# Is MRA/pick-up artist/incel "biological psychology" necessarily........wrong? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [July 15, 2019, 3:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-mra-pick-up-artist-incel-biological-psychology-necessarily-wrong/837132 "2019-07-15T15:30:17Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![Wesley\_Clark](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/wesley_clark/32/20581_2.png) [@Wesley\_Clark](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wesley_Clark)\ **Post date:** [July 15, 2019, 9:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-mra-pick-up-artist-incel-biological-psychology-necessarily-wrong/837132/41 "2019-07-15T21:47:06Z")
My impression was more that the black pill believes looks are all that matter when women evaluate men, while the red, blue and purple pills feel that female attraction to men is based on a wide range of factors, individual preference and what reproductive goals the woman has at the time. ---
**Author:** ![Mijin](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mijin/32/9369_2.png) [@Mijin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mijin)\ **Post date:** [July 16, 2019, 11:39am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-mra-pick-up-artist-incel-biological-psychology-necessarily-wrong/837132/42 "2019-07-16T11:39:09Z")
> [@HelenGawn](#): > > Have they considered that making them weak, unattractive and whiny in nature’s way of culling them from the gene pool? The thing is, it’s this kind of framing that is actually a big part of the problem. Guys are cultured to believe it’s all about “manning-up” or whatever. I don’t doubt that masculinity is a big part of what makes a guy attractive. But when we’re looking at the lowest tier, of guys who struggle to get dates at all, or constantly get dumped, it’s unlikely to be the main problem. Immaturity, lack of social skills and inability to understand other people are bigger factors in my experience (OK, poor personal hygiene / grooming probably ranks up there too). Unfortunately there are a lot of guys, particularly in the very-macho US, trying super hard to be the “alpha male” and just looking like jerks. And when it doesn’t work after a while they implode and consider themselves “beta” and become very bitter, often towards women but equally towards themselves. ---
**Author:** ![Shodan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/9f8e36/32.png) [@Shodan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Shodan)\ **Post date:** [July 16, 2019, 1:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-mra-pick-up-artist-incel-biological-psychology-necessarily-wrong/837132/43 "2019-07-16T13:08:05Z")
> [@MandaJo](#): > > Sure, but the vast majority of women can get pregnant easily enough and often enough that a baby every three years or so is going to occur. But all this EvPsych shit depends on the idea that determining the slightest differences in fertility overwhelmingly dominate what men find attractive. But I just don’t see any actual evidence that a woman who had a 90% chance of getting pregnant in a given year provided any actual reproductive advantage over a woman who had an 85% chance–both are going to have the same number of babies over 30 years. The woman with the 90% chance is going to produce 5% more than the woman with the 85% chance, all other things being equal. Evolution is a game of percentages and market share. Any advantage gets selected for, any disadvantage gets selected against. That’s how natural selection works - whoever produces the most viable offspring, wins. > [@](#): > > But pregnancy and lactation don’t reduce a woman to the point that she’s useless for anything else. Pregnancy and lactation/child care are a disadvantage, nearly universally suffered by women. Women’s strategy to overcome that disadvantage is to find higher status men with resources to support them while they are disadvantaged, and their children are helpless. > [@](#): > > Woman produce massive amounts of resources in primitive cultures. Evolutionarily, it makes sense to mate with an intelligent, creative woman because that maximizes your children’s chance of survival, as well. It makes sense to mate with an intelligent, creative woman, as long as she is young and healthy enough to get pregnant. It does not make sense, evolutionarily, to mate with an intelligent, creative forty-year old. Her resourcefulness has to be exploited in different ways. Not that that resourcefulness isn’t valuable, but it is not directly related to reproducing her own or someone else’s genes. She can benefit the community, but that benefits people who are not as nearly related to her genes as her own offspring, or her mate’s. Taking care of nieces and nephews is great, and a real benefit. But it is not as much a benefit to the [selfish gene](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/61535.The_Selfish_Gene) as benefiting your own offspring. > [@](#): > > My point is that everything men and women find desirable in each other can be explained by cultural constructs. The general preference for youth and health in women, the physical markers of youth and health in women, and the preference of women for higher-status, higher-resource men, crosses cultures. Unless you can name a few cultures where the \*average \*man fantasizes about mating with a seventy year old with no teeth, and the \*average \*woman would rather marry an unemployed high-school drop out than the steadily employed college graduate who owns his own home. Regards, Shodan ---
