Deciphering Concepts of Attraction

How to interpret the femstertalk about attraction.

Readership: Christian Men
Author’s Note: This topic came out of a discussion I had with Cameron under the post, The Christian Marriage Dilemma (2021 February 26). The statements in quotes below are from Cameron.
Length: 3,650 words
Reading Time: 12 minutes

“It is a most quirky irony that in a quest to comprehend herself, a woman will speak constantly. It is by merit of solipsism and this constant need for emotional self-discovery that every woman considers herself an expert on herself, and as such, is inclined to talk at great length about herself. In terms of attraction, there is nothing a woman loves more than for a newly acquainted man to tell her something she considers true about herself. A man who seems to know a woman on the emotional level without that woman having to express herself exudes his own enchanting intrigue. By being able to communicate with women on this level, man creates his presence within her solipsistic world. “He just, like, totally gets me!”

This is oft mistaken for narcissism, but should she lack narcissism, such a quality still persists. For not only is self-obsession a product of narcissism, but likewise a product of solipsism. Therefore, being that solipsism is intrinsic to women, self-obsession is an unavoidable by-product. Indeed, a woman’s most profound hobby is that of her self-interest, chiefly, the catalogued history of emotions she has experienced, how they shape who she is, and which ones are desirable enough to be pursued for re-creation.”

Illimitable Men: A Most Solipsistic Nature (2015 September 4)

Women use “attractive” and “attraction” differently from how men do

From a woman’s perspective, her own attractiveness is not a question, because she gets instant feedback from men, in person, all the time. Women note carefully how many men are noticing, and what kinds of men notice (i.e., how attractive the men are). They know whether they are generally attractive and generally what level of man that “ends” or “lessens” at as well. Keenly. So there isn’t any need to write about it. They do write a lot about how to beautify themselves, but they don’t write a lot about what is attractive to men in that visual sense (unless they are writing to complain about it, a la “unrealistic beauty standards”), because they know very well what that is.

Therefore, when they say such and such will attract a man, they don’t mean that. They mean “keep his interest once I have caught his eye” or “make him pick me and not thot-girl”, etc.

Just like when they list qualities they like about men they mention everything but his being 6’2″, buff, athletic and so on … that’s all “understood”. It’s the other stuff they write about — stuff that’s “in addition to” what to them is obvious.

Physical and Verbal Attraction Cues and Miscommunication

“You don’t think women chronically overestimate their attractiveness? I do. I keep seeing these fatties that squeeze into the same tiny clothes that cute girls do with their fat rolls spilling out.”

A woman may dress in certain clothes for various reasons, but a woman certainly knows how many men are checking her out, at all times and in all situations. They are very much aware of the smallest details about their appearance, and how that impacts their reception of male attention. They also know when it starts to die down, and they will do backflips to keep it coming (but only for certain men, of course). Many, many, many women have written about this, how they noticed at some point that they were drawing fewer eyes, and they dislike it intensely. They know.

A woman who is overweight and dresses modestly won’t get any sexual attention from men at all. But squeezing into a dress that is too tight will get her some feedback she likes. You can rest assured of that. To her, that is better than getting no feedback.

You can easily identify the women who don’t care about feedback because they dress down, way down, so as not to entice any men to look at them — it’s easily done, and you see women doing it. For example, some married women who dress down in public are usually happily married and therefore don’t need any attention from other men. If they dress up, it’s to be respectable and classy, not to be meretricious.

Women are Indirect Communicators

 “If you’re right about these female-to-male translations, then most men have no hope for understanding.”

It’s not that hard to interpret the behavior and the verbalizations, but it’s just that with women you always have to pay at least as much attention, if not more, to what is NOT being said as to what IS being said. Women are indirect communicators and tend to use subtle, coded language.

Even a woman who appears to be speaking sincerely, for a woman, will generally not be speaking nearly as directly and openly as a man typically would be in the same situation — that is, there is still stuff being transmitted between the lines even when it seems like it’s a straightforward and direct communication. A lot of information, social context, emotional nuances, and so on, is being communicated by what they don’t specifically say — by what they leave out — and by specifically how they choose to phrase things (often much more specifically considered than many men, who can tend to be blunt hammers themselves verbally and therefore can easily miss the verbal cues coming from women and what they mean).

