky and you don’t need the help with the last three or four things on this list. That’s great!

Probably everyone who is in the dating market should do the first few things on the list, but if you are short and have an unfortunate face, then that’s bad luck. It is not the slightest bit your fault, but it does make the entire “just be hot” strategy much less viable for you. I’m sorry.

So does this premise hold up? Probably for some people! To read John’s accounts, it does not actually hold up for him. He’s in great shape and he already dresses well, but he reports that no strangers are making eye contact with him. (Sorry, John, I don’t mean to pick on you, but your data does seem to directly contradict your thesis, here.) 

Premise #4: Being physically attractive saves you other kinds of time and effort

This argument, as I understood it, rests on a flirtation model that goes:

physically attractive → woman likes you → eye contact → flirtation → victory

John posed several alternative ways to make initial contact that he said “sucked ass,” such as spending social time around women so they could get to know him, learning to hit on women through banter and giving compliments, or waiting until late at night when the women were drunk and sleepy and would be amenable to hooking up.

The promise of being physically attractive is that you could skip all that, because women would decide they liked you based on looks alone.

This line of reasoning falls down in two places already covered by graphs above.

First, when a woman finds you physically attractive, she doesn’t like you yet, she just finds you hot. And as per the data above, her next move is not usually to make eye contact, it’s to gather more information somehow. In many cases, she’s observing you, trying to decide if she’s going to signal overtly or not. Whatever she’s looking for… is she going to see it? You’re going to have to attend to that, and some of the best ways to attend to it are by being pleasantly social in ways that, to John, suck ass.

Second, you still have to get from “flirtation” to “victory,” whether victory is setting up a second encounter, taking her home that night, or whatever. And yes, I get that’s much easier than getting the flirtation started in the first place. I concede the point that the initial contact is the hardest. But still… there is still some form of attraction she’s still looking for at that point; 75% of women surveyed said they derived half or more of their decision to get closer to factors other than physical attraction. So you’re going to have to round out your game somehow.

The premise that you can save a tremendous amount of time does not seem to hold up.

My prescription: Be well rounded. No, not like that.

What you want is to be attractive in many ways, while not being obviously unattractive in any ways, and do all that efficiently, so you can keep your prospect-funnel full cheaply, if you know what I mean.

I think it is most useful to think across many dimensions at once, and buy cheap and easy results everywhere simultaneously. Once that’s done, maybe you’re already seeing the results you want, or maybe you specialize further.

So yes, do the first half of the physical attractiveness list, by all means. But also do the first half of the “confidence and poise” list and the the “good banter” list and the “putting people at ease” list and the “projecting personality” list and the “good listener” list and the “good social reputation” list and the “checks out online” list and probably a bunch more. The construction of those lists is currently left as an exercise for the reader.

And finally, consider getting some wingwomen on your side. Have them spy on you in social situations and provide field notes on how you come across, which lists to prioritize. What’s already going well for you, and where are you losing prospects? Try to figure that out.

Spending more time at the gym might be a way of avoiding working on the actual bottlenecks in your game.

1. ^{^}

    If you make eye contact at a sex club or a sex party, eye contact is an even bigger invitation than that.

2. ^{^}

   Other women say this more strongly. They are worried that the guy will be “a creep.” I haven’t done a field study on what they mean by this, but I think it means that the guy will assume too much, get in their space, try to get handsy, stuff like that. Making eye contact with potential creeps doesn’t just feel potentially awkward, it feels unsafe.

3. ^{^}

   With me specifically, the outcome of the game has usually been decided before you have even considered your first move.