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Episode 15: Making Yourself More Attractive
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good evening everybody this is nate g and dr. Doug Lyall how you doing dr. Lyle good good to be back all right we're great to have you back this week so last week we had a great episode talking about love sex relationships and dating and all with this perspective from evolutionary psychology and dr. LOH you've kind of created this niche in evolutionary psychology about beating your genes and from what I understand it's that that your genes are really trying to get you to do a couple of things the most of which is actually trying to get you to do one thing which is to spread your genes and make sure that they're in the on the world in the planet a couple generations from now and while that's all great and good that's not necessarily the same things that create happiness and so beating your genes is about figuring out what your gene are trying to get you to do and if you're not being happy as a result outsmarting your genes that's it that's good that that's what we're going to call wisdom wisdom is figuring out that your instincts are not always serving your best interest long-term and now so we have to like figure out where we are getting goaded by some essentially primordial urges into doing things that are actually not in our long-term best interest and when it comes to love sex dating and relationships this seems to happen a lot at least from what you've seen in your practice right certainly in other words people are walking around with a stone-age brain inside their head just in the same way that they've got Stone Age knees and ankles and and eyebrows in other words your your body parts were designed to survive in the Stone Age and as a result of that not only is your body a Stone Age body but your mind is a stone age mind now you may not think so because you read Sports Illustrated and watch LeBron James and you know if your gal you might read Cosmo magazine and you've read you know the blonds taste sisters so that you think that you're this sophisticated thing called the human being but actually if we look past the superficial layers of of civilization we see that human beings are doing the same things that they have always done they are climbing and dominance hierarchies they are competing for mates they are attempting to figure out what the village finds valuable and display those characteristics or or give the village the values that they want in order to gain it status or gain resources they are trying to leverage their children into better locations and dominance hierarchies in the village in order to put themselves in advantageous situations for mating because we're we are bizarre species that actually is tracking our genes through our children all the way into our children's mating choices so these are things that are timeless problems human beings and whether they had cars or horses or before that mething they all they're all still trying to go to the same place very interesting and so when it comes to modern dating which is basically the same dance that our ancestors did things change just a little bit but apparently not so much as I originally thought they've changed almost not at all the truth of the matter is is that in some ways it's easier today in some ways it's more difficult I don't know how many guys have been through the situation where you cannot tell what a woman really looks like because she's wearing so damn many clothes so they're clever disguising her can't see any skin so you really don't know what her body contours look like so you really can't evaluate how sexually attracted to her that you are and in the Stone Age you wouldn't have that problem you can just see it so the so there are things that are obviously we'd rather live today than in the Stone Age the Stone Age was awfully brutal place to live in many ways but in some ways the things that we are doing now that are sometimes difficult for example trying to figure out if we're sexually attracted to people before we can get their clothes off of them or for example another thing that we tried to do today that they didn't try to do in the Stone Age we try to hold relationships together for 30 or 40 or 50 years and that would have been a ludicrous goal in the Stone Age that never would have taken place so the there's so today we have a mixed bag we have people in the modern world with many modern dilemmas some of which are purely of our own creation and they will sometimes do it do a number on the Stone Age mind as it tries to navigate its way through it and so nowadays what are some common things I know you said that that some people are going to try to hold on to a relationship for 30 40 years other people are going to try to either withhold sex or get it as fast as possible what are some of the issues that come up if someone is trying to hold on to a marriage or relationship for 30 40 years well I think one of the things that happens is it the way you have to look at this whole game of life is you have to look at it is this adventure that we are trying to enjoy the whole the purpose by which you were designed was data to you were designed to actually reproduce genes and along along the way what nature did was the nature gave you certain inducements in order to get that debt so nature made it so that you shivered and weren't happy when you look old that you sweated and you were uncomfortable when you were hot if you hadn't had anything to eat for a while you got hungry and nature gave you lusty impulses to go after members of the opposite sex and it gave you particularly differential amount of less depending upon how sexually attracted those people were it made sexual attractiveness actually quite objective so stunningly so in other words certainly there's quote I of the beholder but the truth of the matter is is that most of the be holders have very very similar opinions as to what sexually attractive in the opposite sex and that's because they are evaluating the levels of mutations that are in those individuals of the opposite sex so you can see essentially the errors in the genetic code by looking at their crooked noses or look at these symmetrical faces or body features or looking at their lack or excess of muscle tissue we're looking at their small breasts or small hips we're looking at their bad skin or looking at their falling out here in other words there's all kinds of ways for human beings to actually evaluate the gene quality of the people that they might be interested in and they were designed to have lust responses to be more acute and greater as they saw less and less of mutations so in this way the deep biology that's simply trying to reproduce DNA is actually weaving its way through human motivation very dramatically the I forget what your question was oh it was more about the Iraq yeah I mean you're you're kind of answering