Do guys really choose a mate based on looks? Do females really go for high status? Kevin Carty examines how men are influenced by their peers, and how we should all loosen up a little on our dating standards.
In the opening line of their second album, Craig Finn of The Hold Steady sings: “There are nights when I think Sal Paradise was right. ‘Boys and girls in America have such a sad time together.’” Sal Paradise, Jack Kerouac’s alter-ego in On the Road, was right in 1957, and he remains sadly right today. And his rightness, then and now, is intimately connected to a few of Finn’s last lines of the very same album: “Guys go for looks, girls go for status.”
As I see it, when evaluating prospective dates, most straight young men that I know are either driven by attractiveness to a certain woman, or they consider attractiveness to be a prerequisite, only dating women who pass a certain test of beauty. Guys go for looks.
And, I’ve always found it to be true that self-assured men, their confidence a seeming symbol of their own social standing, have more success with the straight women that I know. Girls go for status.
On the surface, this might seem to validate a long-held theory of the evolutionary psychology community, that men like women whose curves, well-colored cheeks, and youthful glow belie a certain fertility that they adaptively desire, and that women like men of status and resources who can provide for them and their children during the arduous years of pregnancy and early childhood. But, I don’t think that’s the case. “Guys go for looks, girls go for status,” may be descriptively true, but it is not so as a complete result of evolution. It’s a socialized tendency, one that only serves to underscore my belief in the need for real and moral change in the area of gender roles and relationships.
For example, in an authoritative study published in 2002, Wendy Wood and Alice Eagly demonstrated that women’s desire for a mate of status tends to decrease as the society in which they reside becomes more gender-egalitarian. In other words, status and its associated resources matter less and less as women are rightfully given the opportunity to provide for themselves and possess their own resource-rich status. In addition to the obvious moral obligation of equal job opportunity for women, I find this to be an amazingly positive development for us young men and our modern masculinity.
For every man who has ever wished he didn’t have to pay for each date, for every man who has resented his position as the pressured breadwinner and provider, this is progress. For every man who wants to be seen as more than a collection of clothes and cars and cash to show off and shell out, this is meaningful change. For every man who has spent time trying to learn and exude confidence, whether it be through pick-up-artistry, relentless exercise, or pressured social posturing, this is good forward movement. Not a single one of us men wants to be evaluated through the lens of our status or its symbolic signifiers. No, we want to be people, whole and valued, unique and textured; as gender equality slowly but surely marches its way across the world, women’s willingness to care less about our social status will help us realize this goal.
Furthermore, consider the other clause of the lyric. As I wrote above, many men consider attractiveness to be a prerequisite factor in their dating lives, evaluating women and only pursuing a relationship or hookup if they pass a certain bar or advance beyond some BS numerical test. The evolutionary psychologist spies this pattern and sees attractiveness as fertility-signaling, but, in my eyes, that’s just another naturalistic fallacy. As I will write dozens of times in my coming months at The Good Men Project, masculinity is a social construction, built with the brick and mortar of all-male groups. Most trends of masculinity, everything from our propensities toward shame and anger to our peer-group loyalty and solidarity, can trace their roots to the homosocial world of men hanging out with other men. Such is the case with the apparent fact: “Guys go for looks.”
Think of trophy wives. I doubt that the wealthy, powerful men of the world are dating young, stereotypically women to please themselves alone.
What about men who take prostitutes as dates to formal functions? I doubt that they are doing so for their own visual pleasure at the event.
Consider another example, one more relevant to the college-aged and young-adult masculinity that I, and some of you, are navigating right now. Do you act according to higher standards of attractiveness (flirting, asking for numbers, etc.) when you are among your male friends or your female friends? Or, would you exercise higher or lower standards if no one was to ever see your prospective partner?
Lastly, to share my own story, even though I have had countless female friends tell me the same, I still vividly remember the spring day when one of my male high school friends told me that my first girlfriend was “really cute.”
These instances are telling. We men, especially those of us living through the uncertain and often hyper-masculine world of college and early adulthood, are in a desperate, constant search for the validation of our male peers. And, the physical attractiveness of our partners, something most of us do “go for,” is a facet of that search. Not one of us should have our dating lives constrained by the shallow opinions of our peers. Not one of us should be so limited in such a meaningful area of life. Not one of us should be so unfree.
It is true: “Boys and girls in America have such a sad time together,” and it is equally true that “Guys for looks [and] girls go for status.” But of course, neither of these things is everlastingly the case. The gendered failings of hetero dating are not static, and the values of masculinity that hamstring our lives are thankfully dynamic.
