If one enjoys reading the misogynist corners of the Internet, one often sees people saying things along the lines of “women can get hotter men for casual sex than they can for dating, so they all get used to dating hot men, and then this leaves them unable to love the less hot people they end up marrying!”
Now, regardless of the accuracy of the causal reasoning here, I found the premise interesting. After all, it does make theoretical sense: if there are more men than women who want casual sex, one would naively expect the women to pair with the top men. Nevertheless, in my own rather extensive experience of casual sex, I’ve noticed no particular trend of women’s casual sex partners being more attractive than their life partners; indeed, the trend goes rather the other way.
(Throughout this blog post, I will be assuming that fewer women than men are interested in casual sex, for whatever biological or sociological reason. Standard feminist claims– “women are afraid of being attacked,” “women are less likely to orgasm during casual sex,” etc.– are perfectly compatible with this analysis. The reader who disagrees with the original claim is invited to peruse Craigslist Casual Encounters.)
(I will be mostly talking in this blog post as if ‘attractiveness’ is a thing everyone agrees on. This is, of course, not true, but most of my thoughts still hold even given the wondrous diversity of human sexuality. Consider it a simplifying assumption.)
How do we resolve this puzzling dilemma?
One aspect of the solution, of course, is that attractiveness for casual sex is a different thing than attractiveness for long-term relationships. The former is mostly based on charm, looks, sexual abilities, etc.; the latter incorporates things like life goals, values, conflict resolution style, and not having any personal quirks so obnoxious that by two years into the marriage you would sacrifice some of your less necessary body parts to get them to stop. Naturally, casual sex partners are less attractive on axes people don’t care about.
But often people’s life partners are not just kinder people but also hotter than their casual sex partners. How can we explain that? The answer, I think, is found in the concepts of satisficing and maximizing. Maximizing is holding out for the best, while satisficing is settling for the good-enough.
Consider Alice. Alice maximizes. She goes on OKCupid and tries to have casual sex with the most attractive man she can. The good news about this strategy is that Alice gets to have casual sex with significantly more attractive men. The bad news is that Alice doesn’t get to have a lot of casual sex. If Alice hits on men, she’ll have to spend quite a bit of time working down the ‘attractive men’ hierarchy until she finds one she’s willing to have sex with. If– as is more likely in our sexist society– Alice instead waits for her inbox to be filled, with each attractive man Alice faces the dilemma: should she hold out for a more attractive man, or is this the best she’s going to get? Either way, Alice puts a lot of time into identifying the most attractive men and figuring out her rank on the attractiveness scale.
This is obviously unsatisfactory if you like casual sex.
Now consider Eve. Eve satisfices. When Eve is in the mood for casual sex, she opens up OKCupid and sets up a date with any guy who has a reasonably attractive picture and a profile with a minimum of spelling errors. This means that Eve gets to have casual sex quickly, and often the same night. Eve gets to have considerably more casual sex than Alice. On the other hand, Eve’s paramours are less attractive. In fact, Eve’s paramours may be less attractive for casual sex than they are for dating, because she’s considerably less lazy if she actually has to talk to the dude.
Alice and Eve are extreme ends of the strategies, but they trade off against each other: in general, the more attractive you want your partner to me, the more effort you will have to put into finding them.
What are the implications? If you are an Internet misogynist worried about being compared to a casual sex partner, I would strongly advise dating sluts. Being a slut is a strong signal that she has had casual sex with people less attractive than you. On the other hand, steer clear of women who mostly have sex in relationships; they may be executing a maximizing strategy for casual sex, and thus have had casual sex with ‘alphas.’
In addition, the distribution of casual sex among men is different if women are mostly maximizing, compared to if they are mostly satisficing. In the former case, extremely attractive men get as much casual sex as they want, attractive men have to decide between sleeping with unattractive women and not having casual sex, and unattractive men do not have any casual sex at all. In the latter case, the distribution of casual sex is very random. Lots of men have had casual sex once or twice, but few have had a lot of it; many of the men who have had casual sex have had it with women more attractive than themselves. In the former case, being more attractive is a more important strategy, while in the latter case putting in more effort is the more important strategy; the more you hit on women, the more likely it is you’ll catch them on a horny day.
Thing of Things 
I feel compelled to point out another hypothesis: maybe your sample is unusual, and the many, many people who report that women’s casual sex partners are usually more attractive than their life partners are seeing a real thing.