my question about you know what are some of the common issues that people fall into if they're trying to maintain a relationship for 30 40 years you know that is clearly not yet normal right that's that's it that's not something that it would have happened in the Stone Age very often it's not characteristic of our species the it's that's characteristic of of essentially modern financial arrangements and and that's that's sort of what's guiding that more than anything else and the there was a very interesting book published a few years ago that sort of talked about and it's it's a book that had had some very interesting points and it had some pretty big mistakes in it but it had but it had a an argument from anthropology that was there was a very interesting argument that it makes and with a lot of merit and that is that that because the because about ten thousand years ago when human beings started to develop farming they started to for the first time have wealth because they they settled into settlements and they were able to make improvements in real estate and so for the first time they actually had things that could be ask down of significance in terms of wealth and so this was sex at dawn takes a dim view of this as many anthropological people do which is course ridiculous it's unbelievably valuable to have wealth and the and the wealth is going to be have to be defended you're going to have to have kingdoms and warfare and weaponry and all kinds of stuff but the most important thing about wealth is it it's useful so if you build a house and 400 years later some other people can still use it that's fantastic it means that it's somebody living 400 years ago built something that we're still using today which means which is a fantastic economic residual asset and and and advantage for human beings so you don't have to spend your time building that house in the same way that somebody did 400 years ago and so as a result of wealth however and the utility of wealth it winds up being extremely advantageous for every succeeding generation to have more of it than their sexual competitors and so inheriting wealth becomes a very important issue and directing wealth to children becomes a very important issue and so you're going to have marriage spontaneously evolving in this situation as well as all kinds of rules and taboos and so on and so forth and so as a result what we're going to wind up with is financial arrangements locking males and females together in this sort of thang ammonius process where it is that they're not supposed to be sleeping with anybody else and this is sort of catastrophic and terrible and so on and so forth because actually this is all about the fact that this wealth might then get directed away from your jinns says you're a woman whose husband is philandering with somebody else you want to make sure that the women on the other side of this understand that none of his wealth goes to their children ie their children are quote illegitimate if you're a man whose wife is sleeping around you will probably you know immediately get rid of her and so have an a branded on her forehead etc etc bit reason being is this this is a ruthless stealing of the male's resources in the sense that his wealth would be directed towards her children that she would bear and if they are not his this is a horrendous biological disaster for him because his accumulated wealth is now going to genes that are not his so you can see with well on the table it ups the ante tremendously as to what's at stake when it comes to sexual fidelity and when you change the game like this and you massively up the ante and when we say up the ante what it means is it's a tremendous influence a new and novel influence on gene reproduction to success and so as a result the the wealth has now entered into the equation of human biology in a way that it is never entered into any animals biology and as a result of this now we have rules and taboos and now it's having to change or there's going to put social forces on these relationships that we're never there before and this is where sex at dawn and other critics of modern marriage arrangements are accurate in the sense that they're there's always been hurt feelings and there's always been a little bit of social pressure and some gawking and gossiping and mother-in-law's upset if anybody was cheating on anybody but the bottom line is is that there's there's been nothing like the sort of horrendous chronic and major social pressure on human beings to stay married and have all the money channeled directly to let's make sure we know whose genes those are as you have today this is a this is completely inconsistent with human biology and the sort of long term care bonding the 40 or 50 year para bonding that we now see as appropriate normal moral incorrect is a total aberration as to how this organism would have evolved and I'm assuming a couple of one of our first few shows we talked about personality characteristic and you talked about the sucker triad which is basically when someone's very agreeable and they're conscientious and they're intelligent that seems like a recipe for for a disaster somebody's married and they're kind of being pressured into it and they're intelligent enough to know that this is not normal and this is not natural for them to feel bad and feel trapped and but then they have to do the right thing because they're conscientious and they're disagreeable partners pressuring them to stay and everybody else is pressuring this day just the right thing to do oh this is a this is a major recurrent theme in my practice over the last 25 years in psychology there there's absolutely people that are agreeable emotionally stable bright and highly conscientious and they they wind up in a relationship possibly that they were not that interested in at the beginning but they are so conscientious and agreeable that they go right ahead and agree to it anyway and they figure that they'll make the best of it we'll be fine and before they know it they're essentially there's a bunch of little stepping stones that sort of the the entire social matrix starts jollying them along towards towards a wedding and then they don't get out of it and they may never get out of this thing and yet what what this thing should have been was a two-month romance that that failed its death and that is exactly what it would have happened in the Stone Age but today we could have something that looks quite quite different and stunningly we can have a ordinarily mediocre life in terms of the happiness that is actually enjoyed by the individual in comparison to what could have been and and this is where the sort of hippie style anthropologists are saying we've got a worse off now than we've ever had it now this is not correct it turns out that the modern conveniences in modern wealth actually makes people happier than they are when they are in primitive life situations but this is