**Author:** ![AHunter3](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ahunter3/32/368_2.png) [@AHunter3](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AHunter3)\ **Post date:** [July 16, 2019, 1:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-mra-pick-up-artist-incel-biological-psychology-necessarily-wrong/837132/44 "2019-07-16T13:53:50Z")
> [@Mijin](#): > > The thing is, it’s this kind of framing that is actually a big part of the problem. > > Guys are cultured to believe it’s all about “manning-up” or whatever. > > I don’t doubt that masculinity is a big part of what makes a guy attractive. But when we’re looking at the lowest tier, of guys who struggle to get dates at all, or constantly get dumped, it’s unlikely to be the main problem. > Immaturity, lack of social skills and inability to understand other people are bigger factors in my experience (OK, poor personal hygiene / grooming probably ranks up there too). > > Unfortunately there are a lot of guys, particularly in the very-macho US, trying super hard to be the “alpha male” and just looking like jerks. And when it doesn’t work after a while they implode and consider themselves “beta” and become very bitter, often towards women but equally towards themselves. I don’t entirely disagree, but let’s look at the situation of the male who isn’t conventionally masculine. He is likely to end up behind the curve in maturity and social skills because both of those things thrive in a bath of confidence and experience. My own narrative is definitely that of a guy who could not get laid, was sidelined from the dating experience. - Yes, I had to wonder if this was because I was no fun to be with, had the personality of a dead trout (or the underarm odor thereof, for that matter), or that there was something I was doing, or NOT doing, that made this entirely my own fault. I don’t think anyone in that situation can avoid dwelling on that possibility. It’s what you’re alluding to from the outside. It would be silly _not_ to consider that it might be the reason, right? But if you see what I mean, it becomes rather circular with regards to confidence. Wondering about this a lot doesn’t increase confidence. - It is also fair to say – as part of “things he is NOT doing” – that a not-conventionally-masculine male may not be getting laid because he hasn’t made a high priority of getting laid and instead just expected it to eventually “happen” as an outgrowth of interacting with girls and making out / having an ongoing girlfriend-relationship or two. Or that interacting with girls as friend and companion would lead to situations where there would be mutual erotic interest. But this is where these fellows’ complaints start to resemble the outside critiques of “why it’s his fault” – lots of people say “guys like that bring it on themselves by not doing what you gotta do to have that in your life” without examining whether the set of social expectations and requirements for male people, specifically, to be heterosexual in practice aren’t a bad fit for guys who aren’t of a masculine temperament. - When expressed in the most cynical, angrily caustic way possible, with the maximum contempt for girls & women who require or expect it, the set of behaviors that are often described in friendly advice to shy or socially awkward males has a certain resemblance to the mechanical “pickup artist” manipulations that these guys describe and complain about. Here’s an exercise for you: think about feminists complaining about the unfair sexist expectations of female courting / flirting / dating behavior. These angry beta boys / incels / etc seem to hate feminists and blame female people collectively as if they’d designed this whole mess one day in the secrecy of the women’s bathroom, but that doesn’t mean you’re required to do the same in your own analysis. Isn’t any dance that requires dancing partners going to have a flip side, the set of steps that the other dancer has to participate in? Well, even if WhatAboutism indicates that the experience isn’t pleasant on either side of an experience, that doesn’t mean the dance doesn’t suck, in fact it seems to me to mean the opposite. And for both sexes, the worst for the minority who least fit the generalizations about their sex, because the dance steps are least well fitted for their personality and behavioral patterns. ---
**Author:** ![MandaJo](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/ac91a4/32.png) [@MandaJo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MandaJo)\ **Post date:** [July 16, 2019, 1:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-mra-pick-up-artist-incel-biological-psychology-necessarily-wrong/837132/45 "2019-07-16T13:56:01Z")
> [@Shodan](#): > > The woman with the 90% chance is going to produce 5% more than the woman with the 85% chance, all other things being equal. > > Evolution is a game of percentages and market share. Any advantage gets selected for, any disadvantage gets selected against. That’s how natural selection works - whoever produces the most viable offspring, wins. It doesn’t work that way. For one thing, it’s not how many viable offspring you produce, it’s how many offspring you produce who go on to produce offspring. Furthermore, again, marginal differences in fertility are not going to directly translate into having marginally more babies–there’s only 30 fertile years at most, and a marginal difference in fertility is not going to automatically translate into another pregnancy in that interval. The slightly-less-fertile