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In that case, you might say “people in Ozy’s social circles satisfice, while other people maximize.” Like… in the event that my friends are weird, the problem changes from “there is a theoretical argument that women should have casual sex with more attractive men, but they don’t seem to” to “there is a theoretical argument that women should have casual sex with more attractive men, but in this unusual group they do not.” If there was, for instance, a remote Amazonian tribe in which the laws of supply and demand do not apply, economists wouldn’t go “well, they’re weird so we don’t care about them!” They would go “huh! That’s bizarre! Why doesn’t it apply?”
Unless your argument is that the satisficing/maximizing tradeoff doesn’t apply to other people, and in other social circles women can without effort have casual sex with extremely attractive men? Those men must be very busy. I hope they have time for hobbies.
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I hope they have time for hobbies.
Wait, there’s a better hobby than having sex with attractive people? Please tell me where I can sign up for this newsletter.
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>women can without effort have casual sex with extremely attractive men
Isn’t this something internet misogynists believe? Isn’t this fundamentally the point of contention then?
Your not really disputing:
>women can get hotter men for casual sex than they can for dating, so they all get used to dating hot men, and then this leaves them unable to love the less hot people they end up marrying!
Because internet misogynists believe that simply because they believe:
>women can without effort have casual sex with extremely attractive men
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There’s still a suspect causal claim in “women can get hotter men for casual sex than they can for dating, so they all get used to dating hot men, and then this leaves them unable to love the less hot people they end up marrying!”
Why should a sexy but otherwise unremarkable guy cause a woman to be unable to love a somewhat-less-hot guy*? It might cause her to not want sex with him as much as she would have had she not had sex with the other guy, but isn’t it the anti-casual-sex crowd that’s always going on about more-than-sexual love?
There’s no need to dispute women being able to get hotter men for casual sex; that follows from both parties maximizing nothing but sexiness.** The dispute is over the claim that this somehow makes them unable to love other people.
* We expect him to be less hot because of cornerless distributions, substituting whatever positive, non-hotness criteria you like for the “jerkishness” scale in that example. (you’ll want to ctl-f “cornerless”; it’s a long article)
** Of course we’re only talking about hot women. Ugly women are eunuchs.
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Dangit, I had a comment with two links that got filtered. If I’m reading you right, you’re sneaking in a claim that women having casual sex with hot men makes them unable to love less attractive men. This claim is absurd on its face.
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You should really content warn for mention of sex lives.
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It seems to me that the title “Promiscuity” warns for that perfectly well, unless there’s some more specific thing you would like a warning for?
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The pattern you’ve identified matches my experience, though I’d never considered that explanation. I assume women fuck people they don’t find attractive enough to date for the same reason as men: they have a “willing to fuck” level of attractiveness and a “willing to tell the whole world they are willing to fuck” level of attractiveness and the latter isstricter than the former. Wouldn’t want anyone to think you were settling after all.
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>Alice maximizes. She goes on OKCupid and tries to have casual sex with the most attractive man she can. … If– as is more likely in our sexist society– Alice instead waits for her inbox to be filled, with each attractive man Alice faces the dilemma: should she hold out for a more attractive man, or is this the best she’s going to get?
Why would Alice ever hold out?
As long as she only has sex with, say, the top three men who message her each week, she guarantees that she won’t miss out on The Most Attractive Man She Could Have because she was waiting without risking filling her schedule too full.
I guess theoretically having sex with less attractive men takes up time that could be spent searching for The Most Attractive Man, but given we’ve already specified a passive strategy we don’t even have to get into questions of diminishing returns and tradeoffs.
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If she’s having sex with the top three men who message her each week, she’s executing a satisficing strategy.
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Why? It’s the most efficient way to maximize.
Spending so much effort on researching possibilities that you miss the actual optimal strategy isn’t maximizing, it’s just making a mistake.
Now, if you attach large amounts of disutility to sex with anyone but your one true soulmate, that’s another thing. But if you’re just trying to have sex with the hottest guy possible, being so picky you pass him over in favour of waiting for a hypothetical hotter guy who never comes is a rookie mistake.
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As the cliche goes, there’s looking for Mr. Right, and there’s looking for Mr. Right Now.
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“in the latter case putting in more effort is the more important strategy; the more you hit on women, the more likely it is you’ll catch them on a horny day.”
It’s interesting that the actual advice that the more misogynist corners of the internet give out is to hit on a lot of women. Much of the advice is about how to hit on a lot of women without getting discouraged. If they have the same 2% hit rate as everyone else, but they’re emotionally capable of hitting on 50 women a night, that explains them having a lot of sex all on its own.