but we can't say that this is entirely true if you're one of these people doesn't matter if it's you if you're a person who has lived your last 40 years in a very mediocre marriage and you have felt trapped by your church and your and your parents and and the expectations of everybody else and your own conscientiousness about your children etc etc that you've sat right there in this muck and have choked this thing down then you know you would have been better off living in its den edge village yeah and you know sex that dawn I read that book and they seem to conclude that because of this wealth then it became increasingly more important for the holder of the resources to know the paternity of his kid to make sure he knows which one's actually his and lived the authors were making a large Ament yeah the others were making the argument that the conclusion from this is that we used to be carefree about the that about the paternity of the child and so people would just sleep we sleep with everybody in the village depending on their attraction and then they just kind of go along their way it's what the authors seem to be suggesting in sex I don't is that we should be going back to that where they talk about polyamory or at least consensual non-monogamy where you are upfront with with with part potential partners that they're not going to be only ones what are your thoughts on that sex at dawn has a lot of very serious mistakes they these folks are not very knowledgeable in evolutionary psychology they're smart people but they're just not they don't they clearly did not examine the evidence very well and they have a huge bias in their way of thinking the guy that wrote it the lead author clearly would like is clearly got a swinging sort of psychology in his own head and he's looking at all of humanity through those glasses the his in I think one of the last chapters of the book called confronting the sky together where they're going to finally give their prescriptions about how to deal with this they they admit openly and dramatically and actually unconsciously just how how they repudiate their entire thesis and tie the fundamental thesis of sex had gone is that human beings would have been oh they point to animals like bonobos who that are very promiscuous or chimpanzees that are very viscous and they say well see look at that you know what's wrong with that and the answer is those are different species it's not the same species so they're going to have very very different sexual arrangements depending upon the species in the same way that chimpanzees don't talk okay they don't they don't do all kinds of things that people don't do and so the chimpanzee has a brain of 500 CCS and you've got a brain of about 13 or 1400 Urich massively different animal than chimpanzee that a common ancestor you know eight million years ago but I mean eight million years is a long time so you are not a chimpanzee you're not a bona beau you're not any really anything close to those you are unique individual species that has a unique type of mating psychology that does not resemble that of a chimpanzee or Bono or a gorilla or orangutan or anything else now what we see is that they actually make this point of G if you're a female you know do you really want your you know get over actually you know if you're a female on the other side of a guy who's cheating you feel like you know you should just to retaliate you should go G to even though if you don't want to now when they admit that this is their that this is what they think would be going on in a marriage when they're trying to get these marriages to open up and be free and wild what they admit point-blank is that it's the male is going to want to go cheat and the female wouldn't even want to which is very typical of this species and so this is actually this is very typical of what evolutionary psychologists are are essentially trying to explain about male and female mating psychology now this is not these are not extremely firm stereotypes and there's a lot of individual variation here but in principle based on how design of organisms you would expect the case to be that the male that has vastly less possible investment in offspring and a female in other words a female of our species is going to have a huge investment in the offspring it's going to be a minimum of nine months gestation plus at that point the the rule critter is unbelievably helpless and it's going to require a tremendous amount of female attention in order to get this thing all the way to viable at 16 or 17 years old so as a result were and she can do that now she walks away when this kid is 2 years old from the male and says it's your problem now the truth of the matter is the male didn't have that much invested he didn't go through that nine months gestation breast feeding everything else so the point is if he walks off and leaves it she's in a bind she has more to lose and he has to lose and because the male has far less to lose in abandoning in a relationship or a child than a female does then it's going to turn out that females by nature are going to be very interested in latching on to a male and having that males stick around and invest in offspring okay they are going to follow that male around males are not going to follow females to their new job in Atlanta that's not going to happen nearly as often as the female is going to follow the man to his new job in Atlanta and so we still see exactly the same tendencies as would have been the case in the Stone Age so the female has a stickier psychology who is hoping that the male loves them enough to stick around and provision their offspring the the male is designed by nature to signal those things in order to get into female's pants because females are looking for those signals and the and so this is the fundamental underlying dynamic of how human psychology works but the way it generally does not work is that it is is unlikely that those people are very interested in each other sexually 10 or 15 years from now now is it possible of course it's possible does it happen fairly often yes it happens fairly often if you want to talk about raw numbers but if you want to talk about percentage is what is the statistical likelihood the two people who had 25 were sexually attracted to each other what is the statistical likelihood that they even at that time maybe in the early in the relationship that they are both feeling very exclusively attracted to each other but there are known their own sexual private universe and they really are don't have any significant interest outside that that pair bond that will happen for a period of time at which point it won't be too long before the male isn't thinking that way it is very possible that the female largely will could think that way indefinitely for her whole lifetime and at the thought of actually sleeping with anybody else is vaguely interesting under idealized fantasy situations but in