I think I have a decent understanding of attractiveness because I’m au fait with the scientific literature and its pitfalls, vain enough to be interested, and in possession of the psychological fortitude to be secure against ego-defensive cope. You might describe me as ‘The Uberfrau’. Also, as you may have noticed from my long-absense from this blog, I’ve done several months’ worth of research into the matter to refine my thinking.

I have already written practical advice for getting sexier. If that’s all you’re interested in, go and read that.

You can also jump to the section you are most interested in

• Types of evidence

• Don’t be yourself. Be hot instead.

• Animals love supernormal stimuli

• Men are lying to you

• The media is lying to you about the Madonna/Whore complex

• Even billionaire’s wives wear makeup

• Forget symmetry. People like average faces

• Femininity vs neoteny (Do men prefer women or do they prefer beautiful boys?)

• Femininity vs neoteny (Is lip filler worth it?)

• Femininity vs neoteny (Buccal fat and its removal)

• Doesn’t literally everyone have beautiful eyes?

• What does the most beautiful woman look like?

• Men don’t even know what they like about hair

• Do blondes really have more fun?

• Should you go ginger?

• Body hair

• Reclaiming ‘curvy’

• Me vs Cartoons Hate Her (thinness vs curviness)

• Me vs Cartoons Hate Her (boobs and boob jobs)

• Me vs Cartoons Hate Her (Are rich men built different?)

• All about that bass

• In summation

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Types of evidence

All good infodumps start with a screed on epistemics. Here are the different types of evidence I use here. (SKIP if you trust me.)

Academic Evidence

Where possible, I look at what the academic evidence says. Overall the studies can be grouped into two types.

The most typical kind of study shows people pictures and asks them for their opinions. In surveys like this, if the questions are simple (you need to pick between two images) and the sample is well-chosen (it’s all men of a similar demographic) then I consider a small sample to be fine. Most studies, however, are trying to make some complicated point with samples of only 200 (like trying to see whether exposure to Western media makes men prefer slimmer women), in which case I dismiss the whole thing as bunk.

Most of the studies did not use real or realistic photographs of women. I discounted all line drawings and non-human looking shapes but they don’t always show you the images you use. So a few bad papers will have snuck through.

When the available information was sparse, I let a couple of otherwise-weak studies through but only if I thought what they were claiming was uncontroversial and intuitive. Even then, I have tried to signpost it without letting hedging get in the way of the flow of the text.

In the other kind of study, researchers went through libraries of things like Playboy centrefolds, porn sites, and sex doll manufacturers to see what makes money in the sexy lady industry. The average quality of these studies was much better and more reliable.

Celebrities, Only Fans girls, and Instagram models

When academia let me down, I then looked to other places you can find attractive women to look at. I looked at celebrities, Only Fans models and Instagram girls.

I found a list of attractive celebrities and worked down it to check ideas like ‘do men like full lips?’. Unfortunately, famously attractive celebrities are often quite old when they are at their career peak. There were more women in their forties than in their twenties on the top list. Of course, I used pictures of them when they were younger, but you can’t get around the fact that their fame is influenced by things like ‘what movies have they been in recently’ and not just ‘how perfect is their face’.

OnlyFans girls rely far more on their looks. But I still don’t think it’s a perfect example of what men consider to be generally beautiful because I think some successful sex workers are good at finding a small and underserved niche and exploiting that. But I think it still works to double check the information from celebrities.

Finally, I used Instagram models. Obviously, the number of followers a person has has a lot to do with their brand and not just how sexy they are. Rather than look for objective follower counts, I asked my male friends to send me sexy women they like on Instagram or to go to their Reels page and send me any algorithmically-recommended sexy girl content. This was helpful to get a sense of how wide the distribution of preferences fell.

Aella and, to a lesser extent, J Sanilac

Aella has conducted a lot of very high quality research. Her samples are bigger, more robust, and better selected than actual academic research. I have used her findings throughout and, because you can browse her datasets yourself, I have used some of her data for my own original research.

J Sanilac has also conducted some original research by making tallies of libraries of AI girls and sex dolls, and I have used some of his statistics and observations too.

AI and anime girls

I used AI and anime girls to see how far men’s preferences extend. If loads of men liked blue-skinned women, this wouldn’t necessarily show up in real porn or real surveys, but I’m sure you’d see it in drawn and generated sex art. As a result, I find libraries of imaginary women to be useful for getting a sense of how far men’s fantasies extend.

My Twitter polls and my friends

When I’ve been trying to get a qualitative sense of what men think, I have been polling my Twitter followers and asking my friends some questions. My friends are mostly functional, professionally successful, and happily married men, so I find their comments helpful.

This is mostly useful for getting a sense of how strong different preferences are.

I don’t think any of these data sources can stand alone, but all together they paint a clear picture.

Don’t be yourself. Be hot instead.

The famous OkCupid Data blog said ‘If you’re a little chubby, play it up. If you have a big nose, play it up. If you have a weird snaggletooth, play it up: statistically, the guys who don’t like it can only help you, and the ones who do like it will be all the more excited.’ Glamor Magazine and Jezebel also repeated this advice.

In her response to Get Sexier, Cartoons Hate Her said ‘People are best off identifying their aesthetic/vibe-based “type,” plus their best features and then maximizing those features as it relates to their overall type.’

I feel like whenever I talk about how most men prefer slimmer women and most men like long and healthy hair, people are always saying, in one way or another, some variation of ‘be yourself’. They reach for isolated examples of chubby chasers or tell me about that one guy who found an adult woman attractive in the most ‘literal gay pedophile’ way possible.

But no one really believes that if every woman just let herself go and ‘leant into’ her naturally high BMI, thinning hair, and masculine jawline, she would do better on the dating market. There are some men who like these things. But there are more than enough women with these traits to meet scant demand.

Sometimes what’s going on is a conflation of two things. I think your vibe – bookish, sporty, goth etc – should be about leaning into something you already are. But you should be conventionally attractive while you do it.

Obviously the reason the ‘pro-types’ side of this debate is so popular is because it lets you do what you already wanted to do already. It’s just like ‘intuitive eating’, ‘be yourself’, and ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’. They are soothing words that do nothing to change the material reality of what kinds of diets work, what personalities make friends, and what art people find beautiful.

Considering that it is patently ridiculous to ‘lean into’ having an ugly face or having a bad personality, I think the pro-type side of the debate should attempt to popularise some system for deciding which types are and aren’t worth leaning into. I look forward to seeing their work.

I would call my position the ‘pro-popular beauty’ side. I think most men agree about which features are attractive and you will have the most suitors if you try to look as conventionally attractive as possible.

The one extra finesse I have to this strategy is that I think that there are some cases where you can do better than the median man’s preference because we have good reason to assume that there is a large and underserved minority that is worth catering to and the majority of men don’t find this trait offputting.

Clearly some male preferences are undersupplied and others oversupplied. If a third of men like women with pink hair and a two thirds of men like women with natural hair colours, then dying your hair pink plausibly gets you more suitors.

But in many cases, chasing undersupplied features can cause more harm than good because they can be a turn off to the vast majority of men. Assuming that you’re not just looking for any random person who is attracted to you and wish to apply some discernment and filtering, turning off the majority of the market will hinder your overall husband hunting strategy. However, if you want to be a purveyor of professional sexual services, appealing to an undersupplied minority probably is a good strategy.

About 2% of sex dolls have unnatural hair colours and I think it’s plausible that about 2% of men like unnatural hair colours on real women too. But I don’t think 2% of women, especially not in my social milieu, have unnatural hair colours. Despite that, I don’t recommend that girls chase that particular undersupplied market because most men say they dislike it. I think this isn’t about the innate ugliness of unnatural hair colours but mostly because these colours are generally associated with an aesthetic that is not oriented towards appealing to the heterosexual male taste.

Perhaps if you are conventionally attractive in every other way, an unnatural hair colour could make you more appealing – there is, after all, a reason so many sex workers try it.

I think tattoos, being muscular, unnatural hair, and pixie cuts are all in the bucket of ‘undersupplied but a turnoff to the majority’.

I think a woman in a big city with very good social reasoning could find success by leaning into being muscular or tattooed, but if you’re not already good at being fashionable and popular I wouldn’t risk it. Undersupplied but a turnoff to the majority is a very good strategy for Instagram girls, porn stars, and sex dolls because they are dealing with a large global market and are not discerning about who their customers may be.

There are, however, some features that are not the median man’s taste, are undersupplied on the general market, and are still appealing to the majority of men. In general I think these traits are the extremes of continuous spectra and not discrete buckets. You either have a lip piercing or you don’t have a lip piercing (discrete). But for things like height, hair length and eyebrow thickness (continuous) you can sit a few steps beyond the median man’s preferences but still appeal to him, but gain a gigantic edge over the women who are a few steps on the other side of the median man’s preference.

Say men had a strong height preference (they don’t), you could imagine a universe in which women’s heights are still roughly distributed as they are in the real world but the median man has a preference for 5ft women. The average woman would be taller than the median man’s preferences and so all the men who prefer taller women are well catered to. Being 4ft11 or 4ft10 is probably better than being 5ft, because you would still be appealing to the median 5ft-woman-lover, but you are extra appealing to the extremely uncatered to half of the population that prefers women who are even shorter than 5ft. And a 5ft1 lover will still think you’re pretty cute.

So I think it is wise to modestly overshoot the median man’s preferences on continuous traits but nail it on discrete tastes.

Animals love supernormal stimuli.

People often accuse men who like extreme hyperfeminine proportions as being ‘porn brained’. Implicitly, everyone knows that lots of men find extreme curvaceousness attractive but they also believe that there is something suspect and perhaps Japanese about it. That’s why this goat is described as having ‘gooner proportions’. (‘Gooner’ being slang for a person who enjoys masturbating at the expense of higher pleasures.)

There are unending fights about what characters from video games and comic books should look like, the subtext being that men who like these exaggerated proportions are weird and undateable freaks who don’t know what real women look like. Maybe they are even inherently misogynistic because they’re setting unrealistic standards for women.

I think the men who like ‘gooner proportions’ are essentially normal. This graph from earlier presumes that men’s preferences only exist on a spectrum that includes things that are possible in the real world.

But it’s clear for anyone who samples choice libraries of visual art that there are probably some traits that are distributed more like this.

For these traits, I think the best strategy is to be at the boundary of possible but implausible.

When we think about breasts and hips, it seems dirty and salacious to overshoot typical female phenotypes. But it’s clear when we think about red lipstick, bleach blonde hair, and high heels that the supernormal stimulus isn’t the dirty thing itself. In these cases, it can be classy for women to emphasise natural gender dimorphism.

Also, if we look to the animal kingdom, we see it is very normal for creatures to have a preference for extreme and unnatural things.

Mayflies lay their eggs on water so it was useful for them to evolve an attraction to surfaces that reflect polarized sunlight. There aren’t many other shiny surfaces in nature so, until recently, there was no reason to evolve a desire more complex than ‘lay your eggs somewhere shiny’. Now we have many shiny surfaces, far shiner than water and the mayflies are duly tricked. We call this sort of thing ‘supernormal stimuli’, and these desires can suddenly become maladaptive in the face of modern industry.

Junk food, pornography, and videos of cute cats are all ways of bombarding your senses with things that are better than what you would have ever had access to in ye olde ancestral environment.

When we look at art created to titillate in mediums unconstrained by nature, we see evidence that a lot of men are drawn to supernormal stimuli. In drawn and AI-generated art, women often have very exaggerated secondary sexual characteristics beyond what is natural.

Of course, we should assume that men who like anime girls probably have more extreme preferences than the men who are sated by regular porn (or God forbid, the real world). I don’t take anime girls as proof that most men like a woman with the face of a toddler and Z cup breasts. I take anime girls as proof that the distribution of preferences includes some phenotypes that lie far outside of what nature can deliver.

The next reason you might have to avoid the median man’s preferences is if you think good husbands have different preferences to average men. A lot of people seem to think something like ‘sure, the median man likes blonde hair and large breasts, but he’s probably poor and porn-brained and not worth marrying. A good and rich man likes a curveless androgyne of good breeding.’

I had something like this as a cached thought before I started looking into this stuff. When we get to discussing the empirical evidence for men’s preferences I’ll go into more detail about what the studies show, but for now I will say that the evidence does not suggest what people think it does. If people read further than the abstracts of papers they would see that elite Western men like women who are slim and curvy while poorer men in the developing world like women who are slightly heavier and also still curvy.

Pearl from Steven Universe isn’t a sex icon anywhere, not even Park Avenue.

I think some women think that men who like supernormal stimuli watch a lot of porn and that you would, ideally, avoid a man who watches porn. Whether porn shapes people’s preferences is a massive debate that I won’t wade into. I personally find porn kind of disgusting and for a while entertained radical feminist beliefs about how it was all evil and proved that men were naturally rapists. (If you think TikTok is a tool for radicalisation, you don’t know about life on LiveJournal.) I’ve made my peace with it for a number of reasons but in no small part because, after having dated men and learned their perversions, I realised that there really was no correlation between how nice a man is and how much porn he watches.

Over the years I’ve gotten to know rich and marriageable men who watch lots of porn and fucked up perverts who don’t. I’ve also realised how much of the digital realm is full of softcore porn. Whenever I engage with algorithmic social media I see lots of #relatablejokes and Taylor Swift-themed ragebait. But men who scroll TikTok or Instagram Reels are barraged with videos of pretty ladies in a state of undress, so even if your man isn’t technically watching porn, he probably is seeing a lot of surgically and digitally enhanced women and – if you buy the idea that porn is reshaping men’s preferences – that content is probably also recalibrating his sense of what normal women look like.

Men are lying to you.

Some people asked me why I was so stubborn, considering how many people were telling me I was wrong. For one, I tallied up the results and found there were more positive comments than negative.

But for another, I find – on this topic in particular – people lie all the time. Most men are gallant enough that they won’t say what they find attractive if they think it will offend the women they are talking to. Even in their closest relationships.

One of my friends said that his wife, who has a thing for Timothee Chalamet, is always saying that she can’t understand why Chalamet would date a woman like Kylie Jenner. My friend says to his wife ‘oh yeah, I have no idea what he sees in her’ but confessed to me that he secretly thinks Kylie Jenner is pretty attractive. This is probably the correct attitude for marital felicity but it does mean that she is miscalibrated and may be spreading misinformation.

If you seem neurotic and fighty then your friends won’t tell you things either. Literally yesterday (from writing, not posting) a male friend divulged a highly relevant ethnographic data point which he started with ‘I’m only telling you this because you’re kind of autistic’.

Now, we both know I’m not actually autistic. What he means is he feels comfortable telling me about his masturbation habits because it’s not going to be a thing between us that I have this privileged understanding of his sexual psyche, and I’m not going to treat him any worse if what he says disgusts or bemuses me. I find most women don’t get this privileged view into the male mind because they are judgemental. The one person who I don’t expect to be honest with me is my husband because he, in the interest of marital felicity, has has good reason to lie to me.

After that, people falsify their preferences to seem high status. Skinniness is high status in educated circles because it is a signifier of self control. Tattoos are high status if you’re edgy.

Cumulatively, what this means is that men are going to claim – especially to women – that their preferences are a) more common and attainable and b) more socially acceptable than they actually are.

When I was writing Get Sexier, I was hanging out with friends who are a couple. I asked him who, of all the famous women in the world, he finds the most attractive. Before he answered, she joked that there was one wrong answer – Sydney Sweeney – and then he, artfully, avoided the question.

I don’t have a complete theory about why some preferences are more socially acceptable and high status than others. But I think there’s something about the obviousness of Sydney Sweeney’s hotness that seems crass. Having taste often includes liking something nonobvious for arcane reasons and perhaps that’s just as true of sexy ladies as well as architecture.

Some of it is obviously a psychological defense. If you’re not blonde with big tits, or if your girlfriend isn’t blonde with big tits, then to protect your ego you must deride that form of beauty as not worth having. It’s the same as a downwardly mobile middle class person describing McMansions as tacky.

The media is lying to you about the Madonna/Whore complex

Lots of people said ‘Of course women like Sydney Sweeney are sexy. But men wouldn’t marry her. They’d marry someone more like Taylor Swift.’ Or they (gayly) voted in my Twitter poll to say that they wouldn’t date someone who looked like Megan Fox because she looks ‘low class’.

But I think this divide between women you’d fuck and women you’d marry is wildly exaggerated because people don’t understand their own preferences. When they hear big boobs and a youthful face they pattern match the words I’ve written to the context in which they’re most used to noticing these features – i.e. porn.

So they imagine someone like this.

But the curvaceousness and the neotenous face here aren’t the trashy features. She seems trashy because she’s posing in a leopard print bikini top.

Here’s the same model in normal outfits your wife or girlfriend would wear, smiling.

Of course, the world is very big and people have all kinds of idiosyncratic psychological problems. There are going to be some men who are primarily attracted to one type of woman but will only marry a different kind of woman. I’m not saying there aren’t insane people out there.

You see this very dynamic drive the plot of films like Legally Blonde and I think it’s what you’re meant to read into Carrie and Big’s relationship in Sex in the City. But I am suspicious of fictional evidence and I think this sort of thing is more common in stories than in the real world. Remember, for romance fiction to work, there has to be some kind of tension that keeps the main couple apart.