Perhaps some of the misogyny is a psychological adaptation to hitting on that many different women?
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Some PUAs helpfully publish their actual stats. For example, Krauser here:
He’s considered successful, and these numbers of typical from what I understand.
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Is it weird that reading this downgraded my estimate of how much skill PUA-types actually have? 15 lays in a year seems really sad for somebody who has built their lifestyle around seduction and practiced it for years, even if he is doing a bunch of things which make it more difficult.
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Depends – how well do you think someone who looks like Krauser would do *without* PUA?
I mean, it’s sad in the sense that someone would devote their life to having sex with random women, never forming an emotional connection before moving on, then getting sick of it all years later and wondering what now?
Or maybe we all rationalize our life choices, and he would look at me (having only slept with one woman ever) and think my life was sad.
But… I don’t see it that way.
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I do think that his lifestyle choices are generally sad (not because of the promiscuity per se, but because of the way that the competitive aspects of his lifestyle seem to have displaced the pleasures of human connection and even the pleasures of sex itself), but I also think that his number is surprisingly low for a person who prioritizes having sex with a lot of different women. And it’s not like he’s particularly ugly or anything– in photos, he looks sort of like a shorter, less buff Jason Statham, and his baldness pretty much obscures the fact that he’s 40 (I know guys in their late 20s or early 30s who look like that).
One reason why I came to this judgment is that I once slept with six different women in a single year, over 3/4 of which I spent in two monogamous relationships. Unlike Kruass, I definitely wasn’t trying to maximize my number of possible sex partners (even the number of possible sex partners who I was really attracted to), and I definitely didn’t hit on hundreds of people. I was (still am, really) an ex-autistic skinny weakling who’s probably like, a 7 at most in the looks department. I definitely hadn’t spent years practicing seduction. It seems odd that with all of his additional expenditure of deliberate effort, and all of his alleged expertise, Krauss didn’t even triple my number. And it seems especially sad for somebody to invest a whole bunch of effort into a weird pathological lifestyle and not even really be all that good at it.
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Are you in the bay area or a place with a similar culture? Based on bonobo rationalist tumblr I get the feeling casual sex is much more common and much easier for skinny autistic types than elsewhere.
The type to get sucked into pua and the like probably had closer to 0 or 1 partners a year beforehand, and to them thats a huge increase to 12. If youre already getting 6 a year you dont need the suboptimal but still better than nothing techniques pua offers.
If your adequate at meeting people and getting partners, pua probably wont help much and might even be detrimental compared to your previous strategy of using your natural skills + not being a misogynist.
Its like rote memorisation vs understanding, rote memorisation is useful for those who have a lot of trouble understanding but has an upper limit of usefulness. If you compare someone who says rote memorisation helped them to pass exams to someone who doesnt need rote memorisation it wont seem very impressive.
[edited by Ozy for typos, which they assume were not some sort of performance art project]
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That year, I was living in Houston, Texas, and most of the people I slept with I just met over okCupid. I had done some things to improve my chances over past years, but they were pretty basic– mostly just being much more direct about asking people out, being warmer and more complimentary to people I went on dates with, and getting a more fashionable and well-fitting wardrobe.
I think that the rote memorization vs. understanding dichotomy that you set out is probably useful for understanding all of this, especially if you think of understanding as something like “working from first principles.” The most common PUA models of interactions are complicated but shallow, and I think they preclude a lot of interpersonal connection because creating that connection requires you to really understand the other person’s beliefs and desires. That sort of connection also seems to make it much easier to get laid.
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Isn’t your social circle significantly poly/open/bonobo? In that case I would find it strange that people haven’t hooked up with people more (physically) attractive than those they LTR. It just seems like it would happen naturally over time.
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Wait, why is Alice “working down” the hierarchy of men? Are men turning down offers of no-strings-attached casual sex? Or is judging male attractiveness actually that hard?
Why don’t Alice and Eve’s strategies just converge on “message the top 20 most attractive men with offers of no-strings-attached sex and take the first reply”? What am I missing?
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I mean, yes? Proof of concept: I imagine if I approached Ryan Reynolds for no-strings-attached sex, he would turn me down, because he can find people much more attractive than I am.
(It may help your incredulity to *not* visualize Alice as a very attractive woman.)
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But Ryan Reynolds is well within the top 0.5% of attractive men, so why use a total outlier as your example of choice?
(For the record: I was very carefully imagining a woman of average attractiveness – we might disagree about how willing men are to accept offers of no-strings-attached sex?)
