Male Attractiveness to Women as Explained by Evolutionary Psychology
852 upvotes | July 12, 2017 | by the_christian_grey
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Over the last few weeks I’ve been watching a series of lectures by
the psychologist Jordan Petersen, in which he explains the function of
the male dominance hierarchy and its relationship to sexual selection.
These evolutionary psychology concepts have clear implications for
those of us who would like to improve our own success with women, but
can be a bit opaque to the lay reader. I’m going to make it more
accessible. 
Genetic testing of modern humans has led scientists to estimate that
historically about 80% of women and only about 40% of men have been
able to reproduce successfully. If you’re wondering how the sexes
could be so mismatched, it means that every reproductively successful
man impregnated two women on average. 
A woman can only be impregnated by one man every nine months, at
maximum. Whereas one man could theoretically impregnate a thousand
women during that same timespan. Since the number of men and women is
about equal, this makes female reproductive capacity far more
scarce–and thus far more economically valuable–than male
reproductive capacity. This means that women are the primary agents of
sexual selection. 
What that means, in English, is that women are in general a lot more
picky about choosing men than men are about choosing women. It also
means that as a man, the deck is stacked against you. This means that
you are more likely than not to FAIL at having sex with women. That
is, unless you can get into that top 40%. Average won’t cut it. 
The Dominance Hierarchy 
So how do women choose which men are worthy of their scarce vaginas?
The answer, curiously, is that men choose themselves. They do this by
way of a dominance hierarchy. A dominance hierarchy is a natural,
spontaneous ordering of males from most dominant to least dominant.
You can envision a dominance hierarchy as similar to a corporate org
chart. It is pyramid shaped, with the CEO at the top, the other
executives under him, the middle management under them, etc., until
you get to the grunt workers at the bottom. 
All species of social animals have some form of dominance hierarchy.
For some animals, this hierarchy is ordered according to a single
factor, such as physical size. This is the case for the elephant seal,
for example. A male elephant seal can determine his place on the
hierarchy very easily. If he is the largest male, he is the alpha, and
he is entitled to all the females. If he is not the largest, then he
is a beta male, and is not entitled to mate with the females. If a
beta tries to mate with a female, the female will loudly protest, and
the beta male risks being physically harmed by the more powerful alpha
male. Therefore the beta male elephant seal has an instinctual fear of
trying to mate with females, since doing so would put his life in
jeopardy. 
The human dominance hierarchy is far more complicated than that of the
elephant seal, but shares the same basic functioning. Every human male
instinctively knows his place in the dominance hierarchy, and our
subconscious minds guide our behavior and feelings accordingly in
various situations. Approach anxiety, for example, is our instinctive
reaction to the prospect of hitting on a girl to whom we are not
entitled, given our place in the dominance hierarchy. It is the same
as the aversion felt by the beta male elephant seal that keeps him
from mating with the females. 
Also like the elephant seal, a woman’s interest in mating with a man
is determined by his place on the dominance hierarchy. A man who mates
with a woman by force is similarly punished by higher ranking men. And
in more primitive cultures, even hitting on a woman to whom a man is
not entitled is grounds for physical punishment. In modern society,
such men get by with the rather minor punishment of being called
“creepy” by onlookers and other such displays of social
disapproval. 
But unlike the elephant seal, the human male dominance hierarchy is
quite complex. And one man is likely to be a part of multiple
dominance hierarchies at the same time. Some hierarchies are clearly
delineated. A CEO is the alpha male in his company’s dominance
hierarchy. The Head of State of a country is the alpha male in his
country’s political structure. 
Other hierarchies are less obvious. A rock star or a movie star may be
high in a dominance hierarchy, despite perhaps not having anyone
formally working for him. Dominance is determined by a number of
factors beyond formal authority. Physical size, strength, wealth,
fame, intelligence, attractiveness, creativity, personality, and a
variety of other characteristics can factor into a man’s place in a
dominance hierarchy. 
So how does anybody figure out who is where on such a complicated
hierarchy? The answer is that we place ourselves by comparing
ourselves to others. We each have a deeply ingrained perception of our
own status, and we size up other males and compare ourselves to them.
