How are we defining attractive? Yes, I’m sure that especially in times and places where a woman’s status is wholly wrapped up in her husband’s status, a man’s wealth might be of paramount importance- it could mean the difference between a life of luxury and good food vs. a life of crushing poverty. Doesn’t mean Mrs. Richguy isn’t secretly fantasising about the footman while in bed with Mr. Richguy.
Add to that, in society like that, the rich guy who could afford good food and not to be labouring in the fields probably does look better, can converse about things other than cows and dirt.
It’s all very well trying to imagine hypotheticals with two identical guys where the only difference is their bank balance, but that’s not actually a thing that happens. For most women not in a Jane Austen novel, they’re not interviewing suitors on the basis of income.
Speaking for myself, all things considered, I’d prefer a guy who was solvent, because not being so is likely to be an indication of irresponsibility, and I’d want a partner not a liability, but I have no interest in being wealthy.
I wish Riemann was here to blow his/her “STRAWMAN” horn.
I did NOT argue that evolution has no part in what we find attractive.
What I said is that I need evidence before I accept that ‘women are hard wired to be attracted to good providers.’
I can easily come up with a cultural/social hypothesis to explain why women tend to marry employed guys over unemployed guys, so I don’t need to jump to an evolutionary WAG. But as long as we’re trading WAGs, I can also speculate how the hard-working dudes would be selected against. Who do you think cave women were fucking when their “men” were out hunting buffalo and mammoths? It wasn’t another hard-working dude. It was the dude who liked hanging out with the ladies more than he liked hunting. It was the guy who would join the women when they would be out gathering fruits and berries–the guy who would keep them entertained with his jokes and crazy antics and maybe chase off the occasional wild boar so that they’d feel safe with him around. This kind of thing has been happening for millions of years, and it is still happening. There is absolutely no good reason to think that women are hard wired to be attracted to anyone except the guy who pays her some attention and makes her private parts tingly.
If women were driven by biological imperatives to seek out “good providers”, there wouldn’t be so many trifling fathers out there. Turns out a lot of women aren’t really all the discriminating when it comes to their sex partners, and sometimes they find out they had sex with a trifling individual only after their pregnancy test comes up positive. If women were endowed with some special radar that allows them to winnow the “good provider” from the “trifling individual” with high accuracy, we wouldn’t expect this kind of shit to occur as frequently as it does. So it seems to me the more logical explanation is that women are NOT endowed with some special radar. AS MUCH AS WE MIGHT WISH THIS TO BE TRUE, THERE IS NOT A WHOLE LOT OF EVIDENCE SUPPORTING THIS IDEA.
I can sit here and play Little Miss Darwin all day long. So let me get up on my soap box some more: Natural selection benefits the individual who has the most viable offspring, period. A woman who waits for the “good provider” to come along before she spreads her legs is “losing” the game to the woman who has sex with every Tom, Dick, and Harry. Because the latter will have the most kids. And it is likely those kids aren’t going to grow up to be “waiters”. No, those kids are going to grow up having sex with every Tina, Diana, and Henrietta. Prudence McPrudy might have been the richest bitch in the Neanderthal clan, since she held out for the guy who slayed the most mammoths and he would let her get first dibs on his mammoth meat. But she didn’t have as many babies as the women in the clan with more indiscriminating tastes. And lookit, she also didn’t get the kind of male attention that those other bitches got! Sure, she had plenty of mammoth meat, but it’s not like the “easier” women or their kids went hungry. Because when you spread your legs for people, those people often come bearing gifts so you’ll keep them open. Turns out that one chunk of mammoth meat is equivalent to just ten squirrels, and squirrels are tastier anyway. Prudence understood that she really wasn’t “winning” as much as she thought she should and she hated this. So she taught her kids that being “easy” is bad–that “real women” wait for the highest bidder and don’t drop their loin clothes just for anyone. She taught her kids that “real women” are hard wired to be attracted to good providers.
Prudence might not have won the natural selection game, but she did win the culture war.
I doubt wealth gets anyone’s heart beating faster, but…
Wealthy guys have a few advantages. First, they can dress better. This really draws women’s attention. (I don’t know how an ugly but well-dressed guy compares to a handsome but poorly-dressed guy.)
Second, they can probably spend more money on more interesting dates. This is far from an overwhelming advantage. A wealthy but unimaginative man isn’t going to have very interesting dates, while a man, independent of wealth, who participates in an interesting but low-cost date has an advantage. I don’t know how many men take women on “spontaneous” whirlwind trips to exotic locales, outside of movies. In real life, his date has a job and responsibilities and simply doesn’t have the time.