woman gets pregnant in the next month or two. This is all especially true when a big part of your survival strategy is making sure you space your kids adequately. A woman who gets pregnant too easily may well be a disadvantage in that case. I mean, you’ve acknowledged that infanticide is common in hunter-gather cultures. If KILLING babies is an important survival strategy, why does the potential to produce slightly more make any difference at all? But EvPsych suggests it doesn’t make a difference, it’s the KEY difference, overwhelming everything else. > [@](#): > > Pregnancy and lactation/child care are a disadvantage, nearly universally suffered by women. Women’s strategy to overcome that disadvantage is to find higher status men with resources to support them while they are disadvantaged, and their children are helpless. Pregnant and lactating women are not helpless. The society still needs them to be productive–there aren’t enough surplus calories for women to be a drag on the society while they are reproducing. Again, this is why babies are so regulated: you can’t support lots of useless mouths at once. So men ALSO need to select women who can contribute toward keeping their offspring alive. But, again, EvPsych holds that all that is nothing compared to the need for marginally improvments in fertility. > [@](#): > > It makes sense to mate with an intelligent, creative woman, as long as she is young and healthy enough to get pregnant. It does not make sense, evolutionarily, to mate with an intelligent, creative forty-year old. Her resourcefulness has to be exploited in different ways. Not that that resourcefulness isn’t valuable, but it is not directly related to reproducing her own or someone else’s genes. She can benefit the community, but that benefits people who are not as nearly related to her genes as her own offspring, or her mate’s. Taking care of nieces and nephews is great, and a real benefit. But it is not as much a benefit to the [selfish gene](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/61535.The_Selfish_Gene) as benefiting your own offspring. > The general preference for youth and health in women, the physical markers of youth and health in women, and the preference of women for higher-status, higher-resource men, crosses cultures. Children are not antelope. If you want your children to live to reproductive age–and, honestly, for your grandchildren to live to reproductive age, you need to be able to continue to support them. given a choice between a woman who will have babies spaced 22 months apart and one who will have babies spaced 25 months apart, the slight chance of one more pregnancy over the course of a life seems much, much less important than which of the two women has the skills and intelligence to keep the maximum possible number of those children alive. And I thought the idea of “cheap sperm” was that a wise man would want to mate with BOTH or ALL. A man who is only attracted to super-fertile women might well have no opportunities to reproduce at all. > [@](#): > > Unless you can name a few cultures where the \*average \*man fantasizes about mating with a seventy year old with no teeth, and the \*average \*woman would rather marry an unemployed high-school drop out than the steadily employed college graduate who owns his own home. Hyperbole doesn’t strengthen your argument here. And I’m not arguing that there aren’t society-wide preferences. I’m arguing that we don’t have enough evidence to create a just-so story about where they came from–especially because life in hunter-gather cultures is so radically different than our own. The whole field seems to start with assumptions I find unsupported: that selecting for marginally more fertile women is the best, practically the only, way to increase the number of descendants you have and that 2) women don’t contribute enough to their children’s survival to create selection pressure–rate of production overwhelms those factors. Neither of those seem remotely self-evident to me. You need to show me substantial evidence that these things are true. ---
**Author:** ![thorny\_locust](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/thorny_locust/32/431_2.png) [@thorny\_locust](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/thorny_locust)\ **Post date:** [July 16, 2019, 2:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-mra-pick-up-artist-incel-biological-psychology-necessarily-wrong/837132/46 "2019-07-16T14:17:32Z")
> [@Shodan](#): > > The woman with the 90% chance is going to produce 5% more than the woman with the 85% chance, all other things being equal. Only if they could both potentially have children every year for the same length of time, with the exact same chance of the children surviving and of the mother surviving all of those pregnancies; which during nearly all the time of human evolution was extremely unlikely. If only one child every three or four years can be raised, there’s going to be a lot less than 5% difference if everything’s equal but the chance of becoming pregnant. Plus which, overly frequent pregnancies are an increased risk to the mother’s life; and her early death puts her already-existing children at much higher risk. The woman who catches too easily may well raise fewer children, not more of them. Plus which, other things never are all equal. Even aside from the above, a woman with a slightly smaller chance of becoming pregnant in any given cycle but a much greater chance of raising a child to adulthood would still be a better bet. And if this controls modern behavior: again, why is the current general societal preference not for moderately fat women? ---
