Amy Alkon

Busniess Whirlwind by Amy Alkon

I'm a woman who's fiercely competitive in the business world. I've been rewarded for pursuing deals as relentlessly as highly successful men do. Yet, taking this approach in my dating life -- energetically pursuing men and confidently asking them out -- has been a bust. The men I go after seem to find my openness, excitement, and confidence off-putting. I keep hearing that I need to chill out and let men pursue me. This seems crazy. I shouldn't have to act like a debutante, waiting for a man to ask me out. --Irritated

In seduction, more is not more. You'll be most attractive if you simply let who you are sparkle -- a term that has more in common with "twinkle" than "immobilize men with the alien death ray of your personality." As a heterosexual woman, pursuing romantic partners as ferociously as you'd pursue a business deal is especially counterproductive. 

Though we're living in modern times, we're stuck with an antique psychological operating system, calibrated to solve ancestral mating and survival problems. This means the psychology driving us is sometimes seriously mismatched with our modern world. For example, we now have reliable birth control, and even if that fails, children won't die of starvation or be eaten by feral goats because the dude who fathered them "hit it 'n' quit it." 

Yet, we've still got our evolutionary legacy running the show. In vetting potential sex partners, women evolved to be more quality-conscious -- choosier, more "hard to get" -- while men evolved to take a more, shall we say, quantity-driven approach: "The more the merrier! Hey, next time, invite your sisters!" 

These differences in sexual choosiness emerge from what evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers explains as men's and women's differing levels of "parental investment." The members of a species with the greatest possible costs from having sex -- like pregnancy and a screaming kid to feed -- evolved to be more selective in mate choice. Women's emotions are their parental investment watchdogs, pushing them to make sure a man's willing and able to stick around and provide resources. Though some women can take an emotionally Teflon approach to casual sex, anthropologist John Marshall Townsend finds that for many, hooking up comes with some emotional reflux -- even when a woman knows a one-nighter is all she wants from a guy. She'll boot some himbo out of bed only to get all angsty afterward, worrying that the guy she wants nothing more from doesn't want anything more from her. 

These differences in male and female mating selectivity showed up in a big way in a recent study looking at heterosexual Tinder users. Belgian econ doctoral candidate Brecht Neyt calculated the percentage of profiles men and women gave "super likes" to -- a function on Tinder as of 2015. For those uninitiated in Tinder-ese, swiping right "likes" another user, but they will be none the wiser unless they, too, swipe right on you. 

Swiping up, however, is a "super like," which triggers an automatic notification to the super-liked person. (Annoyingly, the researchers didn't mention or take into account that super likes are generally seen as super uncool -- a sign of desperation -- leading many Tinderers to note in their profile, "If I super like you, I did it by accident.") Neyt and his colleagues found that men super liked 61.9% of women's profiles, while women super liked only 4.5% of the men's. Their finding is a pretty dramatic reflection of men's evolved quantity-over-quality default. In short: Stripperliciousness is nice, especially when packaged with kindness, intelligence, and killer cooking skills, but "Same species! Not in jail! Has internet access!" works, too. 

So, if you're reasonably attractive and in a man's age range, there's a good chance he'll go out with you simply because you ask -- though he may not be interested beyond a hookup. But let's say he's somebody who would be interested in you. Because men co-evolved with women, men expect women to be choosy, and they tend to devalue women who just tumble out of the sky into their lap. The best test for whether a man has real interest in you is seeing whether he'll lay his ego on the line to ask you out. You aren't without control in this approach; you can flirt with a guy you're interested in to signal that you're open to being pursued by him. Should things be different? 

Well, sure, in a more perfect mating universe. But if you want to be successful in this one, you should do what works -- which is driven by men's evolved psychology. Though men will eventually take a selective approach when considering a woman as a long-term partner, many will have sex with anything this side of a pound of liver in the refrigerator (and sometimes that will just have to do).

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And while partner-seeking ladies of course appreciate a nice view, biologists Guanlin Wang and John Speakman write that women evolved to be more "sensitive to resources that can be invested (in) themselves and their offspring" -- as in whether a particular dude could bring home the bison or whatever. Wang, Speakman, and their colleagues explored the impact of "resources" -- that is, a person's economic status -- on their physical appeal to the opposite sex. 

They showed research participants in China, the U.S., the U.K., and Lithuania a stack of cards with images of silhouetted bodies of the opposite sex with varying levels of attractiveness and had them rank the images from most attractive to least attractive. (The researchers converted the rankings to a scale of 1 to 9.) 

Next, the researchers randomly assigned salary numbers to the body pix. They brought participants back -- at least a week later -- and again had them rate the attractiveness of the figures, but this time given the salary paired with each bod. Upon tabulating their results, they found a major sex difference in how "responsive" the attractiveness ratings were to an increase in salary. If a man's salary increases by a factor of 10 -- if his salary becomes 10 times greater -- he goes up about 2 points (1.92 on average) on their 1-to-9 attractiveness scale. So, for example, a salary of $50,000 x 10 -- $500,000 -- gets a guy 2 points higher in hotness. 

Meanwhile, in bummerific news for female honchos, for a woman to achieve that two-point hottitude bump, her salary would need to be multiplied by 10,000. In other words, a woman making $50K would have to make $500 million to be hotter in a man's eyes. (No problem...right, ladies? Just get yourself promoted from legal secretary to international drug lord.) The researchers note that because men are "largely insensitive to cues indicating resources" in women, women have to make themselves "physically more attractive" to improve their mating prospects. 

Men, however, "can offset poor physical attractiveness, or further enhance existing good looks, by demonstrating their large levels of resources." This does draw the gold diggers, but again, a woman doesn't have to be a gold digger to be attracted to a man with money. To protect yourself from those who only care about the money, look for "inner beauty," or what everybody's grandpa calls "character." 

Get to know her friends and family. And get to know who she is over time and across situations. There are clever sociopaths who keep up appearances even when tested, but over time, they tend to reveal their true selves in small ways. By weeding out the rotten apples, you make space for a woman who sincerely cares about you -- and can't help but find you attractive in the right light, such as the recessed spotlights on your Gulfstream jet. 

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