– Photo Credit: emilyrachelhildebrand on Flickr
My theory: both genders go for status. But women’s status is measured based on looks more than men’s is (although not completely!). And all of this is totally socially enforced and not biological nearly as much as conventional wisdom would tell you. So would a more gender egalitarian society reduce this effect? partially – because women would be less regularly objectified (or, rather, the degree to which men and women are objectified would even out). but i think on a social psychology level, people are still going to try to choose partners with status. read that as “coolness” or “attractiveness”… Read more »
Clara
Men’s tastes are more varied and egalitarian than women’s. That’s why on college campuses, fat below average girls can get laid left and right (with better looking guys)
Even the football players will have sex with girls of varying level of attractiveness…from the cheerleaders to dorky nobody’s.
So the reality about human sexuality is only bitter and depressing for men…not women. You should be happy about it. It will only get better for women.
Conventional wisdom, academic studies, and my own personal observations and experience all strongly contradict what you are saying. Women are under great pressure to be attractive to men, and that is manifested in all of the things that women are expected to do to make themselves attractive: use make-up, wear fashionable and flattering clothes, remove body hair, undergo salon treatments (like facials, etc.), color and style their hair, and in some cases even resort to surgery to improve their appearance. Men do almost none of those things, and certainly at a much lower rate, because it is simply not as… Read more »
Kerplunk The picture you’re painting is of a bygone era where traditional housewives lived in constant fear of their husband’s philandering while they were supposed to be faithful themselves. Conventional wisdom takes time to be challenged. The conventional wisdom on this subject is too dominated by women’s perspective and narratives. It is not easy to challenge core beliefs that people grow up believing. And most people have grown up believing that being physically attractive is the woman’s job. The dynamics of the modern day dating and sexual marketplace are nothing like you describe and men face an insurmountable pressure to… Read more »
The subjectivity about women’s tastes in men, is over-rated. I don’t know why women push this view of beauty and tastes being very subjective and varying.
Women’s tastes are actually very converging and similar. More so than they like to admit.
The proof is that a small minority of men get a disproportionate amount of female attention and sexual opportunities. It is not so skewed the other way round.
You taking about an “authoritative study”, its it considered authoritative outside of ideology driven academia?
Biologically speaking, women are attracted to men who have the ability to care for and shelter offspring. So, wealth plays a part in female attraction. Men are attracted to symmetrical beauty because the subsequent offspring would have a better chance of making offspring. Darwin would be proud.
The rest of the article, in the face of evolution, technology, society and economics, is a farce.
Oh dear. Ability to provide doesn’t make men more sexually attractive to women. It only makes them more useful and relevant.
When I look at ape, and see the female apes trading sex for for food with the best hunters, it strikes me as a rooted in intelligence rather than biology. There are is also research showing that women at one point choose monogamy and suppressing female sexuality in order to acquire more stable shelter and increase the demand for sex in order to drive up the price, this seems to be the same sort of intelligence.
What do you base the claim
>Biologically speaking, women are attracted to men who have the ability to care for and shelter offspring.
on?
Hi everyone. There seems to be a problem with my hyperlink, so here is a link to the study I cited.
https://labs.psych.ucsb.edu/roney/james/other%20pdf%20readings/Eagly_Wood_1999.pdf
Also, one of the author’s supportive statements was, “For example, in an authoritative study published in 2002, Wendy Wood and Alice Eagly demonstrated that women’s desire for a mate of status tends to decrease as the society in which they reside becomes more gender-egalitarian.” Okay, that’s nice and all, but notice that the tendency is only decreased…. it’s never eliminated entirely. Even rich, egalitarian women prefer to mate with men of higher social status. I’m sure it goes the other way as well. In a country were nearly 2/3rds of the population is obese, men will naturally relax their standards… Read more »
@DD
“But when men look around and see few women who satisfy their physical ideal, they will take the best of what they can get or else risk spending the vast majority of their time alone.”
Correct. This is what women term settling. And women are taught to never settle.
“We men, especially those of us living through the uncertain and often hyper-masculine world of college and early adulthood, are in a desperate, constant search for the validation of our male peers.”
I never gave a rats ass about validation from my my male peers. And I still don’t give a rats ass!
I am driven strictly by the way I see my self, religious beliefs, personal goals, and accomplishments.
Started reading…. scrolled down a bit…
Yup! written by a kid.