Wealthy and successful men want a high status wife who will bolster his success and gel with his social set. If you want to bag a man like that, go to a good university, get an impressive job, pick up upper class habits, and find some intelligent things to say at dinner parties. Having too much raw sex appeal is unlikely to be your problem.

Unless he has a bad relationship with his libido, he will want a wife who is sexy. There’s a big difference between having big tits and getting them out at the JP Morgan summer party.

I think only a very small number of men would, all things being equal, choose to be with a woman with a body and face he found less attractive. This type of man isn’t worth chasing and, frankly, you should be worried if you somehow catch one. Surely he is more likely to cheat, bow and scrape to others’ whims regardless of how personally costly they are, be gay, treat you with indifference because he doesn’t desire you, and be less attractive to you because you can’t sense his desire.

Even billionaire’s wives wear makeup

I was surprised at the number of people whose response was ‘makeup? Yuck’. The 2010s internet was full of memes about how makeup is a form of deceit and you should take a woman swimming on the first date. But I thought we had moved past this.

I assume lots of men are frustrated that they have started dating a beautiful woman only to find that, once she is comfortable with him, she reveals a far less attractive face underneath the layers of painstaking effort. They feel catfished. Others are probably annoyed that their wives and girlfriends spend time on beautification routines that actually make them uglier (and late).

Of course, if you’re naturally ugly, then a thick makeup mask probably does make you more beautiful. But for a lot of women, heavy makeup of the kind that looks good in pictures looks bad in real life. People like natural-looking materials. We like sheets made of real linen and furniture made from real wood. ‘Instagram face’ complete with contour and enlarged eyes removes the natural variation of human skin and replaces it with an artificial and plasticy texture.

Also men like neoteny. I think a heavily made up face always looks adult. For most young women, makeup takes them from looking like a normal twenty-something to a hot thirty-something. This, in the eyes of a red-blooded male, is not necessarily an upgrade.

The best makeup styles are natural-ish and are applied with a light hand. But that’s not because men prefer a natural face – celebrities, OnlyFans girls, influencers, and the girlfriends and wives of eligible men all wear visible makeup. It’s because human males largely prefer styles that imitate features common on attractive women rather than clowns or birds of paradise.

Forget symmetry, people like average faces

Everyone with a passing interest in this kind of thing knows that people like symmetrical faces. This makes some intuitive sense as very few things in nature are symmetrical except for healthy animals. Having a symmetrical face is a sign that you weren’t inundated with parasites at crucial developmental stages. But, in the world of scientifically-backed beauty advice, facial symmetry is a bit passé, a bit ‘baby’s-first-theory’.

Studies that measure symmetry by mirroring faces, or blending the actual face with its mirror image find that digitally constructed symmetrical faces are actually less attractive than natural faces. This is probably because digitally altered faces are just a little uncanny in a subtle way that undermines the boost that the symmetry gives. Studies that test the attractiveness of faces as they actually appear in the real world find better results for symmetry but that is probably because having a symmetrical face correlates with other important signs of health.

When controlling for things like averageness, femininity and clear skin, symmetry becomes substantially less popular. Basically people do like symmetrical faces but it’s not that important.

So what’s this whole average thing? Why is it so popular? It sounds like a euphemism for mid.

In the science of beauty, an average face is a face that’s closer to the population average. By averaging faces together, you can smooth out weird proportions and sizes, and make a better face overall. Generally, the more faces that make up the composite, the more attractive the face.

My guess is we like average faces because an average face resembles the platonic ideal of a face that you picture in your mind’s eye. Like symmetry, averageness is probably a decent proxy for health. Most of the ways in which a person’s face differs from average are ways in which it can be damaged or poorly formed.

Historical beauties are often surprisingly unattractive despite the fact that painters are probably trying to do flattering renders. I think that, while they are usually painted symmetrically, they often lack facial averageness which makes sense considering they were probably bursting with parasites.

I think this is also why couples can sometimes look more alike than one would naively expect. A person’s sense of what the average face is probably somewhat informed by which faces they saw a lot of when they were young – i.e. the faces of people they are related to, i.e. faces like their own.

But, while there is a lot of agreement about broad trends, when it comes to the most beautiful faces, there is quite a lot of disagreement about who the pinnacle of beauty is. Probably, this is because men prefer different distinctive features to each other. For some, Angelina Jolie is basically ideal. For others her face shape is too angular and masculine and her lips too large.

Femininity vs neoteny (do men prefer women or do they prefer beautiful boys?)

It’s no surprise that men like more feminine faces. Interestingly, women don’t reliably prefer more masculine faces but that’s a whole other discussion and frankly, not my area.

The face on the left is a composite of 60 faces. The face on the right is a composite of the 15 most attractive faces from that set. We can see that the face on the right is very similar but slightly more feminine with darker eyes and fuller and redder lips.

There’s some evidence that the healthier the country the stronger the preference for femininity; with Japanese men liking the most feminine faces. I don’t have a good explanation for this and I’m not sure it’s true. One theory is that in scarcer situations, everyone – men and women alike – prefers more masculine faces. To help this idea, some studies show that more resource insecure women like more masculine faces but this finding doesn’t reliably replicate.

I would dismiss this as confusing noise and say that men like feminine faces. The one exception is that men seem to prefer slightly thicker eyebrows on women, despite the fact that thick eyebrows are technically more masculine.

So what traits make a feminine face?

More feminine faces have bigger eyes, fuller lips, a shorter lower face, higher cheekbones and more prominent cheekbones (rather than child-like chubby cheeks), a narrower nose, thinner eyebrows, arched eyebrows, a less pronounced brow ridge, smoother skin, more contrast between features, and a narrower jaw.

Combined, a more feminine vs less feminine face.

I expected neoteny to be harder to research because I thought men might lie, lest they get accused of pedophilia, but across cultures men are pretty honest about their preference for more neotenous features.

There’s a lot of overlap between feminine and neotenous features – big eyes, small noses, smooth skin – but they aren’t exactly the same. Children lack the cheekbones and full lips of a woman in her full bloom. So when there’s tension between femininity and neoteny, what do men choose?

Three quarters of my twitter followers thought the feminine face was more attractive than the neotenous face. I also asked a bunch of my friends and they said things like ‘The first is a borderline movie star. The second is the most attractive woman in a small town in Bosnia in 1992’. And ‘the one on the left is older and more haggard looking, but I chose her anyway’.

Aella ran a survey trying to work out what age women hit the wall at. She used images of real and AI generated attractive brunettes who looked like (based on other polls) different ages. I was surprised to see that the faces men were keenest to date or have casual sex with were 27, 28, and 29.

These faces were more popular than other, very pretty, but more neotenous faces from her sample.

Let’s split the question of femininity vs neoteny into its two components. First, do men prefer faces with fuller lips? Second, do men prefer prominent cheekbones or neoteny?

Femininity vs neoteny (Is lip filler worth it?)

There are lots of tiny studies with noisy information about men’s lip preferences but they are inconclusive.

We are left with our common sense. If we look at pictures of famously beautiful women we see that they have lips that are about as full as they can get while still looking natural.

Because I think it is important to get a feel for the shape of the distribution, we must investigate whether there is a substantial portion of men who like faces that are so young that adult actresses can’t fulfill that look. Let’s call it a supernormal stimulus of sorts.

AI and anime girls indicate that, when realism isn’t important, the faces start to look suspiciously young. I went on a platform for AI generated art, and looked at the most popular images for this month. Here are some of the top images with the womanly bodies cropped out.

When you crop out the bodies, they all look like children. They have large eyes, delicate chins, and their noses and mouths barely exist. Anime girls usually have eyes about two to three times regular human eyes, and girl characters even have pupils about twice the size of male characters.

But perhaps the art style is confusing things. These are the top images from a model that does ‘realistic’ images.

They all look quite young and the eyes are implausibly large, but the lips are full enough to imply to me that they have, at least, gone through puberty. I would guess that these are the faces of teenagers and not children.

Femininity vs Neoteny (Buccal fat and its removal)

A recent bit of internet discourse has centered around buccal fat removal. The kinds of people who try to avoid pasteurised milk suspect there is a conspiracy going on in Hollywood whereby otherwise beautiful actresses are having their buccal fat removed as part of a general plot to make men miserable.

What’s happening is levels of face fat – buccal fat included – are trapped between competing signals of attractiveness. On the one hand, high levels of buccal fat will make your face look younger. On the other, it makes you look fatter and reduces the prominence of your cheekbones.

People are pretty good at identifying small changes in weight from faces.

Extra weight doesn’t just increase the width and reduce the angularity of your face. It also makes the eyes and lips look smaller, lowers the eyebrows, and makes the complexion redder and brighter. Studies generally find that men prefer faces at the lower end of the healthy BMI range but the sample sizes aren’t very large and they don’t measure underweight or obese people.

There are lots of good reasons to be slim. In comparison to other data, this is a relatively weak signal but it points you in the same direction as everything else.

Unsurprisingly, as feminine faces seem to beat neotenous faces, men report having a preference for higher and more prominent cheekbones. But, in the grand scheme of things, it’s not a very strong preference. There are also a handful of small studies that suggest that buccal fat removal makes younger women more attractive in the short term but that they will look worse when they are in their forties.

I wouldn’t trust such small studies. So let’s go back to our common sense and look at more famously beautiful women.

I would say that here, only Adriana Lima has particularly prominent cheekbones. The other three women have their buccal fat totally intact. However, it takes years to build enough fame to make it onto a list of famous women. So these actresses are often much older than their peak attractiveness (there are more women in their forties than their twenties on that list). As the question of buccal fat is tied to youth, we should look at more age-appropriate libraries of beautiful women to answer the question.

What about top OnlyFans girls?

The OnlyFans girls seem to have a similar mix of cheek bone prominence as the celebrities. So do AI girls.

Beautiful actresses, OnlyFans models and AI girls all have levels of face fat that you would expect a woman with a healthy BMI to have and, after that, they have varying levels of cheekbone prominence. I suspect some individual men will have a strong personal preference, but there’s no particular bone-to-fat ratio that is the clear winner.

What can we conclude about femininity and neoteny from this? I think it is clear that neoteny and femininity are both very important to men and all women renowned for their looks will have both. However, when they are in competition, most men will break for femininity.

I think the distribution of men’s preferences are something like this

Doesn’t literally everyone have beautiful eyes?

Describing someone as having beautiful eyes often seems to me like saying they have ‘a nice personality’. Basically everyone has good enough nice eyes and a passable personality, but people are willing to dole out the compliment far too easily.

First, as a clear sign of youth and femininity, big eyes are a clear win. But there are other popular features beyond that.

Generally we like eyes that tilt up on the outside corners, called positive canthal tilt. I think this is the reason winged eyeliner is popular as it can give the illusion of an appealingly cat-like canthal tilt.

We also generally like eyes where the pupils are far apart.

Men usually look better with wide and flat eyes, but some women can look good with round.

I had some intuition that we mostly find coloured eyes – blues and greens – prettier than brown. There are some studies by contact lens companies that say people prefer blue eyes and there are some confused studies that say that people have Freudian preference for the eye colour of their opposite-sex parent. Others find that blue-eyed men specifically prefer blue-eyed women because it makes paternity easier to verify. None of that evidence is particularly persuasive.

If we consult our libraries of attractive celebrities, we find a rainbow of eye colours.

Half of these women have light eyes and half have brown eyes. That’s roughly representative of the American population.

Generally, eye colour is not very important. My theory is that, insofar as it is important, the hue isn’t relevant but there is a small boost from having light eyes, provided you have a strong limbal ring. Your limbal ring is the dark ring around your iris. Small children will sometimes have stunningly thick and dark rings around their irises and then they weaken with age. Like many things that start in youth and fade with the sands of time, we generally find eyes with prominent limbal rings to be more attractive.

What does the most beautiful woman look like?

Faces can vary in so many ways that I think no two people will agree on what the most beautiful face looks like. That being said, there are broad trends in what men like and I think a face like this will be the most universally popular.

She’s a feminine, neotenous Wasian.

But I think this face, having overshot some of the typical male preferences, would have more suitors who were really obsessed with her.

Men don’t even know what they like about hair

If you ask men what kind of hair they like, they will probably say they like blondes or some nonsense. They might, if pushed, say that they prefer long hair. I think this is a key way in which men are particularly boneheaded about their own preferences. What is very clear, from an outsider perspective, is that basically all women who are known for being attractive have very thick, very healthy, shiny, and heavy-looking hair.

From time to time, they might mix it up but, by default, attractive celebrities wear their hair in thick, glossy waves.

In fact, their waves are so thick and healthy looking, despite all the heat treatment and colour changes they go through, that I’m tempted to say most famous women are wearing wigs or hair extensions.

Sexy AI girls all have very nice hair too.

Having nice and feminine hair can give a very significant attractiveness boost to an otherwise plain woman. After losing weight, maintaining hair health is the most important thing a woman can do for her looks.

Do blondes really have more fun?

Okay, now I’ve trashed men’s taste for blondes as being overrated. I’m going to walk it back a bit. Blonde women are overrepresented on the cover of women’s magazines. They are even more overrepresented in Playboy centerfolds, porn, sex dolls, and AI sexy ladies. Blonde sex workers earn more. Blonde women in general earn more too and so do their husbands.

The question about why blonde hair arose is a fraught debate. The genes for red hair also lighten skin, so red hair confers a clear advantage in sunless Ireland. But some of the mutations for blonde hair affect hair colour alone, implying that something else, perhaps sexual selection, led to its rise in Europe. The theory goes that the Ice Age meant that men had to hunt scarcer and large game across further distances so they died at much higher rates. Because of food scarcity, this male shortage didn’t become polygyny. Instead, European women underwent a period of extreme sexual selection while men underwent a period of hunting-related selection and this period of selection is why, they say, people whose ancestors spent time on the frozen tundra have interesting hair and eye colours.

It’s a neat story but I think it needs a little more empirical evidence to be true. For example, blue eyes precede blonde hair by thousands of years which is why Cheddar man, the oldest skeleton found in Britain, is thought to look like this.

What I find compelling about this theory is that I think men like variety and they do seem keen on unnatural hair colours in the right context.

But that doesn’t mean that blonde hair is definitely more attractive to the median man. While blondes – at 20ish% of the white population – are overrepresented in the sexy-lady sectors, brunettes are still a majority. Presumably, if blonde hair was strictly more attractive to everyone, then all Playboy centerfolds and sex dolls would be blonde. I don’t expect the adult entertainment industry to have egalitarian compunctions about this sort of thing.

I think blonde hair, like buccal fat, is stuck between competing signals of attractiveness.

The case for the prosecution is that first, men like youth and hair darkens with age, so all things being equal you should expect men to prefer blonde hair. Second, by virtue of being rare, blonde hair will appeal to some men’s taste for variety.

But it’s not all upside. The case for the defence is that contrast is a sign of femininity. For most skin tones, dark hair, dark eyelashes, and dark eyebrows will stand out more. Sanilac also observed that all the most popular faces in his sample are framed by dark hair.

There’s culture to consider as well. We’ve had many years of dumb blonde jokes. People will make assumptions about your character based on your hair colour. Is going blonde, for some men, a social equivalent of wearing a low cut leopard print dress to the JP Morgan summer party? I think, alas, some men are sufficiently disconnected from their libido to view fake blonde hair as a sign of tackiness and promiscuity rather than a charming attempt to appeal to the male gaze. There was one study that found that men rated a picture of a woman as more attractive when she was brunette but they were more likely to approach her in a nightclub when she was blonde. Maybe they thought the blonde woman was less attractive but easy. Or maybe they really did think she was more attractive when blonde but felt it would seem tacky to say so.

My personal opinion is that high contrast is one of the most important elements of facial beauty. I think this is why, despite being masculine, thick eyebrows are appealing. So I think the most beautiful woman in the world will have relatively light skin and dark hair (see my Wasian AI girl from earlier). But overall attractiveness isn’t determined by a pretty face alone. A lot of facial flaws can be overlooked by a good figure and nice hair. So for most white women, if their hair is healthy enough to withstand some bleach or highlights, then they will be better off with light hair.

Should you go ginger?

Red hair is another complicated question. The academic evidence is basically nonexistent.

About 5% of porn stars are red haired. I went on an AI porn site (Promptchan) and gathered stats on the top images. I found that of the 41 animations I looked at, 6 had red hair (14%).

Considering only about 3-ish% of the white American population is red-haired, this is incredible over representation.

I also polled people on whether they preferred Taylor Swift with blonde, red, brunette, or black hair.

Blonde clearly won the poll and red came in second. But, when I asked my friends to rank their preference (rather than just vote for their favourite), most put the red-headed Taylor Swift last.

I’m guessing that there is a small and underserved population of red-hair lovers but the average man doesn’t really like red hair.

Body Hair

Most men say they prefer it when women remove their pubic hair, though there is a large minority of bush lovers.

For some reason, someone has investigated the incidence of pubic hair prevalence in free internet pornography depicting threesomes – we have to assume that the specificity was driven by the preferences of the researchers – and they found that pubic hair has been disappearing. In 2012 about half the actresses had pubic hair but by 2020 only a quarter did. This matches some other data. Younger men dislike pubic hair more. My brief foray into AI girl image generation sites showed no images of women with a full bush and I assume their users skew young.