**Author:** ![Shodan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/9f8e36/32.png) [@Shodan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Shodan)\ **Post date:** [July 16, 2019, 2:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-mra-pick-up-artist-incel-biological-psychology-necessarily-wrong/837132/47 "2019-07-16T14:27:38Z")
> [@MandaJo](#): > > It doesn’t work that way. Actually, yes, it does work that way. > [@](#): > > For one thing, it’s not how many viable offspring you produce, it’s how many offspring you produce who go on to produce offspring. If you don’t produce viable offspring, you aren’t going to have any offspring who go on to produce viable offspring. Having children is a necessary but not sufficient condition for having grand children. > [@](#): > > Furthermore, again, marginal differences in fertility are not going to directly translate into having marginally more babies–there’s only 30 fertile years at most, and a marginal difference in fertility is not going to automatically translate into another pregnancy in that interval. The slightly-less-fertile woman gets pregnant in the next month or two. I’m sorry you don’t believe in the law of averages, but evolution does. > [@](#): > > If KILLING babies is an important survival strategy, why does the potential to produce slightly more make any difference at all? But EvPsych suggests it doesn’t make a difference, it’s the KEY difference, overwhelming everything else. Evolutionary psychology does not say that it overwhelms everything else. > [@](#): > > And I thought the idea of “cheap sperm” was that a wise man would want to mate with BOTH or ALL. A man who is only attracted to super-fertile women might well have no opportunities to reproduce at all. Men are preferentially attracted to women who have the physical markers of health and fertility. You are correct about the idea of cheap sperm. Men will mate with both if possible. The investment for men is minuscule. The investment for women is much greater, which is why they prefer higher-status, higher-resource men. > [@](#): > > And I’m not arguing that there aren’t society-wide preferences. Not merely society-wide - cross-cultural. > [@](#): > > The whole field seems to start with assumptions I find unsupported: that selecting for marginally more fertile women is the best, practically the only, way to increase the number of descendants you have and that 2) women don’t contribute enough to their children’s survival to create selection pressure–rate of production overwhelms those factors. Neither of those seem remotely self-evident to me. You need to show me substantial evidence that these things are true. It isn’t necessary to over-state the assumptions to argue for selective evolutionary pressure as an explanation for the near-universal preference of men for young healthy women, or of women for high-status, high-resource men. They aren’t the only factors, but they are factors. Regards, Shodan ---
**Author:** ![Mijin](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mijin/32/9369_2.png) [@Mijin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mijin)\ **Post date:** [July 16, 2019, 2:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-mra-pick-up-artist-incel-biological-psychology-necessarily-wrong/837132/48 "2019-07-16T14:31:14Z")
> [@AHunter3](#): > > I don’t entirely disagree, but let’s look at the situation of the male who isn’t conventionally masculine. He is likely to end up behind the curve in maturity and social skills because both of those things thrive in a bath of confidence and experience. Disagree. If you had said let’s look at a guy who is _very shy_, say, I would agree with you. But not being masculine is not the same thing as not being social. > [@](#): > > My own narrative is definitely that of a guy who could not get laid, was sidelined from the dating experience. Me too. I basically didn’t have a real relationship until I was close to 30 :o Then things turned around relatively quickly (in hindsight) and I can say I have dated a lot of very beautiful, amazing women, and now at the age of 40 I still find it easy to get dates and, yes, get laid (though I have not personally desired to “bed N=ridiculous number of women”). I don’t do it by being “alpha” or even extrovert. That’s why I am always dropping in on threads like this with unsolicited advice, hoping I can help some 20-something not waste years like I did. No-one ever listens, I think because “social skills” doesn’t sound like the magic fix they are looking for. > [@](#): > > But if you see what I mean, it becomes rather circular with regards to confidence. Wondering about this a lot doesn’t increase confidence. Yeah. The thing is, sometimes true information is nonetheless not helpful to hear. Confidence is important, but consciously trying to be confident often causes problems. It’s better to forget about it IME. > [@](#): > > that a not-conventionally-masculine male may not be getting laid because he hasn’t made a high priority of getting laid and instead just expected it to eventually “happen” as an outgrowth of interacting with girls and making out / having an ongoing girlfriend-relationship or two. I would say “friend zone” is a real phenomenon, with specific reasons for happening. But guys with steady girlfriends who frequently “make out” but never get to actual sex…is not a frequent issue that I am aware of. > [@](#): > > Here’s an exercise for you: think