all in all reality she's never really seriously tempted Hey that would not be an uncommon psychological event in females again for any listeners who are saying boy that's not my that's not my experience granted there's going to be large individual differences and everybody's circumstances are different female is reasonably attracted to her mate and and there they have a sexual relationship it's very likely that she does not have a major stirring curiosity and a desire to quote spill her seed elsewhere and the reason is is that she cannot be pregnant more than once at a time it's not possible but so in a given year a female can have exactly one child most happens to be twins you can only have one birth in a year it's time whereas a male could have potentially 2,000 okay so they the phenomenal difference biologically between males and females drives pretty substantial psychological differences in them in terms of their in terms of their sexual psychology and so and part of this sexual psychology you were talking about the author tends to have a type of a swinging psychology or yeah when yours type of trite type of outlook from it from what I gather from our one of our last episodes one of our few episodes back about personality characteristics this is more on the spectrum of openness to new experience where someone does a little bit maybe one or two standard deviations away we're now right they've just got to have many many more new experiences for life to feel fair there's no question the I have no doubt that that author can't remember Sam Chris Ryan that's his name and his wife was a co-author the yes the the there's no I have no doubt that Chris Ryan is probably at the 90th percentile for openness to experience so he's speaking right through his own truth but this is this is not this is not consistent you know it's not highly consistent with human nature females are just not very promiscuous in this vicious there they are they are not being held in by intimidation and so on and so forth of course some of them are but this is not typical typically the way this would go down is that that sexual relationships get pretty uninteresting for a hell of a lot of people within within a year or two and people would have moved on and and a lot of that a lot of that is going to be a male roving eye it's going to be it's going to be raising conflicts in relationships and and then certainly in marriages if you were going to look at unhappy marriage partners the females and unhappy marriages are not thinking boy what I really like a step out and have sex with other people but that is very typical of male psychology and so that's you know to think that females are thinking very differently than that is really quite naive yeah I mean I have M friends that are into polyamory and we've talked about sex at dawn before yeah and sex Adhan I was always told that's like the Bible or like the beginning book for learning about polyamory and you know and sure I want to interrupt yeah I want to interrupt you it's a very interesting if one ever reads sexathon so we just wanted on this topic but if one ever reads it you if you read through it you will actually if you pay attention to the following concept insects had gone Ryan and I saw co-author make the point many times quote you could always find somebody to have sex with the the notion is is that there's no sexual competition in humanity there is no evidence in any of their prose that there is intense sexual competition there is no evidence in their approach that there was tremendous ratings and less differences depending upon how sexually attractive you find particular individuals in their notion it's as if we're all a bunch of average looking chimpanzees that are stopping ourselves from screwing each other because of the church and and modern wealth and all this kind of bullshit but that is not true the truth of the matter is is that you see in humanity actually highly discerning and discriminating lust mechanisms and that you see that females are generally very reticent for sex until they find out a lot about the character of the individual you this is not new to humanity since the dawn of wealth human being obviously had to talk to each other and romance and wooing and the getting together and getting to know each other and for the female to find out what's in the male's mind and whether or not he's really into her whether or not he really likes her personality this is characteristic of human beings and it is utterly not characteristic of any other primate so the this is so the notion of selection and competition does not make its way into the pages of sexathon now let's think about why because if you had very open to experienced sexually promiscuous wild males those males are the wilder they get the less discriminating they are in other words it pretty soon you can get yourself all the way to a male who he may be an 8 but he'd screw a 3 ok and those that kind of openness to experience starts to look like somebody that belongs in a bona bow you know group but that but that's an unusual human the truth of the matter is most males show evidence of pretty high selectivity and high selectivity tells you that the females have been putting up barriers and making nails jump hoops and invest in offspring to a significant degree and therefore if they're going to have to invest to a significant degree in offspring they're going to have to develop selectivity of their own and so males and females are actually highly selective in their sexuality towards one another and that is and you see evidence of this in the ferocious sexual competitions that you see in any bar you know in any high school and within high school there's no money anywhere in sight it's all about how you look and how cool you are and how you dance and how how much game you can spit and how what you're how big your breasts are and how great your ass is and you know whether you got a cute face so and it is intensively competitive and so we all recognize that we're highly different in our reactivity to different individuals and that there's a tremendous amount of objectivity in that in other words all the guys agree who the hottest you know girls in the school are and this tells you that there are deep objectivity to this that was shaped by evolution in order to guide a high discrimination and mating behavior so the notion that that that it would be easy if you reframe this it would have we be easy for a whole slew of average males to have sex all they wanted with a bunch of highly attractive females never happened once in history never not characteristic axises damn I can end my search too bad do that I'm waiting for that day if Chris Ryan knows where that's happening I want to go there I'll buy a ticket I got a lot of left work to do on this planet I think I think there is Burning Man yeah there's got to be a lot of drugs flowing in those attractive females that's it yeah and I'm a burning