My guess is this is a newish cultural preference that is sweeping the West and things could always change back but for now getting rid of pubic hair is safest.

I get the impression that older men are mildly wistful of a time when women had hair on their nether regions while younger men experience disgust and contempt when faced with an unshaved vulva. My theory is that this is all about cunnilingus. Older men don’t do that sort of thing and so they are just thinking about aesthetics. Younger men, on the other hand, complain about the smell, friction, and unseemly fluids that get trapped in pubic hair.

It’s easier to just get rid of it.

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So now we’re thinking about hair, here is my update to the most attractive possible person. She would probably still have the same face, but she needs thicker and longer hair.

But, because of the blonde and red-haired premium, and some overshooting of other typical facial preferences, I think these women would have more suitors.

Here are some beautiful AI girls from around the world. I don’t know what prompts the creators to make them, but they share a lot with my ChatGPT girls. All these faces point to the same ground truths about what makes an appealing face.

Reclaiming ‘curvy’

The euphemism treadmill has come for the word curvy but I shan’t relinquish it. It’s too useful. When I search for curvy models on Pinterest, I get images of plus size models who, yes, generally have generous hips and thighs but they also carry far more adiposity on the waist and stomach than most consider to be sexy. Not to be uncouth but we already had a perfectly good word for that body type: fat.

Using the word curvy – which should refer to the sexiest women – as a euphemism for fat doesn’t change the fact that being fat is bad for your health, sexiness, and social standing. But it does degrade my ability to describe a useful concept. So it’s basically all downside.

I am reclaiming curvy. When I use the word here I am talking about bodies that have small waists and have one, or several of, wide hips, thick thighs, large breasts, and a generous round bum. In terms of traditional body shapes, a pear, triangle, and hourglass are all curvy. An apple and a rectangle are not.

These women are all curvy on at least one of the important dimensions.

These women are all not curvy, at different weights and muscle tones.

Me vs Cartoons Hate Her (Thinness vs curvyness)

In my first post my advice was that most women should lose weight but not too much weight. As different women wear their fat in different places, a good rule of thumb is rather than aim for a specific BMI, find the weight at which you have the most extreme hourglass.

I’m a big fan of Cartoons Hate Her’s blog and she wrote a friendly response to me and an unfriendly response to Sanilac, I’m going to use her as a foil for the rest of the piece.

First, CHH polled people to work out what most people rated as the ideal body type. In general, I haven’t been taking line drawings and unrealistic renders as evidence. I think the images are often too weird This is the winning body from her poll, neither particularly skinny or particularly curvy.

And this, curvier body did worse.

Like with a lot of digital renders, this body looks weird. Now, I don’t want to be rude about people who have this body type, but the way the fat is distributed on this body is implausible and crosses over into uncanny. Despite having wide hips, this is quite a scrawny looking figure. All of the hip mass comes from having a wide set pelvis, steep love handles, and a little extra fat at the very top of the thighs. On a real woman with these measurements, there would be far more ass, hip and thigh fat. Something about the shape also means the waist doesn’t look that small.

Comparing the ‘closest she could get to Kim Kardashian’ to actual Kim Kardashian (well, insofar is Kim Kardashian’s body is still ‘actual Kim Kardashian’) you can see that the way the fat falls is an important part of a good waist to hip ratio.

Here are some other curvy human women.

The point is not that men find narrow-hipped slender women repulsive. Slender without curves is the second, maybe third, best body type. But it is possible to be too skinny.

There isn’t fantastic evidence about which BMIs people prefer. There are studies that use line drawings. Others use body fat x-rays which create horrible ghostly images like this.

But there are enough weak studies that together paint a rough picture. Men in the industrialised west prefer BMIs in the low-to-normal range and men in poorer countries prefer higher-but-still-healthy BMIs. In the English-speaking world, you can assume the ideal BMI is from about 17 to 20. A healthy BMI range is generally considered to be 18.5 to 25.

For reference these women are all 5ft 5 and have BMIs of 17, 20 and 25 respectively.

I think what’s going on here is that weight carries a lot of – pardon the pun – baggage with it. My guess is, in a Rousseauian state of nature, the average man’s preference would be for weights that only lie in the healthy range but, because thinner people are higher status, Western men are attracted to thinner bodies than they are naturally inclined.

We know that women are more attracted to men they perceive as higher status. As a society we have come to accept that liking the billionaire werewolf is part of a healthy female sexuality. But I think men also experience a milder version of this phenomenon and therefore they generally prefer thin women, partly, because they seem classier and more intelligent. Slimness also has the added effect of making women seem younger.

After a low BMI, men like small waists and big hips. People often ludicrously describe wide hips as ‘childbearing (complimentary)’. I assume it’s because the average person’s shape rotation skills are so deficient that they can’t work out where exactly the baby goes. Or maybe they have complicated evopsych theories about the impact of hip fat on the size of the birth canal. idk.

Regardless, Miss America winners and Playboy models all have low waist-to-hip ratios (meaning a small waist and wide hips). Men of all ages and education levels prefer a low waist-to-hip ratio and, depending on the study, the ideal waist-to-hip ratio is in the 0.6 to 0.7 range. (The average woman with a healthy weight has a waist-to-hip ratio of about 0.77.)

These women have waist to hip ratios of 0.57, 0.7, and 0.77 respectively.

And, because I promised I would address the ways in which some of these preferences aren’t universal, you’ll be pleased to find that the Hadza from Tanzania showed no preference for a low waist to hip ratio. Nor did forager horticulturalists in Ecuador. So if you’re more straight up-and-down perhaps you should look for a husband lower down the tech tree.

Beyond academic evidence, Sanilac looked at sex dolls sold by the four biggest retailers and found they had an average waist-top-bust and waist-to-hip ratio of about 0.61. Scaled to a normal woman that’s a 39 inch chest, 39 inch hips, and a 24 inch waist. Academic evidence corroborates this. A study, looking at sex dolls from SexyRealSexDolls.com also found that the sex dolls were curvy, with an average waist-to-hip ratio of 0.62.

I couldn’t find any good studies of anime girls, so I decided to check out the most popular anime girls on Ranker.

All of the hottest anime girls have remarkably similar bodies. When men like cartoons, it seems that they like them to have proportions that are within the realm of possible, but stretch plausibility almost as much as they stretch the blouses of their school uniforms.

All of them have breasts that are at least G cups and waist-to-hip ratios smaller than 0.6. Some real women do have proportions like that, but it is an exceptionally rare phenotype. This is, perhaps, a 1 in 100,000 body-type and is reliably popular – at least among weebs.

For a more realistic art style, here are some AI girls from Glambase.

They all have slightly more realistic versions of anime proportions. We’re talking 1 in 1000 bodies rather than 1 in a 100,000 but we see the same patterns; large breasts, small waists, big hips, a youthful face.

Now, the most pornographic images I won’t share here. But I’ll leave you to browse the top images on PromptChan if that’s your thing. Basically all of the women generated are slim with wide hips and large breasts. Many of them – even the photorealistic ones – have bodies even curvier than the anime girls. The breasts are sometimes comedically large and the faces can end up looking suspiciously young. The women are also weirdly shiny sometimes, like they’ve been covered in oil, so I guess that’s another reason to use your highlighter liberally.

The main thing I learned from my misadventure is that men really like the idea of anatomically implausible blowjobs. That’s between them and God.

Me vs Cartoons Hate Her (Breasts)

If you read this recommendation for an air fryer, wouldn’t you think it was the most milquetoast non-recommendation in the world.

If you’re seriously considering getting a new kitchen gadget, you’ll get the most out of an air fryer. It costs about the same as buying fancy flour. I’m not sure which will improve your baking the most.

Across popular kitchen gadgets, people report the highest long-term satisfaction with air fryers (followed by other heating-based implements like deep fat fryers and hot plates) and the lowest satisfaction with stand mixers. That makes sense if people largely prefer the same level of bakedness but lots of different levels of fluffiness.

I’m on the fence about recommending air fryers but it’s probably one of the places where someone really serious about improving their baking can get some alpha and outcompete the casuals. If you’re willing to go that far you shouldn’t be too squeamish to read Which.com. They have a lot of advice about how to choose the right air fryer for you.

I would like to emphasise four things before you go full steam ahead.

• Don’t get an air fryer until you’ve perfected your ideal baking technique. What kind of air fryer you need will change depending on what you’re making. The meta study that finds that people are generally satisfied with air fryers also finds that people who haven’t perfected their technique are overall less satisfied with kitchen gadgets.

• Don’t get a weak air fryer. Strong air fryers take up just as much counter space as cheap ones. I think people get weak air fryers because they think they can fool people into thinking they are still using the oven but most people, especially people interested in baked goods – i.e. your target market – will notice.

• If you get an air fryer you risk fires, under baked food, salmonella, and problems with pleasing your dinner guest. The odds aren’t high but they’re not so low you can dismiss them. About 1 in 20 people with air fryers will have some kind of problem. Do your research and buy the right product. Do not cheap out.

• Don’t do something that will make you resent the air fryer. If you spend the money and no longer have chopping space, will you blame it?

Does that read like someone telling you to buy an air fryer? If I had written these words about literally anything else you would say ‘Aria weighs up the pros and cons of getting a boob job’ not ‘Did you read Aria’s post recommending boob jobs’.

I had to reread what I’d written over and over again just to double check. Did I really recommend that women get boob jobs? Did I actually say that most men like implausibly large anime titties or just one wealthy one I happen to know? But, for the record, when I posted in a group chat about my discovery that men like large breasts, another of my multi-millionaire friends said ‘what, did you think we were lying?’

The narrative had gotten so far away from my actual opinions that I had to double check that I hadn’t written something I don’t endorse in the spirit of comedic exaggeration or something.

My actual opinion is that I think the average man likes large – roughly E cup – breasts. Anime titties are not the median man’s preference but, by overshooting the typical male preference, larger breasts will probably get you more suitors. However, for reasons outlined in the previous post, my position on boob jobs remains ‘I am on the fence’.

Personally, outside researching and writing these blog posts, I don’t think about breasts that much. I’m a straight woman, breasts aren’t one of my hobbies or interests. What this whole debacle has updated me in favour of is thinking that literally everyone else is totally obsessed with breasts. You can’t give a cautious recommendation for a boob job without it subsuming the rest of your body of work. No wonder Sydney Sweeney’s corset and push up bra caused such a ruckus.

Now, let’s dive into the data.

I couldn’t find a single academic paper that showed over 1,000 men pictures of realistic breasts and asked them what they liked.

Most of the papers you find on breast preference will say in the abstract ‘we found that hungry men prefer larger breasts’ and you’ll see that they tested 50 guys in a breakroom on pictures like this.

I understand that it’s a bit weird to look at more realistic images on a work computer, but what can I really glean about men’s breast preferences in the Czech Republic vs Cameroon from how a few dozen of their undergrads rank these pictures? I was very excited to learn about eye-tracking studies, but they use the same silly images as the other studies.

The best study asks men and women (boo) to rank their favourite breasts based on realistically pornographic digital renders of breasts. The breasts were all the same size (roughly E cups) but had different levels of perkiness. The most popular breast was a 45:55, meaning the nipple points up but not too much.

Another study asked about a thousand people (men and women again, ugh) to rank their favourite breasts, using before-pictures from a plastic surgeon. And they found that everyone, across all demographics, agreed that the most perky and symmetrical breasts were nicest. (Although the straight men were the most enthusiastic).

Eyeballing the breasts, all of which were considered defective enough to merit plastic surgery, it seemed you could get away with very small breasts if they were perky and you could get away with saggier breasts if they were large. I have a guess about how well large and perky breasts would be rated, but no one will independently verify my hypothesis for me.

All the other papers use small samples, weird images, and are mostly trying to measure differences between subsets (like hungry vs sated) without having enough people to generate statistically valid results.

Not to be conspiratorial, but academia has been even more of a let down than I thought it would be. I just feel like someone, at some point, should have shown men a bunch of actual photographs of real tits and worked out what people liked.

Fortunately, we’re not abandoned to our common sense. Aella is here to save the day. She assessed the pricing of escorts on the website Tryst. The average female escort prices her services at slightly over $500 per hour. Hair and eye colour make a small difference to pricing (green eyes earns $528 per hour, blonde hair $533).

Body type had a more substantial impact on earnings. Slim and athletic escorts earned $550. Initially, it looked like breast size didn’t have much of an impact on earnings. But, if you look at the breast size of just slim escorts, it had a very substantial impact. A slim escort with A cups earned about $525 but a slim escort with E/FF cups earned a crazy $670.

If you’re about to say ‘what men want in sex workers bears no resemblance to what they want in wives’, Aella has another interesting tidbit about what punters are looking for. The escorts who earned the most had profiles that used words like ‘life’, ‘adventure’, and ‘experiences’. While the words ‘service’, ‘fun’, and ‘hey’ were all associated with lower prices. So even when sourcing an escort, men prefer signs of class and intellect.

Similarly, a German study on escort pricing finds that about 60% of the price was determined by looks (age, weight, breast size etc) and 40% by ‘education and communication’ skills (whether they had a degree, could speak another language, had intellectual interests).

To conclude Aella says

‘If we combine all of these, our highest priced escort is a 5’9”, thin, green-eyed blonde in her 20’s, who uses classy language, lives in New York, and has really fat titties.’

Except for the part about living in New York – which may be a terminal malady – she’d do very well on the marriage market too.

Aella also asked a bunch of people to rate pictures of naked bodies. She writes about her findings here but mostly discusses how people’s self reported hotness contrasts with their actual hotness. Fortunately for my purposes, her raw data is available for anyone to peruse.

I asked Claude to go through the images and estimate BMI, waist-to-hip ratio, and breast size. Claude refused. So I asked ChatGPT to do the same and it not only made me a handy spreadsheet but proactively rated how reliable it thought the estimates were, adjusted the correlations accordingly, and told me which factors had the strongest effect on ratings.

The results are all roughly what you would expect. BMIs of roughly 19/20 had the best ratings (performing better than slightly underweight). The lower the waist-to-hip ratio, the better the rating. And, after adjusting for BMI and perkiness, larger breasts got better ratings up to an E cup, after which greater size didn’t get better ratings.

The overall conclusion is that waist-to-hip ratio has the strongest impact on ratings, followed by BMI, followed by breast size. Apparently perkiness and photograph quality did correlate with attractiveness but the effect disappeared after controlling for the three main factors.

I would guess the reason photo quality seems to correlate with genuine attractiveness is because Aella’s sample contains quite a few women who have made the profession publicising nice pictures of their naked bodies on the internet. The top rated body certainly belongs to a purveyor of sexy pics. As those women are more likely to have nicer bodies, the top third of pictures contain a lot more professional-quality photographs than the bottom third, who probably aren’t practiced nude-takers.

In Sanilac’s sex doll survey, he finds that most have breasts that would be considered large on a real woman. The corroborating study found that the median sex doll had breasts that were a D cup. Personally I think their data wasn’t granular enough because the rest of the sex dolls, 49%, were put in the E to O cup category.

The modal breast size is very plausibly an E cup.

I think the researchers who did this study are quite stupid or very politically motivated (or why not both) because they also calculated the BMI of the sex dolls using their actual weight. Considering they are made of lightweight and cleanable plastic rather than meat, this gave them all implausibly low BMIs. The sex dolls are slim but they’re not wasting away.

My actual opinion on breasts is that we are thinking about the problem all wrong. We tacitly assume that the spectrum of preferences goes from small breasts to large breasts. Really the important spectrum ranges from indifferent to very interested.

Most men care more about weight and waist-to-hip ratio than they care about breast size. But there are definitely some men who care far more about breasts than they do about faces or slenderness. In the real world, slenderness and breast size trade off against each other. But, in the world of surgical enhancement, AI girls, anime, and sex dolls where these trade offs don’t exist, you end up with a plethora of women who are pretty slim and also very curvy.

Me vs Cartoons Hate Her (Are rich men built different?)

CHH says

But Aria specifically mentions her tips are directed at women looking to snag upper middle class husbands. In fact, she directly refutes the idea that class has any bearing on your preference for exaggerated curves versus less curvaceous slender bodies, and says:

Some people think that rich men like flat chested, narrow hipped women and only poor men like curves. There isn’t a good reason to think this is true, just a handful of bad papers that people really wanted to believe in. I asked my richest friend. He is worth several million, seems to be an adequate husband and father, and prefers implausibly massive tits.

Why are people apparently so invested in believing this myth, per her accusation? Nobody knows. You’d think the various media cabals would have bigger fish to fry than spreading the insidious agenda that richer men don’t like breast implants.

This is purely speculative but it isn’t my first day on earth. I think there are a few reasons this myth propagates.

1. The Freakonomics effect. Lots of people like a believable fun fact and hardly anyone reads studies.

2. Most women aren’t that curvy. They have a decided interest in believing that men don’t like curves that much.

3. The concept of ‘curvy’ often gets mixed up with the word ‘fat’. Poorer people usually weigh more and so you see poor men with ‘thick curvy’ wives.

