Sexual attraction is nothing more than an evolved emotional response notifying us a particular individual would be a good candidate to pass on our genes with.

When a woman is beautiful you feel physical attraction for her because her beauty indicates that she is fertile and free of disease. Although this perspective might not make for good love poems, looking at attraction from an evolutionary lens allows us to understand what universally attracts women and why. Then, we can reverse engineer those traits to become more attractive ourselves.

Women have a powerful emotional desire for offspring with the best possible genes (better genes means offspring who are more likely to survive). Because of this, women have evolved over the millennia to respond to what are called honest signals: evidence of good genes that cannot be faked. For example, a peacock develops its heavy and elegant plumage even though the display is a significant burden, because it acts as an honest signal. The more impressive a male peacock’s feathers are, the better his genes must be; because this means he was able to not only survive, but thrive despite the heavy burden. Only a superior specimen with an ability to gather an abundance of food could pull off this feat, lesser peacocks would have smaller, less impressive displays.

For women, a man’s physical fitness, height, and other physical features do trigger sexual attraction because they signal good reproductive health. However, women are much more responsive to behavioral evidence of reproductive value than men because women have to make a much larger investment in their children (9 months vs 2 minutes). As a result, women desire a man who displays honest signals that indicate who would make an effective father (i.e. someone who would help her child thrive).

We evolved in hunter gatherer tribes of 50-150 members, in these tribes, males with high-status had the most power, and therefore, the best genes for a woman to pass on to the next generation (children with high-status fathers would have access to more food and would inherit some of their father’s status). Because of this, status evolved to be the most powerful trigger for attraction.

Men normally chase status through fame, money, and possessions, but this is incredibly inefficient because women’s brains didn’t evolve to respond to Ferrari’s or mansions, external status symbols didn’t exist in the environment we evolved in. Instead, women evolved to respond to the emotional signals of status, because they couldn’t be faked.

High-status behaviors couldn’t be faked because if a male who were low-status acted dominant or assertive (for example, by making an advance on a desirable female), higher status males would see this as a challenge to their authority. At best a low status male who tried to assert himself would be put in his place, at worst he would be ostracized or killed by the leaders of the tribe. To survive, a low status male would have to take what scraps he could get and act as males with authority expected him to. Fortunately, in the modern world, acting confidently is a comparatively risk-free behavior. Unfortunately, building confidence is challenging because it requires you to overcome a primal resistance to confident behaviors that exists to keep you alive.

Confidence is a necessary honest signal to develop, because if you act confidently you are signaling that you are high-status, and if you are high-status you have high reproductive value, and high reproductive value automatically triggers attraction.

For more, check out my blog: https://tpsychnation.com/masterthegamebook/