You have to always ask, “What is not being expressly said here but is important?”, because that is a significant part of what she is communicating. She expects you to “just get it” because women “just get” what they are not saying, or not saying explicitly, and they prefer not to say it explicitly for various reasons which they are not prone to reveal. Asking her about it does no good either. It will only show her what an ignoramus you are (in her eyes) and lower her estimation of you.

Case Study 1 — The Corporate Environment

I worked in an all-female work group for around 15 years. I was the only guy in a group that varied in size between 12-15 women. I became very well versed in indirect communication. At some point it became entertaining watching them all interact at, say, a staff meeting, trying to say things without actually saying them, directly, watching them read the other women’s faces as they were talking to determine whether and how much they needed to get more or less direct in what they were saying, without getting so direct that it would step on someone’s toes. It was like watching an improvised verbal ballet, really …. and all utterly alien to the way men generally communicate or receive communication from others.

Are women intentionally being deceptive?

“Women encrypt communication by using codewords, different word meanings, and they leave things out. Do women do this to deceive men? Or to deceive other women?”

Women don’t communicate this way with the intention to deceive, no. The intention is normally to say things in such a way as to not be so direct as to (1) offend someone, (2) place themselves in a bad light, (3) trigger an openly adverse reaction.

Men tend to be more direct and plain spoken and we tend to prefer that, other than in very specific settings with a set decorum that demands something else. Women tend to not be like that, and often tend to find men’s preferred style of communication to be rude.

In general, women are pleasure oriented, and they will do their best to stay in that mode unless/until one of the following happens.

• Their anger, shame, fear, or indignation surpasses their tolerance threshold.
• It becomes clear that they will not get what they want most.

Within the context of a relationship, however, women will break out of pleasure mode in order to implement various games and schemes for specific purposes (e.g. attention, control, etc.).

Of course women lie just like men do — they can and do intentionally deceive. But the indirect communication style, in my own experience, isn’t done to deceive but to communicate things in a way that doesn’t cause feathers to ruffle.

Do Women really think B!tchiness is Attractive???

Cameron linked to this post at the Daily Mail: Why Men Love B!tches (2021 February 24). He asked,

“Are women actually fooled into thinking men find bitchiness attractive and leave submissive women? Does she believe these things or does she know it’s BS? Besides the point of wanting to sell books for cash.”

The author is not wrong in saying that men love b!tches, but you just have to translate her words from Femstertalk to understand what she specifically means.

She is using the word “attractive” differently from how men think of attraction.

She is using the word “attraction” to mean “does the guy pay attention to me, do what I want, pursue me, and stay interested?” — that is how she is defining “attraction”.

She is not defining “attraction” as “allure”.

She is defining “attraction” as “keeping a guy who is visually attracted to me, already, interested in me over a longer period of time, chasing me, doing what I want, and on my terms”.

In all scenarios she is describing, she is using “attractive” as women tend to use it. It assumes physical/visual attraction is already present, so it’s a given that the guy is already visually/physically attracted in the sense we mean of “allured”. Women consider this to be so obvious that it doesn’t need to be mentioned.

She isn’t claiming (or at least doesn’t seem to be) that a woman who is not visually/physically attractive to a man can make a man physically attracted to her anyway by treating him like a b!tch.

Her concept of attraction might be translated into manspeak as “dominate” or “control”, and there is an element of female pedestalization required here on his part. She is talking about how to reel men in and keep them hooked as beta orbiters.  The motive is for her to maintain a steady stream of ego stoking attention.

So when women talk about a woman’s “attractiveness” (to men), they are talking about other qualities that can get the desired effect of keeping the man interested in her and not some other woman. The issue she is addressing is not whether he is expressing interest, but rather the female challenge of retaining a mans continual interest — an issue that arises when women give such men easy sex. So when you read articles or hear statements with this kind of viewpoint, you can safely assume that she’s already given away the milk for free. (Another red flag for vetting?)