about feminists complaining about the unfair sexist expectations of female courting / flirting / dating behavior. These angry beta boys / incels / etc seem to hate feminists and blame female people collectively as if they’d designed this whole mess one day in the secrecy of the women’s bathroom, but that doesn’t mean you’re required to do the same in your own analysis. Isn’t any dance that requires dancing partners going to have a flip side, the set of steps that the other dancer has to participate in? Well, even if WhatAboutism indicates that the experience isn’t pleasant on either side of an experience, that doesn’t mean the dance doesn’t suck, in fact it seems to me to mean the opposite. > > And for both sexes, the worst for the minority who least fit the generalizations about their sex, because the dance steps are least well fitted for their personality and behavioral patterns. I am afraid I don’t really follow this. ---
**Author:** ![Shodan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/9f8e36/32.png) [@Shodan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Shodan)\ **Post date:** [July 16, 2019, 3:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-mra-pick-up-artist-incel-biological-psychology-necessarily-wrong/837132/49 "2019-07-16T15:14:32Z")
> [@thorny\_locust](#): > > Only if they could both potentially have children every year for the same length of time, with the exact same chance of the children surviving and of the mother surviving all of those pregnancies; which during nearly all the time of human evolution was extremely unlikely. If you don’t think averages apply to evolution, I doubt if I can explain points that are based on that understanding. > [@](#): > > ]And if this controls modern behavior: again, why is the current general societal preference not for moderately fat women? It doesn’t control it; it affects it. But get back to us in a hundred thousand years or so, and we can discuss how evolutionary pressures affect mating preferences. Regards, Shodan ---
**Author:** ![AHunter3](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ahunter3/32/368_2.png) [@AHunter3](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AHunter3)\ **Post date:** [July 16, 2019, 3:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-mra-pick-up-artist-incel-biological-psychology-necessarily-wrong/837132/50 "2019-07-16T15:16:51Z")
> [@Mijin](#): > > I would say “friend zone” is a real phenomenon, with specific reasons for happening. But guys with steady girlfriends who frequently “make out” but never get to actual sex…is not a frequent issue that I am aware of. Could be an artifact of the time and place where I grew up, I don’t honestly know. Is it no longer true that prior to full adulthood (and even into it for a few years) the act of consensual making out does not intrinsically imply intent or consent to go further? By the time I was 21, I had the sense that several of the girls I had spent time with had been hesitant but were also sort of anticipating the experience with excitement and were amenable to being carried along by the passion of the moment if it were to happen that way, but except in such moment were not inclined to opt for it explicitly. This was all within a context where boys who either asked verbally for sexual activity or who made physical attempts to see if and where and when they would be stopped were often accused of not caring for the girl as a person, that they “only wanted one thing” and were hence exploitative and not very nice people. I’d been on the receiving end of that kind of push-away once or twice so I was leery of doing anything that might make the person I was with feel disregarded or mistreated. I, too, was amenable to being carried over the line by things happening and excitement building, if it were happen that way, but I was damned if I was going to be accused of those exploitative and deliberately manipulative agendas. So yeah despite having had a steady girlfriend in my senior year of high school and again (after a dry spell w/o girlfriend) a couple years later in college, I was a virgin, my girlfriends were virgins, and in both cases by the conclusion of all things I was still a virgin. Not, I assure you, because I had a commitment to remaining one. ---
**Author:** ![Mijin](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mijin/32/9369_2.png) [@Mijin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mijin)\ **Post date:** [July 16, 2019, 3:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-mra-pick-up-artist-incel-biological-psychology-necessarily-wrong/837132/51 "2019-07-16T15:29:37Z")
> [@AHunter3](#): > > Could be an artifact of the time and place where I grew up, I don’t honestly know. Is it no longer true that prior to full adulthood (and even into it for a few years) the act of consensual making out does not intrinsically imply intent or consent to go further? Your personal experience is interesting to me, but to be clear I am not saying making out “intrinsically implies” intent or consent to go further. What I meant was more like relationships tend to progress. Or may break up (and a guy who’s been in one relationship is likely to find it easier to initiate another). So…I don’t doubt that some relationships are stuck at first base. And that might be by mutual choice. But it’s probably far less than the number of people who haven’t got to first yet, or have been further. ---