4. I think because people intuitively believe that curvy women are attractive (hence the ‘gooner proportions’ goat), I think everyone feels it’s a bit too crass and a bit too obvious if that’s your preference. It’s like having milk chocolate as your favourite food or Taylor Swift as your favourite artist. It takes a refined and classy palate to prefer a slender rectangle.

5. The debate is intermixed with racial politics. People are taking as given that rich and desirable men are white and, if they have any good sense, they prefer white women. I don’t know if white women are actually less curvy than black or latina women, but people certainly think so. And so, by insisting that elite men prefer a slimmer build, they are describing what they consider the natural order: right-thinking white men preferring white women. I even know someone who said that he thought white men who liked ‘big asses’ were deracinated and that northern European men had always preferred slender blonde girls who look sixteen.

6. Our eyeballs are so blitzed with images of attractive and curvy women that we think that a waist-to-hip ratio of 0.7 is what we should all come to expect. When I say curvy, I very much am including women with 0.7 waist-to-hip ratios. But in a world of anime and BBLs, people are crazy enough to think that Marilyn Monroe isn’t hourglass enough.

The only place I have found an actual divide between what rich and poor men like is BMI. And even in that case, I think it’s a question of whether you’re exposed to the West at all, not a question of whether you’re earning $200k or $50k in America.

In the rich world, people generally prefer women with BMIs closer to 18 while in the developing world, people prefer BMIs closer to 25. After that, there is no particularly compelling evidence that rich and poor men have different preferences on waist-to-hip ratio or breast size to anyone else.

I’ve now told two anecdotes about multi-millionaires, but I also have a number of other wealthy men in my social circle who have said they like curves. Two different men (a successful director of a company and a published author) messaged me to say that they didn’t realise, until they had read Sanilac’s article, just how common their preferences are. You want people who work in tech? You want lawyers? You want writers? You want academics? You want start up founders? You want finance-bros? You want politicians? You want the scions of fortune? All manner of 1%-ers traipse through my house and gossip with me.

What I like about furnishing my data with real stories of real marriageable men, is that qualitative data gives you some sense of what people mean when they give certain answers to polls. After a hundred or so conversations (I’m very popular), I have a good intuitive grasp of what the shape and strength of preferences are. And it’s why I feel able to say that I think breast preference is largely a spectrum of indifference to keenness rather than a question of size per se.

CHH then describes what her rich followers’ preferences are, and they are exactly what I think the median man’s preferences roughly are. They prefer, in order, ‘fitness’, ‘slimness’, ‘hair’, ‘boobs/bum’, ‘nails’. That’s what I would have guessed (except I am confused at fitness and slimness being different categories) and that is why headline min-max advice is to lose weight and grow your hair long.

In her second post, which was mostly a response to Sanilac, she then says

But some pushback I got—which I’ve seen before—is that you can’t trust how men respond to surveys (including the many reputable ones done, which show a distinct difference in average ideals between men of different socioeconomic statuses) because even anonymously, wealthier men feel pressured to claim to like less extreme curves than they actually like.

There’s a lot hanging on these studies, so let’s see what they actually show.

The first link goes to a study with an impressive sample size and country distribution. And it asks men and women to rate their ideal body from this chart.

What do you notice about these images? First, the slimmer bodies have the most impressive waist-to-hip ratios. The results can’t tell us anything about class differences in preferences for slim vs curvy women, because the slimmer bodies have the most impressive curves. Second, they are stupid line drawings.

Next, if you read the paper you see that – for all that the abstract claims that there is some kind of difference – the mean preference in every region was between 3 and 4. There’s remarkably little difference in how those bodies are drawn.

The other thing you will find is that Scandinavia, Oceania, Western Europe and Eastern Europe have the highest mean preference (3.6-3.7) while East Asia, South America and Africa have the lowest mean preference (3.0-3.2). This doesn’t quite fit the ‘rich white men prefer slender androgynes’ that everyone seems to believe.

The paper also tells you nothing about socioeconomic variation within countries.

The second link then goes back to this paper again, just posted on Macquarie University rather than by Research Gate. They even have the exact same title and exact same abstract on both pages.

The third is a paper that tries to draw cross comparisons across two data sets. One testing 266 people of differing socioeconomic status in Malaysia about how much they like these images.

And the other was asking 124 different British university students (not split by socioeconomic background) how much they liked breasts and then compared preferences between boys who are hungry and not hungry.

I’m sure these studies are reputable in their fields but I don’t think sensible people find them convincing. I personally don’t think you can conclude anything like there is ‘a distinct difference in average ideals between men of different socioeconomic statuses’.

At best you could say ‘White men prefer women who are slightly heavier. Hungry men prefer larger breasts, which probably explains why poor Malaysian men like larger breasts too’. But, for anyone familiar with the way social scientists have been known to torture their data, I wouldn’t conclude anything from these studies.

I return to my original statement.

Some people think that rich men like flat chested, narrow hipped women and only poor men like curves. There isn’t a good reason to think this is true, just a handful of bad papers that people really wanted to believe in.

Honestly, I will change my mind if I get any good evidence. But all that happens is people send me the same papers over and over again. And frankly, I don’t think any of you have even read the abstracts. Let alone paused to wonder if the researchers are perhaps … um … exaggerating their findings.

She then says:

If you look at the wives of men working in finance in Manhattan, they will look different from the wives of professional athletes, and both of those groups of wives will look different from the wives of wealthy Mormon businessmen or the wives of tech entrepreneurs. This doesn’t mean any of these groups are “virtue signaling” and marrying women they don’t like for some stupid reason.

Now it could be true that Manhattan finance guys have different preferences to professional athletes. But even if they had identical preferences, we should expect their wives to look different because women in these cultures look different. People mostly date within their own age bracket and social class, partly because of natural homophilic tendencies and party because that’s who they run into.

Americans assortatively mate so strongly, that people are more likely to marry if they study the same subject. Even when you control for educational attainment, people from wealthy backgrounds are more likely to marry each other. And real life age gaps are so small that 63% of newlyweds are within one year of each other’s age.

Of course, elite men have more say over who they date. They can probably have someone who matches them in social class and who has a great body. But we’re still working with tradeoffs. Even Timothee Chalamet isn’t experiencing a world of unconstrained physical ideals.

He’s still choosing a whole person. So who he chooses will tell you something about his preferences but it’s probably not the whole story. The observation that elite men usually marry women from their social class says nothing about the variation in their natural, carnal preferences.

All about that bass

There’s not as much good evidence on bums but they are worth a mention.

This paper asked a thousand people (both genders again) to rate a series of pictures of bums. From the ‘posterior view’ they found that the most popular bums had a waist-to-hip ratio of 0.65 with the widest point at the fold at the bottom.

And people seemed to like it when the bulk of the mass looked like it was coming from hip fat rather than glutes.

From the side, the most popular bum had a waist-to-ass ratio of 0.7 with the widest point in the middle of the bum.

The paper breaks the sample down by race, but there was so little difference that I consider it to be statistical noise.

The best body problem

Combining this information together, it’s clear that men generally like women who are slender on the waist with wide hips, a round bum, and large breasts. It’s easy to come up with an explanation for this. Like with faces, men are looking for clear signals that the person they are looking at is a healthy, fertile, human woman. It is unattractive to give signals that you’re too weird to be human, too young or old to be fertile, too misshapen to be healthy, or too masculine to be a woman. But for some people, ‘too weird to be human’ could be triggered by a waist-to-hip ratio of 0.5 and for others that would be peak attractiveness.

Essentially you want to look feminine but the point at which extreme femininity seems perturbing will be different for different men.

I think this research points to the ideal woman being; slender with a BMI of about 18, a waist-to-hip ratio of 0.65ish, a round but not too perky bum, and E cup breasts. To get a sense of the distribution, especially how it applies to photorealistic women, I asked my friends to send me their favorite e-girls.

This was probably the slimmest model sent in. She’s so skinny her rib cage is more prominent than her breasts but despite that she’s clearly got wide hips – I think mostly because she’s got a good skeleton – and quite a large ass.

The heaviest model (nsfw) was clearly overweight but still quite hourglass shaped. What’s notable about this woman is that, because her breasts are so large, she can get away with them being quite saggy. I think it’s an honest signal that they’re real.

Considering how clear and basically universal the preference for a low waist-to-hip ratio is, I was surprised there were some girls who were quite straight up and down.

These were the models who mostly had very beautiful faces and a clear brand. Their vibe was more professional influencer than OnlyFans-peddler. They give off the vibe that they’re just normal girls who happen to have a popular Instagram and it’s not really for men at all. (Even though the preponderance of bikini pics reveals the lie.)

I don’t think their high waist-to-hip ratio is what drew men to them. Instead, I think the guys who like them have a stronger preference for a classy character and beautiful face than a small and well-defined waist. Take heart, even for e-girls, personality is an important part of the overall attractiveness package. Men and women aren’t so unalike after all! (Note, however, all of these women are quite thin. I think even at slightly higher body fat percentages, they couldn’t pull it off.)

Generally, however, the curviness levels were roughly what you would expect.

And for some, extend into the realm of supernormal stimulus.

Overall, there is some wiggle room around preferences. But that wiggle room isn’t uniform. Beautiful faces vary quite a lot but they are all young and feminine. Attractive influencers have every possible hair, eye and skin colour but they all have thick and healthy hair. Most manage to be both thin and curvy but you can get away with being fatter if you have excellent curves or you can get away with being curveless if you’re very thin. I don’t think any of the influencers I was sent had poor curves and a BMI of over 20.

So, combining this all together, this is the most beautiful possible woman.

But by exaggerating common preferences, a woman with a more extreme hourglass could have more suitors. But we’ll never know because ChatGPT considers even fully clothed versions of anime proportions to be pornographic. We have to wonder why …

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I think this piece will make a lot of women sad and defensive. The last one certainly did. There are two things in this world that it is terrible to be: ugly and stupid. That’s why we have platitudes like ‘everyone is clever in their own way’ or ‘everyone is beautiful in their own way’. It would be comforting if it were true and in some ways I think I have broken some society-wide pact to maintain these untruths.

Just because I think there is such a thing as generally appealing and popular beauty, that doesn’t mean I think it’s right that looks are as important as they are. Ugly people, women especially, have life much harder than others. But that doesn’t mean that I think the men who prize looks are bad, unusual, or worth avoiding.

I think liking a beautiful woman is a bit like preferring salty or fatty food. It’s not universal and it’s not virtuous, but it’s part of the fabric of life. Giving in and eating all the fatty food you like isn’t in your best interest but you lack joie de vivre if you only eat an optimised diet of Huel and supplements. It’s okay for men to consider their lustful urges when selecting a partner and you shouldn’t think less of them for it.

Women have gained a lot by escaping their corsets, swapping their high heels for comfortable shoes, and letting themselves gain a few extra kilograms that they can hide in a loose fitting dress.

I think some people have managed to convince themselves that if they keep to genteel company – with the educated, the kind, and the rational – then they haven’t cost themselves anything by eschewing feminine effort. But I think they have actually just silenced the men around them and not actually rewired their desires.

Hopefully you take this in the way this is intended. More than I wish to impart any particular idea, I’m trying to impart an ethos here: with effort and strategy you can improve your lot in life.

As a woman, improving your looks is a totally tractable problem. You can be at least a 5/10 if you focus on being slim, taking care of your hair and skin, and straightening your teeth. Most deformities are fixable. And even if you have one or two unfixable traits, you might be able to balance that out by getting a really perfect body (this is where a boob job could come in handy). If you also have a good degree or a cool job, can hold an interesting conversation, and generally act like a nice, sweet-tempered person, you should be able to marry well.

And, even if you think you’re a totally hopeless cause, don’t feel too demoralised. Ugly women get married every day, perhaps not to handsome or rich men, but to people who love them. And that’s really the most important thing.

Believing that you’re pretty enough because you’re already quite pretty and plenty of men want to date you is a common pitfall I see women fall into again and again. I am always trying to set people up and the main reason it doesn’t happen is because the men don’t think the women are pretty enough. Alas, many of the shallow men are worth having.

If you get hotter, you’ll get a better man.

I owe a massive debt to this blog post. I would just tell you to go and read it but

• It’s very long

• It contains a lot of nsfw pictures

• It’s focussed on getting sexier instead of capturing a husband and these are slightly different tasks

• It will hurt your feelings. And I know I’ve spent most of these posts telling you you’re an old maid who should probably give up and settle for the dregs of society or whatever, but I hope that’s all useful and spurs you into action. We don’t need to know all the ways in which you’re genetically predisposed to fall short, you just need to know how to improve.

I’ve distilled here the best advice into a shorter, safe for work blogpost. But if you’re interested in things, then I really recommend it.

Men and women are different

Men and women have different tastes in female beauty. Beauty, fashion, and media aimed at women show a different ideal than those aimed at men. There are some commonalities – both men and women like symmetrical faces, clear skin, and not too much fat. But they have different preferences about curves, youthfulness and clothes.

In general, men like neotenous faces with curvy bodies. A lot of women look at the popularity of Belle Delphine et al’s schtick and think that the men who like her are pedophiles. But liking a cute, young face is part of normal, healthy heterosexuality provided it’s combined with a appreciation for a woman’s body.

It’s the same way Hugh Hefner probably didn’t put bunny ears on the playboy bunnies because he was secretly into bestiality.. The adult woman is a crucial part of the overall package.

This type cute faced, curvaceous body type isn’t very common in TV and film and her look is generally considered to be a sign of poor taste. (For example, in Denmark a buxom mermaid sculpture was removed for being too sexy and therefore unfeminist or something) But I see her all the time in adverts for sexy phone games, my main interaction with the world of male lust.

Body

First, and most importantly, don’t be fat. The medically recommended BMI range, for most body-types, includes weights that many men consider too fat to be sexy.

Losing weight is easy now. You can either starve yourself with willpower or you can starve yourself with chemical assistance. Unless you spend a lot of time at the gym, exercise probably won’t help very much. Currently I control my weight by eating about once a day. I personally enjoy the practice of self control and self monitoring. If dieting isn’t a hobby you enjoy, just go down to your local Novo Nordisk or Chinese peptide retailer and pick up some appetite suppressants. The side effects are limited and it will probably be the soundest financial investment you ever make.

If you’re able to control your weight, the next thing you should decide is what your ideal weight should be. The ideal waist to bust and waist to hip ratio is about 0.61. In measurements that’s about 39:24:39. Close to the measurements of this actress.

This is a very rare body to have naturally but you should try to find the weight at which you have the most extreme ratio. Cuvier than 0.61 is less popular but it is so rare in the real world that if your body can look like Kim Kardashian’s (waist to hip of about 0.55) then you should make it so.

Some people think that rich men like flat chested, narrow hipped women and only poor men like curves. There isn’t a good reason to think this is true, just a handful of bad papers that people really wanted to believe in. I asked my richest friend. He is worth several million, seems to be an adequate husband and father, and prefers implausibly massive tits.

I do find that urbane and sophisticated men like to claim that they are interested in facial beauty and they are largely unmoved by hourglass figures. But, speaking as a person whose cup size fluctuates substantially (D to F) with her menstrual cycle, the evidence suggests that they are not totally unmoved by curves.

So, you need to strike a careful balance. It is very easy to be too skinny or too fat.

How to find your ideal weight

Despite what I’ve said about large breasts, the most important element of being curvy is a small waist. So for most people, in order to find your ideal bust-to-waist-to-hip ratio, you should start by losing weight.

Log your weight, bust measurement (around the widest point), waist measurement, and hip measurement. Take your measurements at every half-kilogram or so until you find the weight at which you have the most extreme hourglass that nature will give you. Then maintain as close to that weight as you can manage.

Be careful not to lose too much weight. The weirdness of the modern world is that most women weigh more than their peak beauty but they aspire to weigh less than they should. Once you’ve realised that your weight is something you can control, do not overshoot it to fulfill the female beauty standard. You want to look like a pin up doll not a runway model.

Thighs and bellies are confusing. Men do have preferences here. The ideal is thick thighs, a thigh gap, a soft and almost-but-not-quite-flat stomach, no visible muscle, thin arms and visible collar bones. That’s too much information and your body probably can’t deliver all of those things at the same time. Just chase the hourglass and dismiss the rest as noise.

For some women the best weight may be quite low if you’re prone to gaining weight on your stomach or face. Others will gain mostly in their thighs and bum, which means a bit more fat will be optimal.

Exercise can help a little. Provided you have a little softness, you probably won’t develop visible muscle. Core and glutes exercises will make you more hourglass, so will some shoulder and back work outs. If you’re hoping to exercise your way to an hourglass figure, check out what the bodybuilding girls do for the bikini division. So long as you maintain a feminine body fat percentage, you’re in no danger of looking as grotesque as them.

Face

While people agree on general rankings of faces, there is a lot of disagreement about which faces are the most beautiful. For your body, I recommend everyone get as hourglass as they can, but for your face you should be happy with the face you’ve been given and learn to emphasise what’s striking about your own features.

Here is a collage of images that men sent in when asked for faces they found particularly attractive.

In general, women prefer faces that are much more angular and contoured than the typical male preference. Every other week there’s another celebrity who got her buccal fat removed and all the men on Twitter screech about how this proves that Hollywood hates them.