It should be noted that women’s behavior has an impact on men differentially depending on the SMV rank of the man and how physically attractive the woman is. Of course, her approach will only work with men who consider the woman in question to be exceptional and not easily replaced. So her strategy doesn’t work with the top men who are most desired by women — because a woman who acts like this will get a “next”, since there is always an equally attractive replacement standing right behind her, waiting her turn to try to snag him. In order for this to work with a highly desired man, the woman has to be very, very attractive herself, and most women like that got the memo about bitchiness long before this book was written, for the obvious reasons she states here.

Her approach, though, works with the thirsty betas. Jack wrote about this problem in Why is premarital sex a sin? (2020 August 14). It’s a sin because it hands power over to the woman and sets up an inverted relational structure. But her idea is that it is not a great strategy to try to reel men in with easy sex, because that gives men what they want for a low price, and then his sexual desire cannot be leveraged for her own purposes. That’s a cruel viewpoint, but it’s also true.

So her strategy becomes, don’t give them sex, be challenging, be difficult. Be like a 5-par hole on the golf course — challenging, time-consuming, lots of arguments, tests, and traps … but there’s always the pin flag at the end giving him a glimmer of hope. That’s what she’s talking about, and it’s very effective if the woman is attractive enough to the man, and the man is thirsty enough, so that she can pull it off. If she does, she frames up the relationship totally in her own frame, with the man qualifying for her, and so it’s a total, 100% dominance win for her.

Now, whether that makes her happy in the long term is something else. But it is a very effective approach for snagging and bagging a thirsty beta male into a relationship in which she can dominate him psycho-sexually pretty reliably, provided that he desires her enough (i.e., sees her as hard to replace) for her to pull it off.

Case Study 2 — Tomi Lahren

Last August, Tomi Lahren rather famously posted a video tirade about men, which pretty much evidenced how “difficult” a date she would be.

Does this really make her much less attractive to most men? Not necessarily, depending on what the men’s options are. As we discussed:

“It was evident that Tomi Lahren’s beau that dumped her complained about her being difficult – she complained about men’s complaints about her “difficulty” (and her friends’).”

Again, the string-along B!tch approach works with thirsty betas, but not with guys who have a lot of options. Guys who have a lot of options will “next” a b!tchy woman, as I said. Lahren isn’t dating thirsty betas, she’s trying for NFL players. So she gets nexted. Makes sense to me. A thirsty beta would not next Tomi Lahren for acting b!tchy.

You’d think that she would eventually wake up and try her hand at a different strategy. But like most women of this variety, she’ll keep pounding away until she meets her fated destiny with the Wall.

What is all the hype about #met00 and “Marital Rape”?

“I bet for a lot of them it’s like being a prostitute to have sex with a man they’re not attracted to. How twisted is that?”

It doesn’t seem that twisted to me, actually.

If men are not attracted to some degree, sex can’t physically happen. So we also have an attraction test. It’s just that ours is broader because sperm is cheap, eggs are expensive, etc.

For a woman to feel violated if she is not attracted makes sense, because she feels like the sex is extraneous to her — it is the man using her for his pleasure. She is not enjoying it, but he is. So that conjures up the idea of prostitution or rape, because that is what is happening in those scenarios, too. So it does make sense to me that a woman would experience it that way. But it’s hard for men to relate because it’s an experience a man can’t have (apart from gay rape, like in prisons) because heterosexual sex can’t happen without male arousal.

“[Women never consider] the cost of them settling because they think men owe them marriage…”

Keep in mind that women have a harder marital equation to solve than we do. Men are solving for attractiveness and agreeableness, generally — Christians add more into the mix, but as we know, many times those are added in after the fact, so to speak. It isn’t that hard to find both in one woman because men are attracted to more women than vice versa. Men’s larger problem is finding such a woman who is, in turn, attracted to them, but that’s a different issue altogether.