**Author:** ![thorny\_locust](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/thorny_locust/32/431_2.png) [@thorny\_locust](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/thorny_locust)\ **Post date:** [July 16, 2019, 5:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-mra-pick-up-artist-incel-biological-psychology-necessarily-wrong/837132/52 "2019-07-16T17:50:47Z")
> [@Shodan](#): > > If you don’t think averages apply to evolution, I doubt if I can explain points that are based on that understanding. If you think number of pregnancies initiated is the only thing evolution applies to, I doubt if I can explain points that are based on your understanding. If that were true, we’d all be having litters every month, like mice. ETA: relationships that continue for a long time at the making-out stage may be much more common in teenagers and those in their early 20’s than in older people. I have however no cite for that, just a guess. ---
**Author:** ![aruvqan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/aruvqan/32/2891_2.png) [@aruvqan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/aruvqan)\ **Post date:** [July 16, 2019, 8:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-mra-pick-up-artist-incel-biological-psychology-necessarily-wrong/837132/53 "2019-07-16T20:45:54Z")
> [@mikecurtis](#): > > Let’s pretend for a second that all of your bullet points are true. > Some groups, including the ones you call out are not content just with these things being true, They want to mandate this behavior for all of society. They insist that society organize itself in only this manor and any man or woman who doesn’t want to follow these “traditional” roles are somehow evil and a detriment to society and should be punished or ostracized or made to conform. Which, imho, is where they and there thoughts go off the rail. > > mc I probably would have pissed the hell out of these guys at the age of 25 I was built like a brick shithouse, classic hourglass figure, symmetrical face and body … and totally sterile because I can’t manage to bear children through a pregnancy [they die, I go toxemic, kidneys shut down, it really isn’t pretty.] Add in working a male dominated field and not willing to be the cute shrinking violet woman they want to dominate … yikes. I will say that yes, many of the bullet points are correct - we want good looking and young mates when we are young and interested in reproducing. Extreme wealth will make an otherwise unacceptable mate acceptable. What can I say, millenia of programming goes into it. ---
**Author:** ![Kimstu](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/ecd19e/32.png) [@Kimstu](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kimstu)\ **Post date:** [July 17, 2019, 2:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-mra-pick-up-artist-incel-biological-psychology-necessarily-wrong/837132/54 "2019-07-17T02:43:52Z")
> [@Shodan](#): > > Not merely society-wide - cross-cultural. […] > > It isn’t necessary to over-state the assumptions to argue for selective evolutionary pressure as an explanation for the near-universal preference of men for young healthy women, or of women for high-status, high-resource men. They aren’t the only factors, but they are factors. People who make these arguments tend to leave out a lot of important points, such as: - Men have a near-universal preference for high-status, high-resource women, too: there’s a reason that all those folktales are about the poor young hero getting a princess rather than a neighborhood milkmaid. If there really is a significant difference in how much men and women prefer high-status, high-resource partners, it might well be explicable by the cultural system in which women are much less likely to have access to means of independently ensuring or improving their own status/resources than men are. - Both men and women have a strong and biologically natural preference for young healthy partners. The chief difference is that women in a patriarchal society, with no independent access to status/resources, need to suppress that preference if their best hope of support is a less young or healthy partner. But that doesn’t mean that healthy young women are actually preferentially **attracted** to older uglier richer men, even though older uglier richer men may want to believe that. (See also: the constant societal theme of old rich guy with young hot wife being cuckolded by her young hot lover. See also: increasing numbers of women in increasingly gender-egalitarian societies marrying younger men.) In short: Everybody likes wealth and status, and everybody likes youth and beauty, and both those preferences have perfectly natural and reasonable evolutionary explanations. However, the claim that there are significant gender differences in which preference is **innately biologically** dominant is very poorly supported. ---
**Author:** ![Slash1972](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/slash1972/32/6461_2.png) [@Slash1972](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Slash1972)\ **Post date:** [July 17, 2019, 3:00am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-mra-pick-up-artist-incel-biological-psychology-necessarily-wrong/837132/55 "2019-07-17T03:00:31Z")
> [@Kimstu](#): > > - Men have a near-universal preference for high-status, high-resource women, too Can you explain what you mean by this part? In my experience, men have a near-universal preference for women who “put out”. ---