Third, the future. Despite the expenses of child raising increasing, you don’t have to be rich to raise a child. You do need to be steadily employed at a decently-paying job, or otherwise have a reliable source of enough income. I read a New York Times article about a woman from a poor neighborhood. She is a nurse. Guys chased her, and it wasn’t because of her looks, but because they knew she had a steady job. While she dated some of these poor suitors, she wouldn’t consider marrying or having a child with someone who could not support said child.
[hijack] There are a whole lot of interesting things that can be said about “dirt” (and probably also about cows). (Did you know that the fungi are transferring messages between tree roots, for instance?) (maybe not such a hijack. Different people find different things to be interesting converation.)
monstro is making some good points (not just saying this cuz she’s my sister, either). Us humans have spent the vast majority of our existence in small hunter-gathering societies where resources were communally shared. Male hunters didn’t do it alone; they worked in teams. Strength, skill, and stamina were prized because they helped everyone, not just the woman who mated and had children with him. In collectivist communities like the kind our species emerged in, there wasn’t a huge difference between being just an adequate provider and being a great one. As long as the slain mammoth, zebra, or buffalo was doled out to everyone in the tribe, everyone benefited much the same. We also can’t forget that women were also bringing in “income” too in the form of foraged food. If both genders were providers for the family, just in different ways, then women and men were probably not world’s apart in who they deemed attractive. Both would want someone healthy, strong, smart, hard working, and friendly.
With agriculture, people became more competitive as resources stopped being communal and owning land became a thing. Men then began to distinguish themselves based on who owned more property, with women being part of that property. With a set up like this, you’ll see more of a divide in what men and women value in a mate. Men will be conditioned to want a woman who can easily be controlled, and women will be conditioned to want a man who can take care of her.
It’s a mistake to look at the “agrarian” model and conclude that the preferences that emerged in this arrangement (the legacy of which still persists today) are biologically determined. If there is one thing that separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom, it’s our malleability. What we find attractive is not static or universal. The diversity that exists within human beings suggests we’re literally all over the map when it comes to mating behavior.
Do you not see the difference between these statements: “Humans are hard wired to eat” and “Humans are hard wired to eat filet mignon”? There’s plenty of evidence of the former and zero evidence of the latter.
Having wealth signals the ability to successfully acquire resources. It implies that there is some level of competence and that the male is not a volatile, chaotic mess and has some mastery of life.
Wealthy people also tend to be healthy; it’s hard to do anything well when you’re sickly, either physically or mentally. Wealth and health are necessary to successfully get offspring to reproductive age, thus a greater chance at continuing the genetic legacy of both partners.
Even just having the potential to acquire wealth is sexy, as people who are competent in one area of life are usually competent in other areas of life. Not always, but the odds are with you.
In other words, yes, it’s very attractive for what it implies/promises.
It seems to me that members of both genders are able to get some kind of ego-boost by thinking that women only pursue good providers.
Married guys get to feel some sort of pride because they think they were chosen for their manly ability to slay the most mammoths.
And married women get to feel like their decision-making process was 100% rational and practical…unlike all those stupid women who just open their jungle books for any cave man who comes strolling by.
It’s all just really hilarious to me, as someone who has absolutely no skin in the game.
There is a social explanation for this that is equally plausible to a biological one. We are raised to associate rich men with positive attributes linked to attractiveness. Like I said earlier, it’s the Bruce Wayne factor.
The incels ultimately fall back to the “woman are really hardwired to be gold-diggers” argument and then extrapolate their world view from there. If you’re lucky they’ll amuse you with a diversion on lobsters for a while.
I don’t see how that analogy makes sense. Wealth, like height, boosts Male attractiveness across different cultures, as demonstrated by both my cite and DSeid’s. Yet, for some reason, wealth is “filet-mignon” but height isn’t?
Can you prove that this is why wealth makes men more attractive? Also, if the social explanation is equally plausible, then why is there so much hostility in this thread towards the evolutionary hypothesis?