The first goal of face-maxxing should be improving your skin. The problem with skincare is that it’s a market of snake oil and lemons, so it’s very difficult to tell what’s going to actually improve your skin and what’s just an expensive chore. My rough heuristic is: if a doctor won’t prescribe it, it probably won’t stop you from getting spots. But lots of doctors will give you topical antibiotics if you’re a skilled navigator of bureaucracies.

For aging, the best medicine is prevention. Stay out of the sun and wear SPF every day. I’m skeptical that topical retinol can get through your skin barrier but, unless you’re pregnant, it’s basically harmless to try. What’s one pointless and expensive chore?

Two of my friends swear by Skin and Me which can get you topical antibiotics and prescription retinols without the trouble of going to the doctor. Referral code here.

If you already have wrinkles you should get Botox and maybe filler. Go to someone who does both and they can give you advice about what’s more suitable for your face. For my older readers, I’ve been quite impressed with current face lift technology.

After that, if you have wonky or discoloured teeth you should fix them. Don’t shy away from braces. Lots of men think they’re cute and then you’ll have straight teeth for life.

Maybe you should consider getting lip filler but I would proceed with caution. I’ve been counting, and I see way more cases of bad lip filler in public than lips that look like they need filler.

Makeup

You should wear makeup every day. Even though everyone will be able to tell that you’re wearing makeup, they will just assume you’re more attractive anyway. The internet is full of makeup tutorials. I don’t need to give you one.

My tip for lazy girls is that makeup shops will offer you a bridal makeup package where they teach you how to do a particular look. They will try to overdo it but you should use it as an opportunity to learn what products do what.

Remember that men like a face that’s soft and youthful.

Men say they like natural makeup. What they actually want is elegant, classy makeup.

• Avoid heavily contoured looks. Angular faces and sharp cheek bones are for the female gaze and they can often look clownish in real life.

• Don’t overpluck your eyebrows. You want them to look thick and natural. You might want to fill them in.

• Some highlighter will give you a moist and dewy look

• Lipstick, mascara, eyeliner and blush are all a safe bet.

Glasses

Ditch your glasses. I used to think that glasses were beauty-enhancing for most women because they increase the symmetry of your face and give the illusion of bigger eyes. But men seem to actually like looking at women’s faces. Unless you have very small eyes or a 1 in 100 level asymmetric face, you’re better off without.

If you need eye correction, the sexiest thing is to wear contacts most of the time and to save your glasses for when you’re reading. It adds variety and gives you a sexy extra look in private.

Hair

Most natural hair and eye colours are popular with men but blonde and red are the best. If you’re white and your hair is healthy, you should try either of these colours. If you’re not white, stick with your natural colour.

Length, gloss and thickness are more important than colour. There’s no shame in extensions, Olaplex and expensive shampoo if that’s what you need.

When you wear your hair up, make sure you pull some out to frame your face. You want to pull out more than you think and don’t just take it from the top by your forehead, also pull some from near your ears. This AI girl is a good example. (She also has good makeup)

For your body hair, while some guys like a bush, it’s safer to be hairless. The men who don’t like pubic hair really don’t like it while the men who like a bush don’t seem to feel strongly. By default, remove your pubic, leg and armpit hair and, if it’s visible, your arm and face hair too.

Beauty don’ts.

Here are some things that you shouldn’t do.

• Do not remove your buccal fat. Women like cheekbones way more than men do.

• Don’t get tattoos.

• Don’t tan. It causes wrinkles and codes as common. Wear SPF every day and wear hats on sunny days. Tan lines are ugly in the same way tattoos are ugly.

• Keep your nails short and natural looking. If you really want to paint your nails, go with a light pink. But, if you’re following all my advice, you should be too bored of primping to add a pointless primp. Definitely do not walk around with chipped nail polish or gel nails that have half grown off.

• Don’t thin your eyebrows.

• Don’t cut your hair short.

• Don’t dye your hair an unnatural colour. My one exception is blonde. If you’re white, you can go blonder than is natural. And, if you’re of a race that wouldn’t usually be blonde, you can try it if you really want to. But proceed with caution. Blonde can be very taxing on your hair’s health.

• Don’t get a breast reduction no matter how large and painful they are.

Plastic surgery

If you’re seriously considering plastic surgery, you’ll get the most out of boob job. It costs about the same amount as egg freezing. I’m not sure which increases your odds of having children more.

Across popular plastic surgeries, people report the highest long-term satisfaction with boob jobs (followed by other body-based alterations like abdominoplasty and liposuction) and the lowest satisfaction with nose jobs. This makes sense if men largely prefer one kind of body but lots of different faces.

I’m on the fence about recommending boob jobs but it’s probably one of the places where someone really serious about finding a husband can get some alpha and outcompete the casuals. If you’re willing to go that far, then you shouldn’t be too squeamish to read Dispelling Beauty Lies. Sanilac has a lot of advice on how to choose the right implant size for you.

I would like to emphasise four things before you go full steam ahead.

• Don’t get a boob job until you’ve found and stuck with your ideal weight. What looks good on your frame will change depending on how much body fat you have. The meta study that finds that people are generally satisfied with boob jobs also finds that people with higher BMIs are overall less satisfied with plastic surgery.

• Don’t get a small boob job. Bigger implants carry just as much risk as small ones. I think people get small boob jobs because they think you can fool people but most people, especially people interested in boobs — i.e. your target market — will notice.

• If you get a boob job you are risking rupture, nipple insensitivity and problems breastfeeding. The odds aren’t high but they’re not so low you can dismiss them. About 1 in 20 women with breast augmentation will have some kind of problem. Do your research and find a good surgeon. Do not cheap out.

• Don’t do something that will make you resent your future husband. If your baby has trouble latching because of your implant, will you blame him?

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Getting sexier is the most important thing you can do for your husband hunt. Fortunately, you’re not a man. Men are stuck with the height God gave them and it’s the most important factor in their physical attractiveness.

Most women will be considered attractive if they are skinny with long hair and clear skin. All three of those things are totally within your control.

While men will say they like things to be natural, nine times out of ten they prefer unnatural results delivered in a classy way. It’s better to be a beautiful woman who needs GLP-1s, hair extensions and 37 beauty products than it is to be a mid low maintenance girlfriend.

Last week I talked about how I think sparks are overrated. I think people lose a lot of potential matches because they’re pursuing the romance novel version of their life instead of the arranged marriage version of their life.

That raises an important question. If not romance, what should you be looking for?

For the uninitiated, arbitrage is a concept in finance and economics where you take advantage of a difference in prices between two markets. If you found that your local supermarket was selling jars of miso tasty for a few pounds less than the farmers market, and you had some free time, you could buy a bunch of miso tasty, set up a stall, and sell them for a tidy profit. That would be an arbitrage play and it happens all the time in the economy.

Dating can be thought of as a game of arbitrage. There are some markets where your value is going to be higher than others.

For example, in the British Effective Altruist scene, there are more men than women. Effective Altruists like to date other Effective Altruists, so a woman who is mid in the general market can be quite the catch in this particular sub community. The Soho Reading Sessions are apparently a great place to meet ‘The most beautiful women you’ve ever seen – and 20 of the weirdest men’, if that’s the sort of thing that appeals to you.

Similarly, you hear a lot about the phenomenon of White Male Asian Female couples. I think this happens because Asian women don’t mind dorkiness and sometimes find men from their own country to be quite sexist. The dorky white men, on the other hand, find women who don’t meet the insanely specific Asian beauty standards to be very beautiful despite their unbotoxed traps. That’s arbitrage!

You can improve your league. But you should also be thinking about opportunities for arbitrage. What are your stand out traits? Who are you more valuable to? What do you want that other people don’t care about? What do other people want that you could take or leave?

Here are my top 11 tips for dating market arbitrage.

1. Avoid sexual dominance

I am suspicious of dominant men. Aella writes about how being into BDSM is basically a sexual orientation. She’s probably right.

Despite what the Bible says, male and female sexuality aren’t perfect complements of each other. Men don’t really want to dominate women as much as women want to be dominated. When I talk to men who have a lot of sex they complain that women treat them like a handyman; asking them for a limitless supply of debauched acts. They dutifully choke, slap and restrain as commanded. It’s the ticket price of repeated admission to a lady’s boudoir.

I do know a small number of men who really do enjoy erotic violence and they aren’t the nicest people. Here are some very anonymized anecdotes about them. (Remember, gossip more and watch less TV.)

• A man who shouts at interns

• Another man who shouts at junior staff members

• A man who cheats on his wife publicly and I’ve seen him belittle her

• A man who cheated on his girlfriend and bullied her into an eating disorder and plastic surgery

• A man who dumped a perfectly nice girl to become poly

• A 24/7 sub-dom relationship that the woman, afterwards, considered to be abuse.

I think violent temperaments in the bedroom are correlated with violent temperaments in general. I think it’s fine to want a man who can competently carry out tasks and wants to give you the sex you’re looking for. But give up on the men who really want it.

2. Think of the children

You’re mostly thinking about what traits you want in a husband. You should think about what traits you want for your children.

Mostly the traits I want in my children are very similar to traits that are valuable on the dating market. You probably have similar preferences, so this isn’t super useful. Fundamentally I want my whole family to be healthy, intelligent and likable so there’s not much I can gain there.

There are traits that are more important to me in my children than they are in a partner. It’s more important to me that they are healthy, confident, curious, and driven. It’s less important to me that they be romantic, attractive, or zen.

This is yet another reason to give up on dominance. You might want a kinky husband with a high sex drive, but you would probably prefer to have vanilla children.

3. Looks

Chasing good looking men is a sign of poor time preference. If you get married in your 30s, you will spend about half of your relationship as elderly people.

This advice is the oldest in the book and yet, no one follows it. Sell looks, buy character. When you do buy looks, buy the looks that are associated with good health – like weight, skin and symmetry. Avoid looks that are just good fortune.

I guess if you really want pretty children, find someone whose features would look good with yours.

4. Height

Women love tall men. Even I, as a certified short woman, had the audacity to prefer tall men.

If you’re like me, I’m guessing what you want from height is actually size. I want to feel petite and feminine and height is the easiest way to achieve this. But broad shouldered short men also do the job and the apps don’t yet let you filter on shoulder breadth (yet). Keen observers of male physiques can use this to their advantage.

5. Age

I talked about age a couple of posts ago but you might not have read it. Women’s preference for age is stronger than men’s preference for youth. You should date younger than you’re inclined to.

6. Money

I think young and single people underrate money and overrate status. I didn’t really care about money, except insofar as it was a proxy for status, until I was in a serious relationship thinking seriously about having a family.

Don’t date men with cool, high status jobs. Date men who earn a lot of money doing something boring. Ideally, date a man who does something that lots of women find a bit evil. Go for men in insurance, oil, finance, and logistics. Reject men in the arts.

The other money arbitrage, especially when combined with the youth arbitrage, is you should look for a future rich man. I snapped up my lovely husband when he was a phd student. Other excellent husbands can be found at law school, on grad schemes, or the early stages of start ups.

And, provided he is smart and hard working, you can take an unambitious man and turn him into a high earner. Lots of men also don’t realize they want money until they have a wife and child to spend it on.

7. Hobbies

Shared hobbies and interests aren’t that important and a curse to the people who crave them. Most hobbies and interests are incredibly gendered. In my world, the boys like playing map-based video games, talking about tech and geopolitics, and watching sports. The girls prefer organized fun, arguing about domestic policy, and reading classical literature.

Obviously, my world is hyper selected. We all like trains and Japan. But there are still clear gendered interests. If you have an interest that men really like, you should lean into it. Probably the sexiest thing you could get into is war. Men love talking about war.

But for most of us, our hobbies are niche and feminine. It’s just not that important to share them with your man. I recommend getting into explaining things. Explaining something to a smart and interested person is one of the greatest pleasures in life. It’s so pleasurable I had to ban myself from doing it on dates.

I love coming home to my husband and telling him all about all the new things Samuel has taught me about urbanism. He then tells me all about AI and chemistry and we both have a richer understanding of the world.

8. Politics or ‘values’

I think shared politics/ideology/values are the most overrated thing on the market. If you’re interested in things and stuff, it can be very limiting. Any way in which you stray from the orthodoxy du jour will alienate some part of the market.

It doesn’t help that, like hobbies, politics and values are also very gendered.

I’ve changed my mind so much over time. When I was young and compassionate, I was a woke communist. But, because I have an inherent love of systems, I learned about markets and became libertarianish. Then, because I was interested in rationalism, I learned about Moloch and status games, and became a market-oriented centrist with progress characteristics.

The world will change. I will change.

I think a shared worldview can be a very unstable foundation to build a marriage on. Had I locked in a libertarianish man when I was 25, and had that been the foundation of our relationship, I think he would feel quite betrayed by the ways in which I’ve changed.

Instead, I found a person whose intellect I respect. We disagree recreationally but mostly defer to the other’s domains of expertise.

You will never agree wholeheartedly with another person on how to run your life. And if you’re thoughtful, you won’t agree with your past self about it either. I have a friend who turned her husband vegan and then started eating fish. She also became religious and much less woke.

Fortunately, they were held together by mutual esteem, not shared values.

You will have different intuitions about managing money, whether children should use screens, how often to tidy up, how to plan a holiday, whether and what to give to charities etc. Successfully building a life with other people involves learning how to navigate these incompatibilities.

My caveat here is there are some things that just won’t work.

1. Don’t date a person who thinks you’re stupid or evil.

2. Some differences in belief are fundamental to the way your lives together will be structured. Preferred levels of redistribution aren’t going to make or break your marriage but opinions on stay-at-home mothers might.

3. Don’t marry someone who has a trump card that supersedes all your values. I think this can be a source of tension in relationships where one person has religious mandates and the other person has ‘preferences’.

9. Good husbands aren’t always good boyfriends

There are some traits that are really great in boyfriends but bad in husbands. For example, it’s fun to date men who will take you on lavish dates and it’s bad to be with a spend-thrift husband.

Similarly, some people are very generous and accommodating of other people. This can be nice if you’re the person who is being accommodated but when you’re married you might be expected to do the accommodating. My dad is a very generous man. He’s incredibly generous to me but, unfortunately, he’s also very generous with other people. I remember him giving my toys away to other children!

A man with a tidy house is nice, but how much tidying do you want to do when you live together? I once dated a man who had a glass table that he wiped every day. Horrendous. I couldn’t live like that. We burned a hole in our white dining table during our housewarming party.

Cultivation, stylish outfits, and a good physique are all very nice in a boyfriend. But do you want a husband who goes to the gym all the time? Do you want him to obsess over the latest Drake’s sample sale? Do you want to be in charge of the house’s interior design or will you have to bow to his aesthetic preferences?

When you date a man, he is a stranger to you. His behavior is some indication of how he will treat his wife and it demonstrates what virtues come naturally to him, but it’s a better indication of how he treats strangers.

10. The apps

People have all kinds of hang ups about the apps. I won’t litigate those here but I will say that people who don’t use the apps are hard to meet. That means the price is less likely to reflect the market value.

If you run into an appless man, you can buy him at a discount.

Some men haven’t put much thought into their profiles. Often, I think they feel too squeamish to show their friends so they don’t get good advice. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Look for men with bad profiles but the fundamentals look promising.

11. Date your friends

The biggest tragedy of dating is that it’s really easy to weed out people for shallow and materialistic reasons. It’s really hard to find out who has a heart of gold, who treats people right, and who is going to be a really dedicated and committed life partner.

One of the great things about having friends, especially friends you’ve known for a long time, is that you know the content of their character. I have a few friends who are kind of weird, embarrassing and low status but they are really good people. Sure, they would be weird and embarrassing in a way that would embarrass you at parties but, except for that, they would make damn good husbands.

Ultimately, you want to be in a relationship where you both value each other much more than any likely replacement. You want to find someone who values what’s special about you and wonders at how they got so damn lucky.

The main way to achieve that is through cultivating healthy thought patterns. The halo effect is real and you can use it to your advantage.

The second best way is to think about how to sell yourself. My tips here are very general because you are legion. You will have all kinds of specific traits that some other people are going to really want.

I knew what was special about me is my emotional control and lack of neediness. Most men have a slight preference for a bit of bpd but I assumed that extreme hard-headedness was also undersupplied and I leant into it.

Are you ambitious? Incredibly knowledgeable about trains? Kind of right wing? Very organized? An excellent cook? Find a way to show that off.

What I’m trying to say is that we, as a society, are missing out on the ability to accuse someone of Witchcraft and be taken seriously.

What happened to these people? When was the last time you saw somebody called Hiram invent five different crazy machines, found a new religion, and have twelve children who he named after Greek nymphs?

– Scott Alexander, Puritan Spotting

In Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman classifies modes of thought into System 1 for fast and instinctive thinking and System 2 for deliberate and logical thinking. Provocateur Camille Paglia draws a distinction between Western society’s two modes of thought: the hyperverbal “ascetic Palestinian creed” and pagan aestheticism. Canonical internet text The Nerd as the Norm says that people exist on a spectrum from nerds (people who are literal, unappreciative of aesthetics and like to trade information) to wambs (people sensitive to social norms, have a keen aesthetic sense and consider conversations to be about people not trading information).