My thoughts exactly. The author is theorizing about what men and women are attracted to, whereas most of us have lived it. I’ll trust my 30+ years of experience over idle theorizing any day. Besides, even if his theory holds true, what exactly does that mean to the average guy or girl? We don’t live in theoretical laboratories, we live in the REAL world. So men and women’s biases are shaped as much by culture as they are biology… okay, I’ll buy that. But I still have to live in this (or some other) culture. I might think that it… Read more »
I’m a 49 year old woman. I was in college in the 80s (at Brown too, as a matter of fact), and what strikes me when reading this is how far society has gone backwards, if what you say is indeed true. Back then, there were mainstream magazines that wrote about these attitudes (het men being inflexible about female attractiveness, het women being attracted to status), but no one I knew in real life actually held them. We found them to be puzzlingly old-fashioned, and assumed that they would die out, and that they were in fact dying out already.… Read more »
Hi Kerplunk
These days, every young woman only wants hooking up, casual sex and flings with good looking, popular men. It is an unwritten rule.
Do you think in your time things were different and women were less harsh and unforgiving to men on their looks? Do you think the sexual marketplace was more egalitarian for men back then?
I don’t think it’s ever possible to say what “every” woman/man/youngperson/oldperson etc. wants. There is a difference between societal expectations and actual lived experience. Broader societal expectations matter because we all live together in our society and we want it to be a just society, but in the narrow sense of finding our own partners, it really doesn’t matter very much what society as a whole might consider to be the ideal partner, because we are each only looking for one partner (and even if we are looking for numerous hookups, they will still comprise a very small percentage of… Read more »
Even if women in general are “harsh” and “unforgiving” (and I don’t know that that’s true), that only matters in the broad sense of wanting to create a more caring society, but it doesn’t really affect each of us individually, since we each are only looking for one, or a few, partner(s), and it should theoretically be possible to find at least a few who are forgiving and kind! You left of a bit of Tim’s sentence: Do you think in your time things were different and women were less harsh and unforgiving to men on their looks? Which in… Read more »
You say the ‘broader societal expectations’ and the sexual preferences of individuals are two separate issues. I’ve always found this concept interesting and problematic at the same time. It is interesting that only in recent times have women begun to make a distinction between the 2 issues. For ages we have been told that its the sexual / partner preferences of men that cause these societal expectations. Perhaps the distinction has become necessary due to some observations in the sexual / dating marketplace, in recent times? The thing is that societal expectations and preferences of individuals are inevitably linked. Those… Read more »
Kerplunk You say the ‘broader societal expectations’ and the sexual preferences of individuals are two separate issues. I’ve always found this concept interesting and problematic at the same time. It is interesting that only in recent times have women begun to make a distinction between the 2 issues. For ages we have been told that its the sexual / partner preferences of men that cause these societal expectations. Perhaps the distinction has become necessary due to some observations in the sexual / dating marketplace, in recent times? Societal expectations and preferences of individuals are inevitably linked. Those who measure up… Read more »
I think it matters when you resemble or fit the written description of the man or woman out of central casting who plays the “unattractive friend” of the star of some movie or television show or book. I have a trait that is often code for unattractive in a man, and even though in my actual life that trait has only a small practical impact, men who look like me are the butt of an at least implied joke pretty much daily. That gets old and it wears me out sometimes, though probably only when other things are wearing me… Read more »
I wouldn’t say that young women ONLY want to hook up with good-looking, popular men… but a good-looking, popular man will certainly have far more options than his less attractive, less popular peers. The problem with any argument about what people want when it comes to sex and relationships is that most people’s perception of what they want is tempered by the more limited reality of what they can actually get. It doesn’t do me much good to continue to pine for a woman with model-good looks when I’ve only rarely ever met one in real life. I’ll either consciously… Read more »
Interesting article. I think that if men want to be seen as ‘people, whole and textured, unique and valued’ rather than as ‘a collection of clothes and cars and cash to show off and shell out’, they would do well to cultivate an inner life rather than waiting for gender equality to change societal standards.
I had a hard time making sense of this: “Think of trophy wives. I doubt that the wealthy, powerful men of the world are dating young, stereotypically women to please themselves alone. What about men who take prostitutes as dates to formal functions? I doubt that they are doing so for their own visual pleasure at the event. Consider another example, one more relevant to the college-aged and young-adult masculinity that I, and some of you, are navigating right now. Do you act according to higher standards of attractiveness (flirting, asking for numbers, etc.) when you are among your male… Read more »