Be Extremely Attractive in, Like, 3 Ways

And give up on everything else

Photo courtesy of Vladislav Igumnov

Here’s something humans all have in common: We compete in the sexual marketplace.

Here’s something else humans have in common: We usually don’t enjoy this.

I have heard it said that women don’t really enjoy having to do the whole makeup thing. And they don’t enjoy having to constantly buy new clothes, and have a new dress for every occasion, and always worry about their hair, and such and such and so on. They feel locked in a game that they don’t enjoy, and there doesn’t seem to be any winning this competition. It’s never really “over.” Not once you have a boyfriend, not once you’re married, not necessarily even if you come out as lesbian.

It’s also been said that this is men’s fault — a common feminist line of reasoning is that our society is patriarchal because women have to compete under the male gaze, and that this competition was imposed upon them by men. A common rebuttal to this line of reasoning is, no, women aren’t even doing this for men. They’re doing it for other women. For instance, no man, ever, said “I saw you in that dress before and now I think less of you. You should have bought a new one.” It’s women who will say that to you, not men (or, more accurately, they’ll say it to other women behind your back). It’s women you’re putting on layers of makeup for, not men. And it’s women you’re wearing a $9,000 diamond engagement ring for, not men. Not even your husband. And he’s the one who bought it.

The signal of that dress or of that diamond ring is about femininity. It’s a signal that says, “I’m feminine, and I value my femininity enough to display it, and I’m going to use my femininity to outcompete you in the sexual marketplace.” (And, if I’m currently in a relationship, the extra layer added to this signal is “My boyfriend/fiancée/husband values my femininity enough to invest in it. I’m solid, and he thinks I’m solid, and he spends money on me because I’m solid, so don’t even bother trying to take him away from me.”) It’s a signal of feminine value and feminine standing in the pyramid of feminine.

Here’s one more thing humans have in common: None of us signed up for this. We have to play these ridiculous games because, you know, them’s the rules. This isn’t cultural, it’s biological. The subset of rules varies from culture to culture, and from place-and-time to place-and-time, but the game never goes away. The reason we know this is because everywhere on Earth people want to have sex with each other, and therefore everywhere on Earth people have to make decisions about whom to have sex with. Ergo, competition. That’s not a cultural artifact, it’s a logistical necessity for sex to occur at all. I think it goes without saying that you wouldn’t want to live in a world where the least physically desirable men think they have a chance to be inside you (or actually do get to be inside you). We don’t compete because we want to, we do it because there’s no other way to make decisions.

And I think some women would find it surprising that most men feel the same way about masculinity. There are infinite ways to slice and dice the data about yourself (especially in the age of male-self-optimization podcasts and swiping apps where you have approximately 0.4 seconds to catch someone’s attention), infinite ways to “improve” yourself, to be more intellectual or more charming or chest-beatingly masculine, and all of it ultimately feels sort of pointless. It’s like you’re competing against some imagined foe that never actually grants you a victory. You’re never done being self-conscious; you can always keep improving along some other axis, and you can always make your dating profile a little bit better by some arbitrary metric for some imagined stereotypical woman… but then, of course, you’ll be making yourself less attractive to this other type of woman. C’est la masculinity.

And none of us signed up for this; we feel we have no choice (because we don’t). Most men, apart from those riddled with medically-anomalous amounts of testosterone, don’t enjoy being locked in a perpetual competition each hour of each day. It’s sort of a drag. It makes us self-conscious in a way that can be not only ceaseless but psychologically debilitating. It makes us do stupid things like spend 5 straight minutes thinking about the way we walk while we walk.

Now here’s the good news. You don’t really have to do all of this. Not only because that’s impossible from an energy and time perspective, but because in your quest to compete on every possible metric, you’re failing to compete in any meaningful way anyway.

Any business worth its salt knows that you can’t compete on price, quality, brand, innovation, social impact, environmental impact, and battery life all at the same time. Not only will you fail to do any of them perfectly, you won’t end up doing any of them right at all. Because you’re spreading yourself too thin, like butter over too much bread. You’re better off having two bites of good bread and then two with butter, than four bites of bread where the butter didn’t make a difference and was full of scraped holes.