Over and over, we rediscover the fact that we reason in two ways; a mode that is logical, specialised for algebra and reasoning A therefore B and therefore C, and another mode that is intuitive and is for saying, “That person seems untrustworthy” or “Monochrome is stylish”.

If you’re going to use your logical mind on a problem, you’ll do research and think seriously about it. If you want to use your intuitive sense on a problem you will, LLM like, gather data and stories, ruminate, and hope that you can sleep on it and generate an answer that “feels right”.

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Anyway, I was talking about witchcraft. I would like to point to things that are hijacking your intuitive sense-making and call it witchcraft. There’s lots of it in our fallen world. I think, for example, it’s kind of witchy to fill adverts with attractive people. I think people who do those classic charisma tricks like making too much eye contact or using subtle casual touch are witches. I think, and this is the most puritan thing about me, playing music at church is witchcraft. Choral music is very emotive and you shouldn’t use it to trick people into believing in God. But the worst offenders are Hollywood because they have the most reach.

Everyone gossips too little and consumes too much fiction. For every real life story of love you’ve heard, you have watched ten times as many fictional examples and they are ten times more emotionally potent. Every day you’re watching beautiful people fall in love on Netflix or listening to your latest enemies to lovers audiobook, and your intuitive brain is registering it as real information about the real world.

My chronically single friends are rarely chronically single because eligible bachelors don’t like them. Their problem is that they don’t feel things for the eligible bachelors who like them. It’s not usually because they’re trying desperately to get someone out of their league — that’s been ground out of them by now. But they’re struggling to feel anything for the nice enough people they’re going on dates with.

Many intelligent people are prone to over relying on their logical brain for things that you can’t master without honing intuitive judgments – they only cook from recipes , they try to dress themselves with colour systems and kibbe body types. They won’t unclench and let a bit of intuitive judgement guide them.

And then suddenly these totally nerdy, totally System 2 people, want to use their limp, under-exercised System 1 brain on the most important problem in their life. That would be bad enough on its own. But considering how few examples of good relationships we get to live through, it’s probably one the main places you should not use intuition.

Why is fictional romance so bad? Isn’t good art meant to tell truths we can’t articulate in other ways or something?

It’s because conventions of the genre, written to increase entertainment value, don’t map very well to real life. So for a romance story the plot goes something like:

Two people meet. They have a moment of chemistry – maybe several moments of chemistry – and they are drawn to one another. Often there is some plausible deniability so they are both uncertain about the other’s feelings. There is some kind of obstacle to their relationship. It can be internal, like they think they hate each other, or it can be external, like their parents are trying to keep them apart. Usually this obstacle is overcome but maybe one of them will die.

In real life, normal, healthy couples follow a plot more like:

Two people meet. They find each other attractive and they kind of like talking to each other. Perhaps there could be something there but they barely know each other. They clearly communicate that they’re kind of interested and agree to keep meeting up. Little by little, two people who barely know each other, start to remedy that. Over the course of many evenings, their feelings deepen until they realise, one day, that they’re in love.

Mammals love intermittent rewards. The story from a romance novel is compelling because it hijacks the part of your psyche that seeks inconsistent and uncertain reward. It describes a situation that will create a more immediate, more spark-like connection. You can’t yearn for someone who communicates their intentions clearly.

This is why the red pill teaches men to neg, why women fall for lovebombing fuckboys, why men fall for hot-and-cold BPD girls, and why you can have more butterflies for a man you make eye contact with on your commute than you do for the perfect on paper guy your friend set you up with.

But that passion is not necessarily a sign that your relationship might be good. In the real world, your paramour probably isn’t a fairy king who has kidnapped you against your will or a vampire who has to wrestle with his desire to drink your blood. In the real world (or, as I reflect upon these examples, in the fictional world too), the obstacles that create yearning are anti-correlated with domestic felicity.

Socially savvy people know what cheap tricks they can use to induce that feeling in another person (no, I’m not teaching you) and they are not the tools of good, stable people.

Of course, this isn’t the only reason you shouldn’t trust your gut. There are others.

1. Your natural system for being attracted to people evolved in a very different environment to the one we find ourselves in. The sexiest men often have traits that make them very good cavemen but kind of sub-par actuaries.

2. It’s a very difficult area to study, lots of arranged marriages allow the couple to court and lots of love matches in arranged-marriage cultures are more arranged than Western dating, but most evidence finds little difference between the quality of arranged marriages and love matches. Tentatively, I think this suggests that initial attraction has little to do with long-term love.

   
   If you’re not a sociopath and your partner isn’t a sociopath, if you have similar values, if you’re building a life together and having regular sex, you probably will grow to love each other. Most cultures don’t let women court freely and yet humans evolved the capacity for romantic love anyway.

3. Lots of you are perverts. Depending on how you measure it, somewhere between a large minority to a small majority of women are interested in being dominated. You might be seeking subliminal signs that a man is dominant. Considering the top shortage – if you could take it or leave it, or only slightly prefer it – you’re better off abandoning dominance.

4. People seem to look for strange and random points of similarity. One of my friends has an ex-boyfriend who had an eerily similar joke delivery-style to her. As far as I can tell, she’s never seriously fancied anyone since. While a shared sense of humour is nice, no one would say it’s the only important thing.

5. Some say you’re “stickier” when you’re younger and less experienced. They say virgins can fall deeply and irrationally for the first people they have sex with. As you get older you become desensitised to oxytocin, you’ll get more stuck in your ways, develop taste, guard your heart, and have less time to spend mooning over someone. Sparks probably get rarer with age. The wall is bad enough already without letting age shrink your options further.

Overall, using your intuition is massively overrated in romance. You’ve been trained on a lot of bad data and it’s made you go haywire. You’re better off courting like you’re arranging your own marriage, not like you’re starring in a rom com.

If you understand the phenomenon, you can minimise its impact on you.

Looks

It is true that people, in general, get less attractive as they get older.

But, speaking broadly, we find it quite difficult to tell how old people are and overindex on cues that don’t change throughout adulthood like big eyes or height. I think this is, in no small part, because we look much younger and more attractive than people of previous generations. Provided you’re successfully combatting wrinkles, grey hairs, and weight gain, how old you look will depend mostly on how you dress and carry yourself.

If you were sexy at 20, you will probably still be attractive in your 30s. I would expect a typical 8 to drop to a 7 over the course of ten years. Nothing devastating should happen to your appearance over this time. If you’ve only just started to think seriously about your looks, you might even hit your attractiveness peak in your 30s. (More on how you can do this later.)

All the good ones get taken

Every day that passes, eligible bachelors in your age range start dating the women they are going to marry. Men get spit back out onto the apps for three main reasons.

1. There’s something wrong with him

2. There’s something wrong with her

3. Bad luck

As you get older the men who are attractive, want to get married, and don’t have ruinous personality problems get snapped up. What’s left are the men who can’t get girlfriends, aren’t interested in serious dating, and/or have been serially rejected by women after getting into relationships with them. Obviously lots of single older men are still marriage-worthy. Maybe they’ve had a bit of a glow up, matured over the years, or just had some unfortunate sources of incompatibility. But the more time passes, the less likely this becomes. My gut instinct is that it’s not worth wasting your time on men older than 35.

For a while the market gets better as men who aren’t yet ready for marriage become ready and learn to clean their rooms. But then it gets worse as functional and commitment-minded people exit forever.

The problem described above should harm men and women symmetrically. The reverse logic should also hold too. The women left in the dating market in their 30s are also, presumably, less able to get boyfriends, less interested in marriage, and/or have been serially rejected by boyfriends.

Unfortunately there are lots of factors which make this asymmetric.

1. While I think the looks-based analysis of the wall is overrated, there is still some truth to it. Women can expect their physical beauty to wane faster than a man’s.

2. Men who want children will sometimes reject older women who they find attractive because they are worried about her fertility – especially if they want several children. A woman will rarely reject a man for being too old, regardless of whether he harbours a ruinous mutational load in his loins.

3. Women who don’t want relationships don’t bother meeting men and stringing them along. If they want to use a man for sex, they can usually engage him without fuss. Men, on the other hand, when seeking short-term dalliances, will often pretend at being a serious suitor and thus, waste a good woman’s time.

4. A bad man is much more ruinous than a bad woman. So the men who get spat out into serial monogamy are more likely to carry a dangerous downside risk.

The most important factor, that reinforces all the above, is that across societies men usually prefer to date women who are younger and women prefer to date men who are older. So as a woman gets older, her potential market shrinks and, as a man gets older, his potential market grows.

Speaking in very general terms, a woman who is in her early twenties usually has all the men her age available to her as well as all the single men in their thirties too. Whereas a woman in her thirties can usually only date men in their thirties – selection effects and all. A man in his early twenties can usually only date women his age – but that’s okay, they haven’t been so adversely selected yet – and when he’s in his thirties he can still date the women in their twenties, as well as the increasingly desperate thirty-somethings.

Women experience this as a sharp decrease in their sexual market value while men, even though they are also getting uglier, will feel as if they’re getting sexier.

I ran a small poll in my first post. It totally confirms my preconceived notions. We, as a culture, love to blame men for their perversions. I think this is why we blame the wall on their shallow desire for youth. But, in my experience, a man is perfectly happy to date women a little older than him, but a woman ‘gets the ick’ if her paramour is younger than her.

In my poll, single men were on average willing to date six years younger and three years older. A small handful of men were willing to date more years older than younger, but they were typically 20 year olds who didn’t want to date under 18s. Some of the older men didn’t even want to date women as old as they were – I assume because they want children.

The women were the opposite of the men but more extreme. The average woman was willing to date two years younger and eight years older. In fact, there were more women who were willing to date 10+ years older than 3 years younger.

Sexual market value is not marriage market value

It’s very difficult to know what your league is.

I can’t see myself accurately in the mirror. I go from thinking I’m a beautiful goddess to thinking I’m a horrible bin raccoon. People say things from time to time but you can’t trust them. My husband once said I’m the most beautiful woman he’s ever met and he definitely can’t be trusted. (He also once said that I look like Julia Roberts, which I think meant “I find Julia Roberts attractive.”)

My friends aren’t going to tell me anything useful. And even when they are unusually candid it’s difficult to assess taste versus objective value on the market.

Sometimes you can learn general rules about beauty and assess yourself based on those. But people are always trying trying to sell you snake oil, so it can feel like playing with astrological charts.

Most women end up defaulting to assessing their attractiveness by working out how many people find them attractive and comparing that yardstick to other women they know. This is a very confusing signal with a lot of dishonesty and noise, but it probably is the best you have.

But, I think this signal leads you to overrate your value on the marriage market place.

First, you can probably sleep with a man who is out of your league but you can’t lock him down. That man will probably pretend to have honourable intentions and, especially if you reject him, you may never know what he was after.

Second, your marriage market value will decline quite quickly. You might be assessing people based on your league a couple of years ago rather than your current one. If you’re too slow to update you might throw away your best option.

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Age informed tricks and tips

So, what is to be done?

My best advice is that you shouldn’t waste time. If you’re young, don’t focus on work or having fun. Start dating for marriage now. You’ll have an easier time finding a great man.

The best age of man to target is probably younger than you think. I think you should focus your attention on men in their mid twenties. In my poll, the average age of men in relationships was 31, two years older than the single men, but they met their wives/girlfriends at a median age of 25. I recommend any woman 27 and younger to aim for people in their mid twenties. They are probably not thinking about marriage yet but they will be after a couple of years. And they haven’t hit their peak sexual market value yet so you can buy a great guy at a discount.

If you’re older and want to have children soon, you don’t want to be in a relationship for a few years before you get married. So you are looking for the kind of man who already knows he’s looking for a wife. Ideally you want a man whose friends are starting to get married. I wouldn’t risk dating a man under 28 unless you have evidence that his social group marries young. In person this is easy to find out. Presumably, you’re meeting because you have mutual friends.

Online there are clues you can pick up on. Do any of his pictures show him as someone’s best man? Is he holding a baby? Is he religious?

If you don’t get any of these clues, I would aim for 30. After that milestone birthday, he’s probably thinking about being a serious grown up.

When possible, you should also focus on men who haven’t been single for very long. Forget silly notions about rebounds. Snap up your newly single friends ASAP. Don’t wait for a respectful mourning period.

After some time on the apps, men pick up tricks for optimising their profile and they work out that their league has improved since they were last hawking their wares. Look for clues that the profile is bad but the man is good. If he has a high IQ job and his prompts are generic, he probably isn’t dumb, just poorly versed in Hinge.

If his pictures look like they were taken by or with an ex-girlfriend that probably means he has a recent ex-girlfriend and other women are arbitrarily ruling him out. What better arbitrage could there be?

Thanks to everyone who took my survey! I’m donating £200 to Give Directly on behalf of an anonymous responder.

Eighty six people filled it out. If I get about a hundred more responses, I will make some nice data viz but at current numbers it looks a bit lumpy.

Take my survey here

I promise that I will deliver useful advice soon. But first, I must give you a blackpill.

In the era of good sitcoms, probably when most of our parents were hooking up, you could just accidentally fall into a marriage. If you were born in 1960, over three quarters of your peers would be married by 30. Only about 15% of people should expect to be terminally unwed.

This is the world of Sex in the City and Friends and it’s totally lost to us.

One of my friends jokes that if you ask anyone how their parents got together, the story sounds insane. This is certainly true of my parents. They met in the spring of 1995, they were engaged by the summer, married in the winter, and I was born nine and a half months after that. It all worked out alright.

Marriage rates have fallen so quickly that you can assume that if you’re a single woman today, you probably won’t get married at all.

If you were born in 1960, you had an 85% chance of getting married by the time you turned 40.1 This fell by over 10% for women born in 1970 and by over 10% again for women born in 1980. At every age from 25 on, women born in 1990 were about 10% less likely to be married than women from 1980. So if 62% of women born in 1980 were married by 40 what does that leave me to predict …..

My guess is that only half of people born in 1990 will end up married. For every year after 1990, knock another percentage point off.

This means that for literally every age cohort, if you aren’t already married, you probably won’t get married.

So let’s say you’re about 30. About a quarter of your friends are already married. Only another fifth or so are going to get married. Look around and take stock. Are you in the most-marrying fifth? (Or quarter of remaining unmarried women) Are you going to beat all the girls with boyfriends and fiancées?

I’m not writing this to upset you. I’m writing this to light a fire in you.

The future steps of this guide are going to recommend that you put in some serious effort. I’m going to tell you lose some weight, go on a lot of dates, and even do some maths.

I hope I’ve convinced you that you want a husband. That alone shouldn’t persuade you to put in lots of work. You probably also want a steady flow of oxygen to your lungs but only in dire emergencies do you expend any effort to ensure this happens.

This is a dire emergency. Something has gone horribly wrong with our matching technology and/or our settling-down technology. Dropping a percentage point every year, we have been frogboiled into accepting this as normal. This is actually a disaster, the likes of which our civilisation has never seen. I think you should take seriously the idea that this might not work out for you and respond accordingly.’

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“I’m not an average person so I don’t have average odds of getting married”

Lots of people on the internet seem to think their very high IQ social circle is an island protected from general trends, as though your A* in GSCE Geography protects you from spinsterhood, just as your careers counsellor promised. Some people are one bad customer service interaction away from thinking that tradies can’t understand hypothetical questions. Honestly, it’s a wonder you people get into Ubers.

I expect my audience to be pulled in opposite directions. High education levels increase your odds of getting married, mostly by protecting you from intractable unwed cohabitation. But city living and faithlessness are a bad combination for the nuptially inclined.

My friend and colleague Will Hewitt has vibecoded an excellent calculator. Claude uses data beyond our ONS but is just as pessimistic about the numbers as I am.

Have a play around (if you dare).

Calculate your odds

Help me gather empirical data to improve future episodes. Fill out the survey. I will give one randomly selected person £100 or give £200 to an effective charity of their choice.

Appendix for sociopaths

If you want some proper motivation, get out a pen and paper and do something a bit fucked up. Write down the names and relationship statuses of all your friends and work out where you fall on the distribution for odd of getting married.

I just wrote down the names of all my female friends who are roughly my age. Of thirty eight women, eleven are married, two are engaged, thirteen are in relationships and twelve are single.

It we were nationally representative, I should expect about 45% to end up married, 20% long-term cohabiting and 35% single. But actually we’re an unusually educated, south asian, and religious group, so I’m going to say it’s more like 55%, 5% and 40%.

My napkin maths tells me that about twenty one are going to end up married, two in long-term cohabitations and the rest single. I think the two who are engaged are definitely going to get married and, knowing the people involved, I think that six of those couples are headed marriage-ward too. (I’ve even been privy to some exciting ring chat.) I have my suspicions about who the two unmarried cohabiters will be.

Of the seventeen remaining, only two more will make it down the aisle. If I were single now, I would look at my friends and internalise the fact that there a lot of beautiful and interesting women who are going to end up single. And I would be trying my best to be more cunning, diligent, and beautiful than them.

Here is a picture of us at our wedding.

To maintain his impeccable SEO I’m not going to name him but here’s his CV.