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Alice is maximizing! There’d be a top 0.5% guy on OKC in any city with at least 200 people on OKCupid– and it’s a rare city that doesn’t have that many people. So of course I’m starting with the total outliers– Alice herself is starting with the total outliers and working her way down.
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Please – let’s not be disingenuous – Ryan Reynolds is highly attractive among *all men* – not within Alice’s geographic area unless she lives in LA – which is an outlier city, in terms of the calibre of men she’d have access to. (I’m assuming he lives in LA – I don’t know this)
I poked around – here’s what some of the research says: Landolt et al. 1995; Nevid 1984; Regan 1998 all say the one thing men *don’t* relax in short-term mating is attractiveness – these are survey studies. Hald Olesen 2010 (modelled after the Clark Hatfield study where people approach random strangers with offers of dates/sex) support their hypothesis that female attractiveness is not a strong predictor of male receptivity. FWIW.
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That data would tend to support Ozy’s point that Alice should work her way down from the most attractive men she can find if she wants to maximize her eventual partner’s attractiveness. It’s a one-person case of the stable (mono, hetero) marriage problem.
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To be clear, I don’t mean “find” as in “get a response from” – Alice has won if she gets a response. By “find” I literally mean “locate”.
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Except that Alice would have significant overhead trying to look at the profiles of everyone in her area (seriously, that’s a ton of people in any moderately populated region), and then have to wonder about newcomers to the site as well. A proper maximizer wouldn’t be happy with just the hottest thing on their screen today if there’s a good chance of someone hotter signing up tomorrow.
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Is there such a thing as a hierarchy of attractiveness? Surely the main point of the misogyny argument is that most men are not sexually attractive to most women. Here we’re talking about 0.5%, Red Pill puts it at 10% of men. Even if we narrow it down to within a particular age group, does the average women really find one in every two hundred men attractive enough to want to have sex with based solely on sexual attraction?
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I really like this post. Pulling premises from the most polarizing corners of thoughtspace and pursuing then with apparently perfect impartiality is awesome.
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Is this just a random thought piece, or is it meant as a quasi-refutation of general misogynist thought? Because I’m seeing two core elements of their worldview you’re missing/getting wrong. And trying to figure out ways to account for them in the better fitting secretary problem.
(The gist of them being that age significantly impacts a woman’s desirability while she fails to account for that factor, and that the casual vs. committed issue is not as explicitly spelled out. It’s not about her calibrating based on what she can pick up tonight, it’s about being unable to tell what the long-term intentions of the man who just approached her are. And calibrating under the assumption that he wants something committed even if he doesn’t.
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This reminds me a bit of one of the “monogamous mating strategies” I played around with back in high school (and wrote up as a cursory blog post a decade later: https://nikvetr.wordpress.com/2016/05/23/modeling-monogamous-commitment/). Though it deals more with commitment and less with casual sex, I think it can be applied to the latter (insofar as you can be said to commit to a sexual partner — though I guess in my thing, the commitment is rather somewhat longer term). I’m not sure that it necessarily constitutes a purely maximizing or satisficing strategy; it seems like it’s at a more intermediate point on the spectrum (but maybe closer to maximizing).
In any case, what do you mean by the “distribution of casual sex is very random”?
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As I understand the PUA hypothesis, it assumes that Alice doesn’t have a committed relationship at all because the absolute most attractive people she can have sex with won’t commit, and she’s orbiting one or more hot f-buddies who she wishes would commit but won’t. No idea if it’s true but here are a couple observations:
1) You could argue that the whole hypothesis is extrapolation based on PUAs’ “nice guy” experiences, where they orbited a crush instead of moving on.
2) Rationalist poly groups are probably going to break any PUA generalization – this one depends on (1) hot guys who won’t commit long as they are easily able to have sex; and (2) women who would like a guy to commit but only from among the hottest guys who will have sex with them. Once either group can commit *and* have casual sex and/or gains some maturity, the model probably breaks, so if the model is true anywhere, it’s probably highschool, college, or other young people.
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Another possible explanation: casual sex partners are selected from the general population. High quality (across all metrics, including physical attractiveness) CS partners turn into long term partners as repeated CS is often referred to as a LTR. Low quality ones drop out of the pool. Hence people in LTR’s are of above average attractiveness.
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Alternately, over time, people whose CS partners are more attractive to them than their current LTRs move their current LTRs to secondaries and promote the CS partners to primary LTRS.
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