Women are looking for two different kinds of men, really — genes men and family men. There are a few men who solve both parts of that equation (and these men are in the highest demand, for obvious reasons), but most are primarily one or the other (or none). And it’s only the first type that generates a sexual desire in women that is equivalent to the male sexual desire for women. So almost all women, if they want to marry and have children (recognizing as most of them do that this is still the best way to do that), will marry guys that they aren’t that attracted to sexually — they have no other option. Not settling sexually means kids outside of marriage, or no kids.

Attraction is not a choice — they can’t make themselves be highly sexually attracted to the family type men in the way they are attracted to the genes type men. They aren’t made that way. This doesn’t mean that women marry men to whom they aren’t attracted at all sexually … that’s only rarely the case. However, it does mean that most marriages are not ones where the woman is very sexually attracted to the husband in the way she was to guys she “just dated” when she wasn’t screening for husband qualities.

So, really, the best case for most women is that they marry a family type man to whom they are at least somewhat attracted sexually, so that the sex doesn’t feel like a violation, even if it isn’t very exciting for them.

So you can’t really separate out the forensic side of it from the other side because most women just have bad options because of how their attraction works.

The Bottom Line is about Control

“I think this woman just wrote these crap books for girlpower reasons.”

Sure, it’s all about power in relationships — that’s clear. It’s about getting the man to do what she wants.

“Yeah, [the author of the B!tch article] wants to encourage women to be something we’re not attracted to. WTF?”

She’s talking about power, not “ideal mates”. She’s talking about how to get, and keep, “hand” in a relationship, from the women’s perspective. That’s why the father wants it for his daughter (she is in control then, not whatever worthless loser male happens to marry his precious princess), but not for his wife (he doesn’t want to be subject to her control/hand). It’s about viewing relationships through the lens of power.

A man can be attracted to a woman who is in power over him, or to a woman who is not. That is not what she is really talking about. What she is talking about is taking a man who finds her attractive and using that to control him, and thereby control the relationship.

As I said above, it’s a given that the man is attracted physically in a way that the physical attraction can be used as a lever to enforce his compliance — to exert control.

“So what about her belief that the submissive yes women get left by men? Does she really believe this or is some weird translation required?”

What she is saying is that the men are more empowered, so they will eventually lose his interest to another woman who is equally attractive, but who makes herself more of a challenge. That is what she is saying there. Whether that is true depends on a lot of factors, most of them relating to the guy’s personality, and his actual options. (Are there other women who are equally attractive who are doing that and getting their way by doing so, or not?)

Remember what I said about how women use the word “attraction” in the sense of “interested in pursuing actively”. She is saying that, as between two women who are equally visually attractive, the woman who plays harder to get will get/keep the man’s attention more. That depends on his personality, I think, but it is true with at least some men, most notably those who are favored by women and thus, can find other attractive options.

The bottom line in reality here is that many very high-powered men, CEOs, managing partners in law firms, investment bankers, senators, etc., are not married to “submissive wife” type women. That doesn’t compute in the Manosphere, but it is nevertheless true. This is the kind of thing she is talking about in her book — men like this can be hooked in by a woman who is attractive enough to lure them in physically and then savvy enough to control the relationship on her terms. An actual “dominatrix” — not the classic one of male sexual fantasies but rather the more prosaic one of the man being led around by his wife, who dominates him both sexually (by controlling his access to sex) and psycho-emotionally, by running circles around him verbally and emotionally. AKA: most American marriages.

Conclusions

Jack has written tomes about how sex should be unique to marriage, but for sexually liberated people who live in a sex-centric culture, it is not. For wimmin like this, sex is for hot men, marriage is for rich men, and unfortunately, they are not the same men. Likewise, their concepts of attraction become complicated, convoluted, and messy.

Furthermore, dropping hints about what women truly find attractive shows their hand in a way that is detrimental to their frame of social control. So when women are pressed for an answer about what really turns them on, they are prone to speak in coded language, toss out a red herring for distraction, or simply change the subject.

Women know that true attraction cannot be negotiated, so why talk about it?

Related

• Σ Frame: How the Pill Affects Attraction and Mating (2020 August 26)
• Patriactionary: Oh look, yet another churchian femingelical shaming Christian men for wanting to get married for sex (2021 April 16)