• Oxbridge graduate

• Successful career with a very good long-term earning potential

• Lots of friends, both men and women

• A good relationship with his family

• A good person – thoughtful, kind, has a backbone, seeks to improve the world in measurable ways

• Has good relationship skills e.g. he disagrees well, controls his emotions etc

• Wants children

• 6ft1, in shape, handsome

• Reads books and is cultured and knowledgeable about a range of things

• Has hobbies – walking (or ‘hiking’ in American English), plays several instruments, cooks, climbs)

• No mental or physical health problems

• All his grandparents lived into their 90s (other people don’t think this is important but they should)

• Good social skills that work in a range of settings

• Demonstrates the kind of masculine virtue that people are aiming for when they talk about ‘getting the ick’

• Romantic, considerate, kind

I basically found someone who has the full checklist of things that most people want. Though I am a catch, I’m not as obviously desirable as my husband is. And, as we all know, there are way more university educated women than men. It’s tough out there. So how did I find him?

I had a very methodical process. My main skill is that I think strategically about things other people do on autopilot. I’ve done a lot of thinking about this question. It is, after all, the most important thing I will ever do in my life.

This is a multi part series. I’ve written most of it and I plan to publish weekly. This is the list I’ve roughly drafted so far, but I expect it to change in response to comments.

• You should want a husband

• You’ll probably die alone

• The wall is real but not for the reasons you think

• Don’t trust your gut

• A mathematical approach to settling

• In defence of settling

• 7 Rules for using the Aria method

• What traits should you look for

• How to be prettier

• How to dress

• How to act sexier

• Men’s preferences are legitimate

• Use the apps. Move to a big city. It’s not the 1990s anymore.

• Design your best dating app profile

• How to give a good first date

• Are you too cooked to fancy anyone?

• Datemaxing motivation

• Make him chase

• How to act wifeable

• Yes, you should be good in bed

• Ambient, low effort sexiness

• The fuckboy plague

• The dating to boyfriend pipeline

• Who should you prioritise

• Dump early dump often

• The boyfriend to husband pipeline

Help me gather empirical data to improve future episodes. Fill out the survey. I will give one randomly selected person £100 or give £200 to an effective charity of their choice.

Part 1: You should want a husband

Finding a spouse should be the number one priority in your life.

The right partner will make every other goal in your life easier to achieve.

If your priority is your career, you will probably be more successful with a well-chosen spouse. In some cases this will be a partner in a similar field and you guys can pass each other networks and gossip. In some cases you may prefer someone who is willing to put their career on the backburner and support you by taking care of everything else in your life.

If you’re aiming for success in politics, or the arts, or you work tirelessly for a really important altruistic cause, then marrying someone with a steady income will make you able to take the risks you need to.

Of course, if you plan on having children, the right partner makes all the difference. Your children are literally half your husband’s and will be full of his DNA. If your husband is attractive but kind of lazy, then your kids will on average be a bit attractive and a bit lazy. If your husband is funny and intelligent but has a mean streak, then your kids will probably be a little like that too.

And while most enterprising women can probably think up a way to get the sperm they need to make a baby, a conscientious pair of hands from a highly invested individual is harder to come by.

Even if you just want hedonic pleasure, you’re probably better off with a spouse than without. Sure, if you’re a socially normal twenty-or-thirty-something, then being carefree and single is pretty great. But, you’ll grow old regardless of whether you get married.

At some point, you’ll stop being hot and single and become an old maid. And you will go on to spend more of your life as an old maid than as a hot and single lady. You should resist the marshmallow and spend the currency of youth on securing happiness in your future. Also married people are happier. People who value hedonism should take this consistent and cross-cultural finding seriously.

As long term trends show that only functional people are deciding to get married and everyone is getting lonelier, we should expect the hedonistic returns to marriage to improve.

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But, this is the wrong way to think about life and I disavow it. Your priorities when you’re young and single are different to what they will be when you’re older. You should expect to value sex and social status less than you do now. As you get older, you should predict that you will want children more than you do now. And you should expect to want more children than the number you end up having.

I’m addressing the small number of people who don’t want to get married because they want to maximise some other value because I understand that way of thinking. At a formative age I read too many books about teenagers who save the world. On some level I believe I should be optimising for one Very Important Thing and anything that doesn’t aid the Very Important Thing is a distraction and any person of strong character would jettison those meaningless distractions in a heartbeat. Some might call it autism. Whatever it is, it is the psychological disposition that draws people to eating disorders and Effective Altruism. (Two things I continue to dabble in from time to time.)

In the general imagination, genius comes with obsessiveness. We think incredibly successful people are also incredibly driven and are willing to sacrifice their personal lives for their success. This is one of the many memes brought to you by the just world fallacy.

But that doesn’t seem to be the case. Patrick Collison is not just obsessed with payments. He’s happily married, widely read, and strong. Taylor Swift bakes and hangs out for days with her aging parents.

Ironically, the small number of people I know who have dedicated everything in their life to one thing, usually something professional, are weird and unlikeable in ways that affect their professional success. The one time I met an actually successful person whose whole life was about one thing, he was later arrested for fraud. (And he was still weird and unlikeable.)

Diversify your fulfilment. Also, put your savings in an index tracker.

Hardly anyone is better off without a life partner. Maybe 1% of the population. Loads of people, on the other hand, are wrong about themselves and their romantic preferences. Most people learn really crucial things about love as they get older and they try out a few relationships. If you think you’re better off alone, you’re more likely to wrong about yourself than you are to be a freak. Noted asexual freak (complimentary) Scott Alexander is happily married.

“I don’t need a husband, just a boyfriend”

It’s true that you can get basically everything I’ve described from having a long term committed partner. So why do you, in 2026, need a ring?

I talk about finding a husband because I’m talking about finding someone who is committed to you for the rest of your life. Due to the legality of no-fault divorce and a society that will not ostracise people for reneging on their marital vows — marriage is actually just a piece of paper. But, despite that, marriage is doing better than ever.

The world is complicated and you are unpredictable. But! It does have trends! For some reason, the people who decide to get married are better at staying together. Maybe it’s just because marrying-types are more conscientious and actually getting married does nothing. Or maybe it’s because society at large reinforces their relationship in ways that make a meaningful difference. Maybe it’s because the legal faff involved with separation provides just enough friction to hold some couples together. Maybe it’s because, even if you think it’s no big deal when you do it, going back on a promise you made in public is shameful to you. I make no claims about why marriage works, I’m simply observing that it does.

I don’t think you can be so certain that marriage is just a piece of paper that it isn’t worth doing, just in case you’re wrong.

In truth, I suspect many of the people who refuse to get married are quietly maintaining their outside options, they are trying to save face because the person they want to marry is dragging their feet, or despite the outward appearance of felicity, the relationship has serious issues and both parties suspect they are headed for splitsville.

Don’t let the propaganda from these fools con you out of longterm happiness.

The first thing is an interesting topic for a book, and Kearney explores the key questions in a data rich and clear way. But she also dedicates loads of pages to how brave she is to be speaking up about this issue and how really she isn’t socially conservative.

The most annoying consequence is that the book has lots of tedious paragraphs like this.

I thought about a conversation I had recently had with a different economist in a different setting who reacted negatively when I mentioned the importance of family structure to children’s outcomes. He bristled, suggesting to me that I sounded “socially conservative”, in a way that implied “not academically serious.” I countered, “You are always talking about the things you are doing for your kids and how much time their activities take up in your life. Why would you be offended by the suggestion that maybe other kids would also benefit from having the involvement of two parents, and in particular a father, in their lives?”

The actual substantial problem is that she does not engage properly with right wing explanations for the data she presents – more and more children are being raised by single mothers and this seems to have a strong impact on their educational outcomes, future earnings, odds of going to prison and odds of becoming single parents themselves. She doesn’t ask obvious questions about whether there’s a genetic explanation for these kids’ bad outcomes.

In fact, she frequently presents data that implies there’s a genetic component without even acknowledging that a person could possibly think this. This is what she has to say when talking about gaps in kindergarten test scores between rich and poor kids.

“Although these achievement gaps cannot be definitively linked to differences in parental investments, the fact that they are observed in kindergarten suggests that they are driven by factors that predate (in the children’s lives) anything that could be attributed to the school environment. That shines a spotlight on home environment, early-childhood experience, and even in-utero experiences.”

(Or maybe, just maybe, there are some important pre-utero factors that can impact a person’s life.)

I think it’s plausible that deadbeat dads have bad genes and pass those genes onto their kids and that is a partial explanation for why those kids have worse outcomes. I’d like to know if that’s true and to what extent it’s true, but I’ll have to read a different book to get those answers.

That being said, the book is data-rich and interesting, and here’s what I learned.

The rise of single-parent households

There has been a substantial decrease in the number of children living with married parents. In 1980, 77% of American kids had married parents, now only 63% do. Most of the decline has happened in families without college-education.1 Educated mothers are getting married almost as much as they used to. (When educated women forgo marriage they also, mostly, forgo children too)

The data suggests that this is not because of happy progressive reasons. These children are not living with parents who are living together in stable unions, but have eschewed marriage because they are too modern for that sort of thing. Nor are they mothered by girl-bosses who picked out a top quality father from a sperm-bank and decided to do it by herself. Most of these children are raised by single mothers with little or no support from the dad and they are born to poor mothers.

Kearney’s graph above is statistically naughty. The proportion of Americans not completing high school is not the same as it was forty years ago. Nor is the proportion of Americans who are going to college. She talks about these groups as though they are a static monolith through this period but that is not the case. 

Statistics make it difficult to tell outright lies but they make it easy to wildly exaggerate. She’s presented women with no high school, women with no college, and women with college as though they have been the same group since 1980. Actually the proportions have changed quite dramatically. The 70th percentile woman, by academic attainment, probably didn’t have a college degree and now she does. This means if marriage rates are determined purely by how good at school you are, marriage rates could have been stable overall but declining for each of the education groups that Kearney has created.

This effect overall means that comparing women without high school in 1980 and now is a fool’s errand and it renders a lot of Kearney’s analysis irrelevant.2

While I dislike the way she presents the information, Kearney is right about her core thesis: marriage is declining and that the rise of single parenthood has been concentrated among less educated and poorer mothers. 

For unmarried parents, the fathers usually stay around for a few years. At the time these children are born, 74% of the mothers and 90% of the fathers say they expect to get married. But by the time the child is five, only a third of those couples are still together. In another third the parents are separated but the father is somewhat involved. In the last third, the father is completely absent.

Unfortunately, these fathers are not paying for the upkeep of their children. Only about half of single mothers have child-support agreements with the fathers of their children. Of this half, only 44% of them received the full payment owed. 

This is a problem. Children raised in single-parent households have much worse outcomes. Children raised by single parents, when controlling for other factors, are less likely to complete college. And, this effect has been getting stronger over time. They also are more likely to have behavioural problems, go to prison, and be single parents themselves when they are older.

To some extent this is a selection effect. If marriage has become the preserve of the middle class, then we should expect the children of married parents to have better, more middle class outcomes regardless – your personality is heritable after all.

But even beyond that, single-parenthood is worse. If you have two parents in a house then there are two adults who can dedicate their incomes and time to their children. That kid then has more resources. Unsurprisingly, the children of married couples spend more time with both their parents. And the children of high-income parents have more money spent on them and are therefore more likely to do sport, athletics, music, dance or art.

Some parents are Bad Actually

Kearney then uses the facts above to promote marriage but I’m dissatisfied with her exploration of the counterfactual. The average dad might have a really positive impact on their kids' lives. But not all dads are the average dad. Some dads are long term out of work and contribute nothing to the family’s finances. They don’t pick up after themselves and add to the household chores rather than help with them. They are addicted to drugs or alcohol, they’re violent, they make for terrible role models, and they burden the psyche of the already-overextended mother with their presence.

And Kearney brings up evidence to support this claim. There is a study from Ohio that measures the difference in outcomes between the children of men who committed the same crimes but receive different sentences. They indicate that if a parent is incarcerated  and therefore taken away, then their child is less likely to go on to commit a crime themselves. She also cites the ethnographic work of two sociologists who interview 162 single mothers and write their findings up in a book called “Promises I can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood before Marriage.” They suggest that many women don’t marry their children’s fathers because they do not see them as a reliable source of economic security and stability.’

Obviously, lots of dads who leave aren’t total criminals. But clearly, some parents are more dedicated to parenting than others. The American Time Use Survey has found that highly educated parents spend less time on leisure activities, sleep and household chores. They spend that extra time with their children even though they also work more hours. I don’t know if this itself is going to make a big difference on a child’s outcomes but I do know that conscientiousness is heritable.

People grow up to be like their parents

Genes and culture are both important and I am going to controversially suggest that people often grow up to be like their parents.

Except for some rare extenuating circumstances, I think fathers who leave their children and skip out on their child support payments are bad people. I think women who have unplanned pregnancies with unreliable men make bad decisions. I think people pass on traits like criminality and impulsivity to their children. Similarly, I think a child born to hyper-educated and conscientious parents inherit some traits that make them more likely to go to university.

If we could wave a magic wand and guarantee that every child grows up with both of their parents, there would still be a disparity in outcomes between the children of the elite and the children of high-school dropouts.

What’s the causal direction?

There is good evidence that suggests that it’s definitely not just bad genes. In the US, different states brought in more liberal divorce laws at different points. Using data from the censuses from 1960 to 1990, before and after the laws were being implemented, you can see that these legal changes increased the number of divorces and subsequently, children had worse levels of education, lower incomes, and more marital churn themselves when compared with similar children in states with stricter divorce laws.

This suggests to me that the act of parents splitting up, not just the traits that make splitting up likely, has a deleterious impact on children.

Girls don’t like boys, they like cars and money

So why is marriage in decline? In the book Kearney puts across one main theory. She says that women don’t really want men around. They like babies and they need sperm for that. They like money, and often men can help with that. But, if men aren’t earning that much more than them, they can make off with their sperm and be happier without them. She hasn’t quite put it like that. (I don’t even think this is what she believes. If I pressed her on it, I’d guess that she would say that she thought cultural factors were more important but she’s an economist, and therefore only argues for the theory that she has data for.)

She says:

Since the 1980s, economic trends have favoured workers with college degrees, making it harder for those without a college degree to obtain a secure footing in the workforce with a steady, well-paying job. Men without college degrees have seen their earnings stagnate and employment rates fall. Women, meanwhile, have experienced increases in average earnings regardless of their education level. This change has stripped many men of their traditional role as breadwinner for the family and, in simple terms, made them less desirable marriage partners.’’

What this means is that between 1990 and 2020, college educated women earned about 70% of what college-educated men earned. Now they earn 76% of what college-educated men earn and this corresponds with a modest drop in marriage rates for college-educated mothers. On the other hand, non-college-educated women went from earning 54% of what non-college-educated men earned to 74%. This has corresponded with a much greater decrease in their marriage rates. Also, in areas where women tend to earn more than men, marriage rates are lower.

She then looks at papers that track marriage rates in the places that have been most heavily hit by declines in manufacturing and sees that yes, a decrease in manufacturing jobs and an increase in the number of robots used – something that we should expect to impact male employment more than female employment – decreases the number of new marriages and increases the number of births to unmarried women.

However the opposite doesn't seem to hold. Areas that benefited from the fracking boom, i.e, places where the employment of non-college-educated men was boosted more than women’s incomes, they found that there was an associated increase in the number of babies born but there was no marked increase in marriages.

This is plausibly because, after marriage rates fall, social norms shift, and people are less likely to want to get married at all. During the coal boom of the 70s and 80s, when single-motherhood was rare, the marriage rate went up as well as the number of children born.

Of course this model can’t explain what’s happening fully – 74% is still less than 76%. If the underlying cause was truly about relative earnings, then we should see a world in which poor women were more likely to be married. In fact, considering the diminishing utility of money, we should expect poor women to be much more motivated to marry, regardless of their relative incomes.

Marriage Penalties

The book completely ignores marriage penalties. If people get poorer by getting married to each other, it makes perfect sense that they wouldn’t then get married. I think it is a massive oversight that she doesn’t discuss this.

If you assume that 20 to 49 year old Americans would marry someone who earns the same as them, the average single American is facing a potential marriage tax of 2.69%. The top-line federal income tax brackets are marriage neutral, but other features of taxes and benefit programs penalise marriage. As a result, the marriage penalty is higher for poorer families who receive more in benefits. So for the bottom quintile, who presumably need the money more, the average marriage tax is 3.71%. For the top quintile it is 1.49%.

They also found that a one percent increase in marriage penalties decreased the odds of getting married later by 3.69% in women with children. (And 1.12% for women without.) For a 25-year-old woman, in the bottom quintile of earnings, with a child, her marriage tax rate reduces her chances of being married at 35 by 7.52%.

There are lots of things we need to consider when designing taxes and benefits. Most policymakers want

1. The children of poorer families to have the best chance in life – which will often mean removing barriers that stop their parents from marrying and staying together

2. Women in abusive relationships to feel able to escape their situation without worrying about losing benefits for them and their children

3. Benefits to be progressive, meaning we give more to people on lower incomes

You could achieve 1 and 2 with more UBI-like systems but those are very expensive. Amber Lapp of the Institute for Family Studies suggests here that they should double the threshold for benefits like Medicaid for married couples. I’m sure this would create some new distortions in the system, but they probably wouldn’t be as bad as the distortions we currently have.3

The end of shotgun marriages

With the rise of abortion came the death of the shotgun marriage. Until about 1970 if a man got a woman pregnant, the expectation from all parties – the couple, her family, his family, the broader community etc – was that he would marry her.