man they have just enough discernment even with their higher than a kite tick the hot guys I have no job I've never been there but I have no doubt that this is true also so uh so you know a couple of things came up after last episode from some listeners and I actually had some questions to is we were discussing how in general the things that a man and a female should do is to focus on themselves to be a hard worker to develop a way to display their personality characteristics through their life for instance for for a male the advice you gave was to work hard to focus on your resources make sure you have a good job making sure you have a good career you have a good car some good clothes make sure that you're respectful are able to carry on an intellectual conversation or at least some sort of intelligent conversation don't be cheap don't be obese and then and then in terms of going to the gym and being you know trying to be like a bodybuilder super fit what right what is that there has to be a hierarchy there or a priority there what what your opinion is yes that the focus yes that's actually very interesting the we have research on this and so we we know so a couple of couple of sort of fascinating mistakes that are made by both males and females show the it turns out that males believe that females are very impressed by and very attracted to males that are bigger and stronger and etc the and it turns out that that females also believe that males are attracted to females that are extremely thin now this is uh this is sort of kind of interesting that they're that they're under a they've got mutual delusions here the the truth of the matter is is that whoever you are you you are let's suppose let's take if you're a male for example and if we were to look at a bell curve of how testosterone is your musculoskeletal system looks so you know you've got testosterone cues in your face and your jaw and forehead and you know et cetera et cetera so there's your voice for example even your coloring so there are you know if you're darker colored long jaw it's a deep voice those are testosterone gives the but but the most major and obvious testosterone including your behavior like how it's sort of you are for example the but your your but the most obvious testosterone Q is your musculature so let's suppose you're a guy who's I don't know let's suppose your average height 510 ish and you're 510 and you're 165 pounds okay so you're sort of a medium build got you're neither you're not skinny you're not you're not mesomorphic and you're not fat you're sort of right in the middle of very typical kind of bell curve now there the question would be you know should you take steroids and get up to 185 and get to be a lot bigger and stronger with that with that and significantly raise your sexual attractiveness to women the answer is absolutely not it does not the what it does is it changes the women for whom you are found to be attractive so let's suppose that our guy in principle is an 80th percentile looking guide terms of his facial structure the we're going to ignore everything else about him his brains his job his clothes his car you know his voice and his you know it is basically how much game he's gotten how smooth he is personally we're going to hold all of those things constant and we're going to say look he he has the opportunity that if he goes to the gym and works out ferociously and takes just a little bit of steroids he we can go to 185 pounds which would be tremendous it would change his morphology significantly the question is does this take him to an eight to a nine and it absolutely does not take him to an eight to a nine it really will not significantly change where he is on the bell curve of directedness the it will change who is attracted to him so women our guy at 510 165 pounds is essentially in the middle of the bell curve for poor male sighs and so as a result we would expect if he's in the middle of the bell curve we would quite reasonably expect that the middle of the bell curve would be a pretty good place to be in human evolution if it was so great to be bigger than that then there would be more people bigger than that so it turns out that that that's a pretty safe bet to be right there so if you look at all your movie stars from the last you know 50 years 60 years the big heart drops you're going to find Paul Newman was 510 and about 150 pounds Robert Redford very similar build Tom Cruise a little more musculature not not that tall Brad Pitt you know probably six foot 180 etc this is sort of what people are and so you're you're looking right down the middle of the bell curve and women are more reactive that's much more important in terms of facial characteristics and other things and personality characteristics and so forth so you're not going to buy a lot now now some women are going to say oh no that's not true for me yeah that's not true for them so they aren't sitting in a normal place sitting in the Belk Road they may be women that are highly reactive to a bigger heavy heavier musculature at which point we've now changed to it was we dropped a few off on the other end so if you can imagine a male bell curve I don't know what the I think the average weight of American male is is about five nine one eighty by the way but that's because they're fat so the average male is not five nine one eighty and ripped 510 165 70 pounds is an extremely athletic strong male if we've gotten ripped now Lee uh so think about a female bell curve of what it is that they prefer and understand that that that that's somewhere in a medium build is about where the average female finds very appealing now you would expect that the bell curve will also say that females would also there would be some females that would be highly preferring males that had bigger builds you would also surprisingly find that there are females also on a smaller part of the bell curve on the other side of it it would prefer males that were thinner now probably my guess is there are more women that it's probably not a quite a bell-shaped curve it could be a somewhat skewed distribution there's probably more females to prefer bigger stronger males than prefer thinner ones however there there are reasons why the the middle of the bell curve the median build is probably in generally the most preferred build by females towards males and the reason is when you get to be big and strong you have essentially higher than average levels of testosterone which means that that might be real nice if you throw a son who also has high levels of testosterone and is potentially more dominant and stronger than his own specific competitors however your daughter is going to be a little stead and she's not going to be very attractive okay so this is going to be very common that you're going to have you know Muhammad Ali believe me all of his wives were stunning but if you look at his daughters hmm they're pretty but they're big and