You’re criticizing the “just so” stories of evolutionary psychology, and coming up with this in response? This is not remotely convincing. You hypothesis would only make sense if it were difficult to get pregnant, if a woman who has sex frequently and indiscriminately with a large number of partners is likely to have significantly more babies than a woman who has sex less frequently with one partner. But we are not frogs. The nature of human reproduction is that we have a small number of offspring and commit a large amount of resources to each child. An incremental amount of sex does not allow a woman to bear more than one child each 9 months; and the need to devote considerable resources to postnatal childcare increases the optimal (from a Darwinian fitness perspective) gap between children to considerably more than just the gestation period. So for a female - and to emphasize I’m talking purely about evolutionary fitness in the human ancestral environment in which our instincts evolved, not making some ethical or idealistic statement about what’s just or appropriate in modern society - nothing is gained from an incremental amount of sex beyond getting pregnant every couple of years or so. Given the biological limitation on how many babies a human female can produce, what makes a fitness difference (again, in the ancestral environment in which our instincts evolved) is not the quantity of sex but the quality - where quality means the quality of the partner in terms of his genetic endowment to the child, and in the amount of resources the father is willing and able to commit to her and her baby. That’s why there’s likely to be a fitness advantage for females to be especially “picky” about the qualities of their sexual partners. And, of course the male perspective also argues strongly against your notion that more frequent sex with multiple partners grants a fitness advantage for females: it’s a biological reality that maternity is certain, but paternity is not, and males will be much less willing to commit resources when paternity is uncertain.
All of this is certainly what we see in other species with a reproductive process similar to humans. Special pleading that humans are different because you (wrongly, imo) think it undermines an ideological agenda about the completely different roles of women/men in modern society is not convincing.
I’m not arguing it doesn’t. I’m just saying there are social explanations that could account for the findings in your cite, so it doesn’t prove it’s a hard wired preference.
In my grandmother’s generation, a man was a “good catch” if he earned a wage high enough to support a family, have reliable transportation, and save some rainy day money. That’s only because relative to the opportunities available to women in her day, a man like this had a lot to offer.
Now that women have the financial means to take care of themselves, a man’s income carries less weight than it used to. Girls used to fantasize about being rescued by a rich prince. Nowadays girls are more likely to fantasize about finding a partner rather than a benefactor.
So from this, we can conclude that a man’s wealth is a less of a factor in his romantic success than it used to be. It stands to reason that this change also extends to wealthy men.
If standards and preferences and ideas about attractiveness can change in two or three generations, then I don’t see how we conclude anything about this stuff being hard-wired.
And also, I think if you were to ask men, all other things being equal, would they be more attracted to a rich woman than a non-rich one, they would say no. But it would be a mistake to infer they wouldn’t jump at the chance to be married to an rich heiress. Men are pragmatic too. It’s just that the “rich woman” archetype isn’t associated with prized traits like “rich man” is.
The word “attractive” can have different meanings, and I suspect part of what’s going on in this thread is that different people are thinking of the different senses in which a person can be “attractive.”
In once sense, finding a person attractive is an instinctive, involuntary, non-rational reaction, that has nothing to do with whether they’re a “good catch” or what they have to offer us. It seems to me that what kind of person we find attractive in this sense has to be either hardwired or conditioned (the old nature vs. nurture debate), or, as I suspect, some of both.
Looking back at the thread it seems that a poster using “hard wired” was what got your goat. “Hard-wired” does not mean absolute.
This seems to be a repeat of a conversation in another thread in which a poster claimed that it makes no sense that “the small biological differences in men and women would produce large outcomes like a systematic oppression of women and a culture where men must be the strongest and compete with one another” that culture is in and of itself the cause. Cultures and evolution have interacted bidirectionally: cultures emerge as a result of our natures and impact what traits associated with the most reproductive fitness.
Maybe one of you have examples at the ready, but I cannot think of many species in which the sex that has more survival costs associated with reproducing isn’t more likely to reproduce in ways that increase the likelihood of healthy offspring with greater access to resources. Let’s even look at a reverse circumstance: the praying mantis. There males have a high cost to mating - they get eaten. And they are somewhat careful to choose females that have good access to food themselves (are well-fed/mantis wealthy)
So sure it could be just coincidentally that culture, dropped from above, causes a consistent pattern across most species and most human cultures, and that there is no selected for wiring that predisposes for such. Sure.
To be clear, we are not prisoners to such wiring, and such being a predisposition is not therefore how it should be …
Attraction can be influenced by social conditioning, as you say. A part of that is feeling like you’ve scored a “good catch”. But I agree with your main point.
Attraction is not interchangeable with whom we choose to enter into relationships with.