We do most of this on a subconscious level. 
If you are a typical guy, and you find yourself face to face with a
famous rock star, you are instinctively going to judge his place on
the dominance hierarchy as higher than yours, and you will act in a
way that is deferential to his higher status. Similarly, if you are
face to face with a beggar on the street, you will naturally expect
him, being of lower status, to defer to you. We defer to those whom we
deem higher status than ourselves, because deferring is easier than
getting into a fight we are likely to lose, or risking alienation by
society as a whole. 
Your subconscious mind will make this comparison with just about every
other man with whom you interact. Most of the time the comparison will
be less obvious to your conscious mind. But your subconscious is
extremely observant. It will pick up the tiniest cues from another
man’s posture, vocal tone, movement, word choice, body language,
etc. to make this determination. 
Sometimes it is not immediately clear which man holds the higher
position. Let’s say you and another guy both judge yourselves to be
higher status than the other. In this case it largely comes down to
conviction. If you are more convinced of your higher status, he will
pick up on that from your body language, and will reassess your status
as higher than his own. 
The subconscious minds of women are also very adept at determining
men’s place on the male dominance hierarchy. Women are attracted to
men who have a high position in the hierarchy. You’ve probably heard
a million times that the most attractive characteristic in a man is
confidence. This is basically true, but I’m going to be more
specific. The most attractive characteristic in a man is his own
conception of his high position on the dominance hierarchy. This looks
a lot like confidence. 
And it shows. Men have been trying to fake confidence (i.e. a high
position in the dominance hierarchy) in the presence of women for
millennia. This is very difficult to do, because women are very adept
at deciphering tiny signals and can instinctively spot fakers. There
is a feedback loop between confident body language and actual
confidence, however, so consciously learning alpha male body language
can still be useful (perhaps I’ll go into this in more detail in a
subsequent post). 
The importance of our place in the dominance hierarchy leads us to the
obvious question: where does our conception of our own position on the
dominance hierarchy come from? This where it gets tricky. Our
subconscious mind has built our self conception on the accumulation of
our entire lifetime’s worth of experiences, including during
childhood. A kid who was bullied in school, abused by his parents, or
rejected by other kids may well grow up to have a rather negative
conception of himself. Even if he becomes rich and good looking, he
may still carry this negative self-conception as a relic of his
formative experiences. 
If you’ve ever seen a tall, handsome, well-dressed guy timidly try
to start a conversation with a girl and get coldly rejected (happens
all the time), something like this is the issue. And it only compounds
itself. Every time he gets rejected, it reinforces his assessment of
himself as low on the dominance hierarchy. It’s a very difficult
cycle to break. 
So is it possible to improve your subconscious conception of your own
place in the dominance hierarchy? The answer, thankfully, is yes. Your
subconscious generalizes from examples. You need to give it new
examples that show that your position has changed and you’ve managed
to move up to a higher position on the dominance hierarchy. As luck
would have it, I’m going to tell you exactly how you can do this. 
Step One: Realize that hitting on girls is not actually dangerous 
Before you can start focusing on success with women, you have to get
rid of your fear of trying. If you are naturally a beta male, as most
men are, you are going to have some anxiety when hitting on girls. You
need to accept your fear (which is totally normal), and face it. 
Do exactly what you are afraid to do. Go talk to women. The more
uncomfortable it makes you, the better. The less alcohol involved, the
better. I have a great program to gradually ease you into it, which
you can find here. 
You will almost certainly get rejected a lot at first. That’s ok.
Your purpose in this step is simply to show your subconscious mind
that nothing truly bad happens when you hit on girls. If you live in a
modern Western society, nobody is going to come chop your head off
because you talked to a girl to whom you were not entitled. The more
your subconscious sees that there is no real danger, the less anxiety
you will have around attractive women. 
Step Two: Convince yourself that you are attractive to women 
Rest of the article here:
http://www.christiangreypua.com/dominance-hierarchy-male-attractiveness/
[https://archive.ph/o/6Ro63/www.christiangreypua.com/dominance-hierarchy-male-attractiveness/]

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