tough you know and this is this is a so you are starting to place the the androgens in the female a little too high relative to what the average man finds sexually ideal so you will find women that are actually turned off as males get above the bell curve average for strength and musculature and you'll find females turned on so as you move yourself from one place on the velcro to another you're going to pick up some but you're going to lose some and therefore that is a lousy place to invest what you want to be is you want to be a good rendition of yourself so if you are if you are 510 165 pounds but you're you're not you don't exercise very much and you're not in the greatest shape and you're kind of so-so then you would be or probably be better off being 510 and 168 and and taking off four pounds of fat and added seven or eight pounds of muscle and now you are an excellent rendition of yourself spending time trying to push yourself a set effectively unnaturally to 175 pounds is a total waste of time you're you are all you're doing is you're picking up some some points on the one end and you're losing some girls on the other end and there's probably no very little net benefit get yourself in good condition for your own morphology and after that get a good hairstyle get good clothes get a good job and you know invest in your own personal development so that you become as good of a as good of a partner that is you can be and as with as much to trade as possible and then just act naturally because you are that person and so when you say bell curve there's a bell curve for the say six the six is the seven to eight they all have their own gal curve in terms of what I can get so an eight nine ever someone's got a is a seven or an eight they're never going to become a nine or ten through really hard work or steroids or whatever it is no of course that now they're know you're there are too many cues on your body most particularly face skeletal structure you know postural issues etc even even psychological characteristics are important too so you could be very handsome for example I knew the guy that was one of the Marlboro Man and he was you know I met him when he was about 50 and this guy was he wasn't gay but I'm telling you he was 85% of the way there he was very effeminate and and yet I could see and once in a while he he would pose just for fun for our little group he was a psychologist he would like pose a little bit like he did used to when he was 25 for the Marlboro commercials and it was a crack-up because he could actually look really tough and looked like a real Marlboro Man he had the acting gene in there because he you know he had done some acting and he had it in there and he still had this chiseled jawline and all this masculinity but the guy was just an absolute sweetheart teddy bear who who who couldn't rope a cow or even get an official ID to save his life okay there was just no way all right and the thing is is that when when women would find out about his history they would kind of like roll their eyes and chuckle because it would be like yeah he is still kind of handsome we could see that but you know ie so what the guy's a total sissy and and I am NOT impressed so you can't just look at size strength musculature ants and this etc we also have to throw in the fact that you are who you are to a large extent personality wise and that makes you a niche operator and so this guy even though he would have increased his niche by by being different personality wise he can't meet different personality wise so you know he always had partners there's always girls that thought he was pretty and those girls were girls that didn't mind pretty boys who acted like pretty well so it doesn't matter you can fake your outside appearance but you can't fake your inside up here your inside yeah the dude and you can't you can't fake your outside too much either there are all gonna smoke it out pretty soon well I'm thinking like I'm thinking like nowadays let's say let's say a woman has smaller breasts or she's she she wants to say certain appearances sushi a plastic surgery or a man can get like PEC implants or I don't know whatever kind of nonsense right I do to fake all this you can fake it but the minute you open your mouth the minute someone notices your your facial cues your facial expressions how nervous you are around more attractive people they can sniff out right away what you know how many mutations you have they're going to snip a lot out now I will say that there are in some ways you can imagine what goes on today in women's heads around breasts this is a fascinating area discussion for me just generally because I'm a male but you can as an evolutionary psychologist as well as a clinical psychologist this this phenomenon is really quite a novel but curveballs to throw throw it generation since this was invented you can think about this because breast size breasts and women breast and women is very analogous to musculature in men so you can imagine that you can imagine that some women might think what God men are just so go gaga for big breasts so maybe I should get them with huge in the same way that men are thinking well women are so gaga for less cool true maybe I should go huge so you can see that but men will also very clearly tell you that there's that you know you have these preferences somewhere near the middle of the bell curve most men are are attracted to women's whose breasts are the average size and then they go on either side of the bell curve from there and so some men are much more attracted to the breast gets bigger some men actually prefer it when the breasts are very small and the woman is much leaner and more athletic looking so there's these are these individual differences in preferences and those differences are sitting largely in the middle of the bell curve but with a tendency towards bigger breasts being more attractive in the species as there's a tendency for bigger muscles to be more attractive now it is not a huge dramatic issue about women who are small breasted definitely feel like they would increase their market share by getting breast implants and they do and the problem is then you have an evolutionary arms race because suddenly now there are there is a way you if you are a smaller breasted woman and who was for example and seven and a half because of your small breasts and you have a competitor that was a seven and a half because of she has small breasts but now shilling got breast implants and that bumps are up to an eight and a quarter now you are at a competitive disadvantage and you are and you are now and you feel that competitive disadvantage so the evolutionary arms race for the competitive pressures certainly puts pressure on people to cheat be it's just like on a test in a final I was once in a final I couldn't believe what they did they told us at the beginning of the class if we catch you cheating once we're going to warn you