**Author:** ![Kimstu](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/ecd19e/32.png) [@Kimstu](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kimstu)\ **Post date:** [July 17, 2019, 3:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-mra-pick-up-artist-incel-biological-psychology-necessarily-wrong/837132/56 "2019-07-17T03:15:18Z")
> [@Slash1972](#): > > Can you explain what you mean by this part? In my experience, men have a near-universal preference for women who “put out”. Well, the two aren’t mutually exclusive. See, for example, ubiquitous cultural tropes about the desirability of marriage to the boss’s daughter, the wealthy widow, the princess, the heiress. ---
**Author:** ![Slash1972](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/slash1972/32/6461_2.png) [@Slash1972](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Slash1972)\ **Post date:** [July 17, 2019, 3:18am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-mra-pick-up-artist-incel-biological-psychology-necessarily-wrong/837132/57 "2019-07-17T03:18:50Z")
> [@Kimstu](#): > > Well, the two aren’t mutually exclusive. See, for example, ubiquitous cultural tropes about the desirability of marriage to the boss’s daughter, the wealthy widow, the princess, the heiress. Fair enough, but I don’t think a person should use “who men want to sleep with” as any sort of evidence for anything. Or else “trees with a vagina-looking knothole” would be considered evidence of something. ---
**Author:** ![Kimstu](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/ecd19e/32.png) [@Kimstu](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kimstu)\ **Post date:** [July 17, 2019, 4:22am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-mra-pick-up-artist-incel-biological-psychology-necessarily-wrong/837132/58 "2019-07-17T04:22:27Z")
> [@Slash1972](#): > > Fair enough, but I don’t think a person should use “who men want to sleep with” as any sort of evidence for anything. > > Or else “trees with a vagina-looking knothole” would be considered evidence of something. Okay. Tell it to the OP, who’s attempting to use a considerably more restricted version of “who men want to sleep with” (namely, “women who are young and have a curvy figure and pretty face”) as evidence for the potential validity of a particular sort of evolutionary-psychology argument put forward by some MRA/PUA/incel folks. ---
**Author:** ![Shodan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/9f8e36/32.png) [@Shodan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Shodan)\ **Post date:** [July 17, 2019, 12:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-mra-pick-up-artist-incel-biological-psychology-necessarily-wrong/837132/59 "2019-07-17T12:57:11Z")
> [@thorny\_locust](#): > > If you think number of pregnancies initiated is the only thing evolution applies to, I doubt if I can explain points that are based on your understanding. Fortunately, though, I don’t think this and have never said or implied that number of pregnancies is the only thing evolution applies to - just the opposite, in fact. > [@Kimstu](#): > > People who make these arguments tend to leave out a lot of important points… Both of these were already addressed. > [@](#): > > - Men have a near-universal preference for high-status, high-resource women, too: there’s a reason that all those folktales are about the poor young hero getting a princess rather than a neighborhood milkmaid. Already addressed - see the parts about dowries vs. bride prices. Also read the part about marrying into high-status families. Marrying the princess means becoming the heir to the kingdom - i.e. acquiring high status and resources. > [@](#): > > Both men and women have a strong and biologically natural preference for young healthy partners. Also already addressed, several times. Women marry up, men marry down. Men across cultures tend to marry women who are younger than they are, and women accordingly tend to marry men who are older than they are. And, female fertility drops off much more with age than male fertility, as (again) already mentioned. From the biological point of view, [Sophie Tucker](https://lyrics.fandom.com/wiki/Bette_Midler:Those_Wonderful_Sophie_Tucker_Jokes) was mistaken - forty goes into twenty more, or more effectively, than twenty goes into forty. > [@](#): > > The chief difference is that women in a patriarchal society, with no independent access to status/resources, need to suppress that preference if their best hope of support is a less young or healthy partner. But that doesn’t mean that healthy young women are actually preferentially attracted to older uglier richer men… You are getting cause and effect mixed up. The disadvantages of pregnancy, childbirth, child care and lactation, are biological, not social. If preferences that address that are selected for, they tend to persist. Evolution doesn’t care if you call it names like “patriarchal”. Regards, Shodan ---
**Author:** ![Kobal2](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kobal2/32/20_2.png) [@Kobal2](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kobal2)\ **Post date:** [July 17, 2019, 1:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-mra-pick-up-artist-incel-biological-psychology-necessarily-wrong/837132/60 "2019-07-17T13:13:18Z")
> [@Slash1972](#): > > Or else “trees with a vagina-looking knothole” would be considered evidence of something. Well it’s definitely evidence that some trees are thirsty af. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-mra-pick-up-artist-incel-biological-psychology-necessarily-wrong/837132.md?page=2) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-mra-pick-up-artist-incel-biological-psychology-necessarily-wrong/837132.md?page=4)