First Things First

Why women can never usefully advise men about women

My HYPERGAMOUSE colleague, the lovely and talented Lacey Fairchild, inadvertently helped me understand the main reason underlying the female inability to usefully advise men about women with a comment here yesterday. And as it turns out, this reason less concerns solipsism than an intrinsic female inability to recognize the key challenge faced by most men.

I'm a woman so take my opinion with a big grain of salt, given the topic at hand XD but... Girls may like muscles, but women marry for money, skills, and attitude, not muscles. A man who has a job, can fix the sink, and doesn't get emotional is way more attractive than a man who just has abs.

Key phrase: more attractive. Key factor: women are fundamentally situated in a very different socio-sexual position than men. For women, their primary challenge does not concern anyone finding them attractive, but rather, the need to make a choice between the various men who are attracted to them. And, additionally, how to improve the caliber of men who are attracted to them. This is why their advice to men, when it is not mere solipsistic projection, invariably concerns how an already attractive man can better compete with other attractive men.

Which advice, obviously, is entirely useless to the man who is essentially invisible to all of the women to whom he is attracted. They have nothing to offer the man who they do not already deem to be attractive… which is the vast majority of men.

One of the things I often point out to authors who bemoan their inability to sell books, even books that are objectively and inarguably better than books that sell much better than theirs, is that their problem is not a qualitative one. The comparisons are irrelevant, as are the various qualities of their book. Their fundamental problem is a marketing problem: no one has any idea that they, or their book, even exist.

The invisible man attracts no woman.

In like manner, for most men, the qualitative issue is at best a secondary issue, if that. This is because most men are completely invisible to any woman, even if they are objectively superior to her. While men rate women on an objectively reasonable Bell curve, women have a much more Pareto-style perspective, with a bar that only 17 percent of men are capable of passing.

So the key for those 83 percent of men who fail to clear the “attractive” bar is to focus on those superficial things that allow them to do so, which includes putting on some of that muscle mass that girls like. Yes, of course they like handsome and pretty faces even better, but there isn’t much that a man can do in that regard other than lose weight to bring out some hidden cheekbones or grow a beard to hide a weak chin, whereas every man can easily add five pounds of muscle in a year by hitting the gym.

Only after sufficient self-improvement in the superficial areas that will permit a man to clear the 17 percent bar is it important to start considering those more qualitative aspects that elevate an attractive man’s prospective marital prospects. If you’re invisible to women, focus relentlessly on the superficial. Because unless you are on a woman’s radar, it doesn’t matter how wonderful you are. You cannot win the game when you’re sitting on the bench… or in the crowd.

And speaking of Lacey, don’t neglect to back the book! Here’s an early look at the wraparound cover in the works.

HYPERGAMOUSE has an amazing cast of characters.