and we catch you the second time then you're going to get an F and we like anybody with any brains we look the intern said together kidding me I can't believe you just said that like now you're making it so that I have to cheat I know everybody else is cheating I don't have any choice I'm saying and I remember I didn't cheat on that final I was well prepared for it but boy was I hot under the collar that that was an ounce it's like you've got to be kidding and so this is the same kind of thing that's going on that's why you've got two million men in the United States shooting steroids and that's why you've got several million women with breast implants is because they are responding to an evolutionary arms race now you said that that the mail no matter how hard he works he can't raise his his you know genetic cachet he can't become a 9 after being an 8 or even more so but with a woman she can go she can go from a seven and a half to like eight and a quarter just oh yeah but I think yeah I believe I think that I wouldn't want to I wouldn't want to we'd actually have to do research find out I'm giving you the research that has been then the bid published David buss has written a classic called the evolution of desire where and he has done much subsequent research has been published on these issues and Natick nante at cough who wrote survival of the prettiest reviews tremendous amount of research on on sexual attractiveness and preferences in in bodies and so on and so forth I can't tell you that well I believe if you are an average build male and in good shape I don't think you're going to lose your cachet in the same way I think if you're a female and you're of average breast size and you get them bigger I think you I think you more change your market than increase it if you were small breasted women and then moved it to middle I think you might literally be increasing your sexual attractiveness generally across the board you would not be increasing it with the men who happen to prefer the smaller breasts but if we're looking at your overall ratings and what would be happening to your score given a thousand males judging you I think that we're going to find that there's not much action going from medium to big but there's a probably more action from going from below average to average in the same thing with male musculature I don't think there's a lot of action from what I could tell from the research that there'd be a lot of action going from medium excellent build to big but I think that there would be more action that we could probably we could probably objectively show increase in general female preference for males when you go from from a slight build to medium build so I think that I think those those profits are sitting there now you have a major issue with diminishing returns for both breast size and with male musculature when you go from medium to big because there's a list so many happen today so and there's also there's so many other factors in other words so you're you start to essentially going from very small breasts of the medium breasted or going for a very slight male to medium build male if you could do such a thing the point of the matter is is that essentially you're taking care of what the market would look at us a deficiency but once you get rid of that in other words but that deficiency is sitting in a matrix of all the other characteristics about you so so for example if you are an exceptionally attractive woman that was was you know at that the the one thing that was missing was you had very you're very flat-chested I think that what would happen is that some males would consider you to be a 10 exactly as you are but that might be only 10 percent of the male market might consider that whereas you know ninety percent of the rest of the market we consider you a nine that almost was a ten if only you had medium sized breasts and then if you've got those medium sized breasts put on you then in close at least you may have essentially checkmate being essentially the entire market that you a massively greater number we'd consider you attend but you might have lost a few of the males who actually preferred you flat-chested but you would have had a general net gain in the market the point here is don't here's what I'm really trying to say with a hell of a lot of words and far too many we are in fact all niche marketers we are like we're all selling our own kind of hamburger there's like there isn't McDonald's and jack-in-the-box in five different places there's 50,000 different kinds of hamburger stands and they all do their hamburgers a little bit different okay now the thing is is that there is there's uh so if you are a certain kind of seven you're not going to twist yourself into an eight or a nine your your better play is to do a really good job of being you know what it is that you are across the board of all of your Fitness indicators and then the point is is that we're trying to find somebody who thinks for an eight because somebody does so if you're a seven you're somebody's eight if you get your act together and if you're an eight you're somebody's nine if you get your act together and you're trying to find that somebody who who you think who maybe if you're a guy and urinate you you are somebody's 9 and then not and that person that you're looking for you hope is a 9 and a half or who's a 9 that you think is a 10 and so you wind up with the magic 10% and both of you excited the mistake is if you're a natural eight and your displays make you look like a seven because you've got a lousy car lousy clothes lousy career and and lousy musculature it allows you haircut so you you make the mistake and you got lousy conversation so the point is is that if you do a mediocre job then you are not a good rendition of you and that's what you need to do and so the difference between short-term casual a long-term cash a long-term strategy can be from what we've talked on the show let's say a male is a seven and he's engaging he will only is know where your casual mating strategy if the female is much much loved activist and but she's interested whereas he will want to be in a long-term pair bond if he perceives her to be way more attractive in years is that did I get that right yeah so the basic the basic structure like too harsh about this is think about this in terms of mirror mirror images because you can understand male and female behavior if you understand that a great deal of what's going on in their behaviors absolute mirror images so for example the the females are wanting to in casual mating strategy females are only wanting to sleep up they want to be with people that are fancier than they are smarter better-looking better educated just better you know more money like everything certainly looks is the dominant issue that they're looking for there but not only there also interestingly enough looking for males that are more intelligent and accomplished