Janet Yellen’s theory is that before abortion and widespread contraception, having a child out of wedlock was so damaging to women that they would only have sex with men if they believed that, in the event they got pregnant, the man would step up and marry her. This meant that women were extracting these promises from men, only having sex with them if they thought they would follow through, and other men were enforcing this norm because they benefited from this norm existing. Close association with a cad and charlatan would probably damage your own standing among the women in your community. If you were married your wife would be angry with you for remaining friends with such a person. If you were single, the taint of this man would rub off on you and you’d struggle to get a girlfriend.

The rise of contraception and abortion meant that women who didn’t mind using contraception, and didn’t have an ethical objection to abortion, no longer extracted the promise of marriage from the men they slept with. This undermined the collective bargaining power of women and sex without commitment became a mainstream relationship norm.

Now, as the choice of whether to have an abortion is primarily the choice of the pregnant woman, a man could reasonably say “I wanted her to have an abortion. I don’t see why I’m on the hook for her choice.” He doesn’t feel the need to step up. And men and women who are happy with contraception don’t want to pressure him to.

And so, outside of isolated communities where abortion is frowned upon, shotgun marriages don’t really happen. Despite the hardship of solo-parenting, lots of women still want children and they are still having these children alone and so begins the “feminization of poverty” that comes from the uptick of single-mother households.

What does Kearney think we should do about it?

This is the weakest part of the book.

In summary, here are the things we should do to address the challenges I have laid out in this book

Work to restore and foster a norm of two-parent homes for children

• Work to improve the economic position of men without a college level of education so the are more reliable marriage partners and fathers

• Scale up  government and community programs that show promise in strengthening families and improving outcomes for parents and children from disadvantaged backgrounds

• Have a stronger safety net for families, regardless of family structure

  Here are some things I do not think we should do

• Accept a new reality where the two-parent family is a thing of the past for less educated, lower-income Americans

• Bemoan the economic independence of women

• Stigmatize single mothers or encourage unhealthy marriages

• Run unsuccessful government marriage programs

• Keep government assistance meager under the mistaken assumption that doing so will incentivize more marriages and two-parent families

I don’t think that any of these policy solutions make sense with the evidence she presents throughout the book

Boost men’s wages

“I want to be explicit in stating the following: the growth in women’s earnings and economic opportunities is a positive social trend, unequivocally.”

And then talks about ways she wishes to bolster the earnings of working class men to make them more marriageable. I think it’s worth emphasising a fact from earlier in the book where she acknowledges women still earn less than men. While the gap is shrinking, it still exists. Sure, maybe she wants to widen the gap by increasing men’s wages instead of by depressing womens’ – but she keeps reiterating that women gaining financial independence is a good thing. You can’t have your cake and eat it.

Also, earlier in the book she shows that in areas that have already experienced the collapse of marriage, boosts to men’s earnings, relative to women’s earnings don’t boost marriage rates anyway.

Criminal Justice Reform

She then talks about how we should do criminal justice reform to decrease the number of American dads in prison.

“Criminal justice reform and prisoner reentry efforts will also be needed to reduce the number of American men who spend time incarcerated and to help those who do have criminal backgrounds reintegrate into society and the workforce.”

Earlier in the book she uses fathers with criminal convictions as an example of how some children are not better off with their fathers around. She points to studies which show that when fathers escape prison due to lenient judges their kids are worse off.

Useless Programs

She then writes about a series of Bush-era policies that tried to strengthen marriage.

“An obvious way to help strengthen families would be to run programs that encourage stable marriages. But such efforts have been tried and they generally did not work well. Early in the first decade of the 2000s, the federal government took up the cause of trying to encourage healthy, stable marriages by funding community programs with that goal. The Healthy Marriage Initiative, launched by the Bush administration in 2001, provided federal funding for voluntary programs run by local and state governments and community organizations to promote marriage among low-income couples with children. The results of these studies were not very encouraging. The programs appeared to help people in some ways, but they didn’t meaningfully increase marital stability among participating couples.”

So instead she says that we should have fatherhood promoting programs instead of marriage promoting programs.

“There is not a trend toward programming that promotes strong families (not necessarily marriage) and engaged fatherhood. Fatherhood programs are being designed and implemented around the country, as discussed in chapter 6. Some fatherhood programs work with dads on parenting techniques and conflict-management skills. Others additionally work to address personal barriers in the form of unstable employment or previous incarceration. There is still much to be learned about how to design these programs in such a way that they produce meaningful improvements, but it seems clear that building on and experimenting with programs that engages fathers and that work to improve parental cooperation and active co-parenting between mothers and fathers is more likely to be a successful approach than programs that focus on encouraging or sustaining marriage per se.”

But she’s already shown, in the book, that these programs don’t work either. She mentions one study about one of these programs and it shows that men who participated had better “self reported nurturing behaviour” but didn’t actually spend any more time with their children. Basically, they learned the right, researcher-approved language for talking about their kids.

Welfare

Then, after saying that in order to address inequality we need much more generous welfare payments for all parents – single and married alike. But after that she says,

“Even in Denmark, a bastion of public welfare that includes free college tuition, universal access to high-quality health care, universal high-quality pre-K, and a generous childcare and maternity-leave policy, the influence of family background on many child outcomes is about as strong as it is in the US.”

Basically, everything Kearney proposes to counteract the decline of the marriage contradicts other things she says. On her own terms, she has nothing to offer.

That shouldn’t surprise us. Basically everything I’ve listed above – more welfare, less incarceration, raising wages for people without college, spending money on random ineffectual feel-good programs – is just part of your average Democrat platform. She’s written a book about something the Democrat establishment doesn’t really care about and then concludes that all their solutions were right anyway.

Based on what Kearney has said, if I were serious about countering the decline in marriage in the working class US, I would not conclude that more of the same was good enough. I would probably pay people to get married – either through tax breaks or some kind of cash payment, and then I would make it difficult to get divorced.

But I also don’t think she’s convinced me that the main problem even is the decline of marriage. I’ve been convinced that on the margin, more people should get married and once married, we should stop them from getting divorced.

But I don’t think the main issue here is that people aren’t marrying enough. I think it’s because there aren’t enough good men in the US. 9% of all American men are incarcerated at some point in their lives, 19% still live with their parents and 15% don’t work. Who knows how many are addicts, abusive, or criminals who haven’t yet been caught? What right-thinking woman is going to take on that burden?

Now, I don’t expect that men were better in the past. They were probably just as violent and useless – if not more so. But it used to be much worse to be an unmarried woman. Women were paid less, single mothers were much more maligned, and it was easier to fall into life threatening poverty. 

The fact that it’s possible, through a combination of welfare and job opportunities, to live an adequate existence without male support means that lots of women and children are much better off. The consequences aren’t “unequivocally good”, but I don’t think they’re so dire that I’d wish to reverse this trend.

I think that the decline in marriage is, in large part, the result of women looking at what possible men are on offer and saying “no thanks.” It’s difficult to know in what proportion of these cases, the women are making choices that are good for them and their children, and in what proportion of these cases they are missing out on resources, love, and support that would make everyone better off. But I think that a lot of these women are canny. At the point at which these children are born, the women are less likely to think that they will eventually get married than the men do. They don’t seem to be choosing motherhood while completely ignorant of what their future is going to look like.

Kearney, towards the end of her book, has a story about an Uber driver she talked to. He said that he has a daughter, but she’s not with his kids mother. Kearney asks why and he gives a half-hearted answer and says that maybe they’d get married and live together if he saved up enough money. She concludes that surely, if he loves his daughter and gets along with his ex, they could make it work.

I also have an Uber driver story  — who the fuck doesn’t. When I was in New Mexico, I had a half hour journey with a driver, a 29 year old woman who I’ll call Jane. Jane was a single mum with a seven year old son. She had been training to be a nurse but during the pandemic her son’s nursery closed down so she switched to doing UberEats deliveries so she could take care of him while working. He’d hang out with her in the back of the car.

Jane and I talked about boys. A man she had a situationship with tried to call her and she rejected the call to keep talking to me. The problem with him, she said, was that he just wasn’t responsible enough. He had a factory job, but he had only just started it and had a history of not sticking with anything. He’d been arrested a few weeks ago for a DUI. “He’s just not in the position to be a good step-father.”

I then asked her about her son’s father. She said that she was twenty one when they were dating and he had been much older. She found out, after she was pregnant with her son, that he had been lying to her about his age and mysterious “other things.” She broke up with him and moved in with her mum.

I think Jane has done the right thing for her son by breaking up with his father. Her ominous tone implied to me that he had done something quite nasty. If I had to guess, I’d say he was sleeping with Jane when he already had a wife and family at home. I think it’s likely that Kearney’s Uber driver, even if he seemed like a nice man for the twenty minutes they were together, was, like the men in Jane’s life, too unreliable to be a father.

The argument for culture goes something like this; “most of our great grandmothers gave birth to several children, in two room shacks, and couldn’t afford a spare pair of shoes. We are richer than we’ve ever been. There is no way that people can’t afford to have children. We simply have other priorities now.”

The argument for economics is something like this; “children are as valuable as they have always been, but as we get richer the value of work and leisure has improved so much. And while we have washing machines and epidurals, children still take up a career’s worth of time and effort. People see this and then they invent rationalisations for why they don’t want as many children as their ancestors. Culture is downstream of economics here.”

In my last post I wrote about how European countries with more socially conservative beliefs actually have lower birth-rates than those with socially liberal beliefs. That may sound like I’m making a contrarian and counterintuitive argument for Team Culture but I am incredibly suspicious of all stories about how being socially liberal could lead to more children.

My best guess for why socially liberal societies could have higher birth-rates would be a general endorsement for the left. I’d say that people in socially liberal countries are happy and people are like pandas – they only make babies if their lives are good. But that sounds like bullshit to me.

So let’s examine the data more closely.

This is the strongest trend Boom found in Europe. Of the social values checked, the more people believed that a pre-school child suffers if their mother works, the fewer children they had.

The trend is sufficiently weak, and Europe is sufficiently small and similar to itself, that I thought it could be a weird fluke. I thought that maybe Scandinavian countries are very socially liberal but also have very generous pro-parent welfare policies, which means they could disrupt the rest of the data.

So I thought that before coming up with explanations, it was worth checking to see if the trend exists globally.

I have decided to compare the OECD numbers for fertility with the World Values Survey questions, to see if this trend persists.1

This graph matches the European trend. I now think it is safe to say that, in the rich world, if your people believe that a working mother somehow harms her children, this means you will have lower birth-rates. It seems that moving from this being a fringe opinion to being something most people believe, loses you one baby for every four women.

So why might this be the case?

Childcare

If most of your fellow countrymen believe that young mothers should be at home with their children, then there will be less political support for generous childcare subsidies. “Really, childcare is only used by work-a-holic harridans so why should we help them?”

But this doesn’t hold up.

Surprisingly it turns out the cost of nursery schooling has basically no impact on TFR. Austria and Switzerland have a lot in common, but in Vienna your nursery costs you 3% of your income (at that point, why charge at all?) and in Zurich it will cost you 64% – regardless you’re going to have the same number of kids.

Because countries offer very different benefits for different subsets of the population, schools start at different ages, and parental leave policies vary so much, it is difficult to get a real country by country comparison. Nonetheless, these OECD numbers seem to be the best on the market.

I’ll go into more detail about childcare policies at some point. But for now, I am unsatisfied by the childcare argument.

Weirdly, in countries where people think nurseries are bad for small children, nurseries are cheaper. (But this is a very weak correlation.)

Social pressure

Maybe the cost of childcare doesn’t really tell you much about whether people use it. In Vienna, maybe you think about dropping your child off at their cheap nursery but you can’t bring yourself to do it because you think you’re inflicting debilitating trauma on them.

While childcare may technically be very cheap, it could be too shameful and emotionally taxing to use it, so actually the cost of having two children isn’t 3% of your income, it’s actually 100%.

But there also appears to be no relationship between the number of under twos in childcare and TFR. Nor, it seems, is there any relationship with the proportion of mothers of under-twos who work and TFR.

This implies to me that it’s not really about the cost of taking care of children at all.

Hard work

If you think a child suffers from being away from its mother, you probably believe one of two things. First, there is a sacred bond between mothers and babies, and the infant is somehow psychologically damaged if they spend too much time apart.

Or, you believe that small children require a lot of attention to develop properly and there is no way to practically provide that if there are lots of children and only a few adults. And that paid workers, while able to ensure that a child eats, sleeps and doesn’t electrocute themselves, they are probably not sufficiently motivated to continually stimulate an infant in the ways that are best for brain development.

If you believe either of these things, then you probably don’t think that you can have a new baby if you already have another young child in the house because you will, by necessity, be depriving the older child of their mother’s attention.

What data can you use to test whether people think children are a lot of work? The best thing I found was the amount of time that the mother spends on care.

Now we’re starting to get a graph that looks like the first one. This could be a plausible mechanism.

Maybe it is economics after all …

This third idea seems somewhat compelling to me. Especially because the belief that when a mother works, the child suffers, has a stronger relationship with TFR than other socially conservative beliefs about women and work.

Is this a victory for team economics? Countries where mothers spend more time with babies have fewer babies – that’s not proof by any means, but it sure seems like a clue about what’s going on. It indicates that the more effort children are, the fewer children get made.

But, the effort needed to raise kids is not determined objectively. Polish mothers aren’t spending twice as much time with their kids than Belgian mothers because their babies are inexplicably more difficult. There are cultural beliefs that underpin what’s happening.

It is easy to believe that the world is progressing from conservatism to liberalism – and that if generations change their minds about something, it must be because they believe the more liberalism-y thing.

But actually, beliefs can change for other reasons too. Not everything is about the culture war. For some reason, we’re tending towards an era of baggy jeans (again), and that has nothing to do with how woke people are (and don’t let some click-monger working in the Conde Nast mines tell you otherwise). Cultures reimagine the world all the time for all kinds of reasons, “woke” being just one of them.

In this particular case, I think the birth-rate-destroying belief is not really a conservative belief about women and gender. It is actually a belief about babies. My guess is that if the World Values Survey asked whether “It takes a lot of work to raise a child well”, then we would find an even stronger correlation.

Sarah Therese is a home-schooled Canadian Christian fundamentalist and YouTuber, she’s under thirty and has five children. Classically Abby (Ben Shapiro’s sister) makes a series of half political, half lifestyle content about motherhood and “classic living”. She talks about how being a parent is your duty and without parenthood you are wasting your life. Hannah or @ballerinafarm is a retired ballerina and mother of seven, who quit her “city career” to run a farm with her husband and run in beauty pageants. The internet is full of them.

(Of course, all of these women work from home but they are not “stay-at-home mothers”. They are, in fact, professional influencers. Sarah Therese’s husband even quit his job to help her business.)

These women present an appealing and maybe even plausible answer to the birth rates issue. What if, to save humanity, we had to turn our backs on modernity and enjoy a simple life? What if men had to provide and women had to stay at home and act feminine? What if the answer lies in homemade bread and floral dresses.

If you’re of a conservative inclination, you probably want to believe that in the 1960s we invented casual sex and ‘career women’ and now Western civilisation is paying for it with a high dependency ratio and a shrinking native population.

This seems intuitively true. Historically, in Western society, women had fewer socially acceptable life paths. You could be a wife and mother, and your status was affected by how good you were at those things. Maybe, you could be a nun if that really wasn’t for you. Otherwise, you probably had to be a prostitute or an eccentric, unloved spinster.

Now, many of the most widely respected women don’t have children. In fact, it’s probably higher status for a woman to excel in a profession than it is for her to have three kids and raise them well. And, if she has these children, and puts in the effort, then she will harm her chances at excelling in that status-accruing career. Basically, the lesson of the last few decades is that women can’t have it all – and sometimes the thing they choose to give up is motherhood. (This is basically the underlying message of the Barbie movie.)

On an intra-national level, this theory holds up. Republicans have higher birth rates than Democrats.

But, strangely, on an international level, countries with conservative values do not have higher birth rates. My friends at the Boom campaign have written about how “family values”, as found in the European Values Survey, and TFR have a surprising correlation. More conservative values, like believing that one has a duty to society to have children, are held in countries with lower birth rates.

These are weak correlations but are certainly worth further thought.

In my next few blogs I’m going to see if the same trend exists for OECD countries and if it exists between states in the US. Even if this trend doesn’t hold up globally or within the US, I don’t want to minimise this result. I think it is incredibly surprising that socially conservative beliefs have little or no impact on nation-wide birth rates.

Does it mean that when women don’t feel obligated to be mothers, they want to do it more? Does it mean that more socially liberal countries compensate parents more, because they don’t feel that people are naturally obligated to provide for the next generation? Or does it mean that the more important we think motherhood is, the more difficult it becomes, and so these women have fewer children?

And if it’s not a shift in values, then why do increases in a country’s wealth cause its birth rate to fall anyway?