the this was very well demonstrated by a study done by David buss and his colleagues I believe it was at University of Texas at Austin they had an active member yeah a male or female sexual conflict theory yeah I'm not done miniature what they call it but this is they had good-looking guys go up to good-looking girls and say hey I've noticed you around town or no sir on campus and you know I just find you really attractive and they would you know I just really like to spend the afternoon with you you know ain't that you know and you know what do you think about that and so they I think they did that 26 times and they went over 26 went the OP surprise right the opposite side of the equation when attractive females went up to attractive males and said the same thing they had huge positive feedback males were very interested in the ones that that said no dead girlfriends and well you know maybe we could take a raincheck like I mean everybody so like twisted themselves into a pretzel because they want to do it all right so this was a very different response then but I think that that's one story another story was when they asked males and females about if they were going to have a long term relationship what they're looking for versus a short term and it turns out that males for example if it's a short term a relationship they couldn't give a rat's ass about how smart the female is couldn't care less whereas if a female is looking at a short-term relationship no that's a very important issue words they don't want to mate with an idiot which is fascinating but this is true so the female is much more selective across the board on all issues that then males are when it comes to casual mating males are reducing their they arrest stringency of requirement because they have to they remember the females on the other side of this is getting more stringent so let's think for example about what goes inside the head of a female there's a set when it comes to a para bond she's willing to take a five who is willing to put a big diamond on her finger and say that he swears eternal allegiance to her and he'll give her everything in the world that he can get his hands on okay why is he so willing to say this because he's sleeping up so that female is willing to sleep down in order to get resources along with the deal but a female who's a six looks at an eight and finds herself weak in the needs and the eight is looking at her like you know what I ain't sticking around you know after nine o'clock and it's 7:30 now and so the point is is that the the male is is willing to sleep down but only under considerations where it's going to be short-term the female is willing to sleep up you know when it's short term consideration what a female also be willing to sleep up in a long term of course but she can't get that situation the the male is not willing to sleep down for four long-term considerations so the female is so female sleep down for long-term mating or are willing to they don't want to but they're willing to and they bit pretty well half to most of the time the the males are why because the males are only willing to get locked down and long-term relationships that they feel like they're sleeping up and so this is because they're bringing resources along with them so males and females have a mirror image of their mating psychologies and preferences and requirements with respect to short and long term made mates and and that's you know that's the way the game is played now it seemed that uh if I understand this correctly that if there's a long-term pair bond going on sleeping up whereas a woman sleeping down who's really bad at being here except for the male I mean a female is benefiting the female is benefiting from the notion with the males quote in love and what in love means is is going to bring resources okay okay remember the male has the opportunity of impregnating the female and walking over the hill and never investing in that offspring and so that that is a part parcel of male psychology that's what casual mating is all about and so the male absolutely can do that and he sticks or in a biological bind where she's going to have to put all this energy into a gene reproduction device I he or her child which is 50% of the guy's genes so she absolutely skins the cat on this issue as a biological reproductive strategy and so this is uh this is why the female wants to see a duration in the male's eyes why that is such a big deal and that's why the female is you know really not very interested in mating unless she gets that situation if she is going to mate and she doesn't have that situation it's because she's sleeping up in a big way she's weak in the knees and so would a woman who's sleeping down at a long pair bondage teat super excited about the guy she just excited about the resources he's bringing well I think what we find is it's an amalgam the females are evolutionarily designed to essentially mold those two factors inside their head into one general aesthetic response so the so it sort of takes a little time for that to happen so female is females are falling in love at a slower pace than males this is well documented males can be in love in five seconds other words this is not uncommon for males to look at a female and think I think I'm in love with you and they don't know anything about it today that's because there's no evolutionary reason for them to not feel that if they feel like she is a superior physical specimen to them and so the whereas a female is designed with tremendous what I'm going to call egg defenses and her her eggs are a reproductive Treasury that the male is designed by Nate nature to try to figure out how to pick the lock they're much finds me when I was younger I used to play hockey when I was in high school on a men's team like an adult-adult team and there was always like who's been divorced and just been married and they kind of dumped all their advice on on to me the young kid who didn't know anything about dating at that time and what a nice bit she ends up telling me he goes hey kid just remember girls need a reason guys need a place and that I remember thinking this is true but it seems like what you're saying is that this is this is relatively accurate yes absolutely that's quite accurate dr. Lao I've got you know I somebody sent me a joke the other day they said if I had a dollar for every girl who found me unattractive they'd all eventually find me very attractive ah that's beautiful that's beautiful we got to write that down some wind Doris that's a fantastic joke yeah duck Hector Lyle thank you for coming on again we look forward to having you back neck pleasure thanks for having me and yeah thanks very much for listening we will be back next week Wednesdays 7:30 p.m. until 8:30 p.m. Pacific Standard Time beat your jeans radio dr. Doug Lyall and I am Nate G your host and we will see you next
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