Both sexes would be better off just choosing, like, 3 things that their head, heart, and loins can all get on board with to be more feminine/masculine, and give up on trying to outcompete everybody on everything else. You find the things you can live with competing on, and you just worry about those. For instance a man might just choose to 1) work out, 2) learn how to speak two more languages, and 3) play the guitar. He can leave sports, perfect style, perfect haircuts, perfect cologne, sexual dominance, and fighting to the men who would rather compete on those metrics, and just “compete” on these 3. In other words, get good enough at these 3 to be attention-grabbingly attractive. Which isn’t actually that difficult when most people aren’t focused enough to be good at anything.

A woman might wake up in the morning and, instead of worrying about her hair, her makeup, her nails, her top, her bottom, her jacket, her shoes, her warmth, her smile, her other bottom, her other top, her jewelry, and the amount of hobbies she can talk to people about, she might just choose her hair, her pants, and her books. Or her makeup, her workout routine, and her hobbies. I can assure you of one thing right now: there are men alive who, upon meeting you and seeing that you have a gorgeous long ponytail and are currently reading The Count of Monte Cristo, will literally lie down and die for you on the spot. You don’t even need a third thing. It doesn’t even matter what your teeth look like. So don’t trick yourself out of competing for that man by trying to compete for every man.

And keep in mind who you’re competing for and against. If you’re 34 years old and single, like almost all of us are at this point for Christ’s sakes, don’t waste your time signaling to other women. Signal to men. Wake up in the morning and do your hair nicely and give warm, inviting smiles to men. Carry your journal or a cute book with you, not a cute bag. Focus your time signaling to men, not women.

And if you’re a man and you’re taking testosterone injections and going to the gym to build your body, remember that it’s not women you’re attracting to come up and talk to you. It’s dudes. It’s other men. Women like a man who works out, not a man who is obsessed to the point of mental illness and doesn’t have anything going on in his life other than weights and boiled chicken. In fact you’d have more success attracting women if you were seen speaking to other women, being a trusted member of a community, not if you were seen having big muscles. Status isn’t about visual displays of theatrical qualities, it’s about displays of actual status.

There are very few proxies that work as well as actual status. And by status here, we don’t mean something like “dominance in public.” That’s a seventeen-year-old’s definition. We mean having other people know you and respect you on pretty much any level. That’s more status than most people have these days, and it’s not proxy-able. And having big biceps isn’t even a proxy, it’s a total avoidance of the thing you claim to be competing on.¹

The signal you’re looking for is not in preparing to be a sexy man, it’s in being a sexy man. It’s not in preparing to be masculine, it’s in sending out a couple of reliable signals that you are masculine, and that you can be trusted to remain masculine without collapsing from the weight of the competition. The signal you’re looking for as a woman is not that you are adorned, but that you are adorable. Not that you spend your whole paycheck on bullshit, but that you can be trusted to be cute and sexy for a man if he comes into your life. And the best way to show that, is to stop spending your whole paycheck on bullshit and instead just show that you are cute and sexy, right now, today. And that’s 90% personality and 10% accessories, not the other way around.

None of us signed up for this competition, and we don’t really have to do it anyway. Not the way we feel pressured to, at least. Just pick a few things and do those well enough to attract someone who would in fact be attracted to those few things. If you can live without a man who likes nice earrings, stop wasting your money on nice earrings. If you can live without a woman who likes perfect haircuts, stop getting them. In fact as long as you keep getting them, you keep interrupting the flow of options to you with the ones you don’t want anyway. You’re trying to drown yourself in options that you don’t even consider options.

The point isn’t to just “be yourself” or anything quite so cheesy and useless. If you want a worthy mate, you do in fact have to be worthy of a worthy mate — and that means trying. It means you do have to compete on some of these things. The point is more like, if you try to do everything well, you’ll never be the best at what you’re the best at. You water down what would have attracted the right person to you in the first place. I like a feminine woman just as much as the next guy, but I’d much rather have my wife be extremely feminine in 3 ways I adore the most, than go broke and look silly trying to be feminine and attractive in every possible way. It’s just unnecessary.

Enjoy your life and limit yourself to sending just a few really strong indications of why someone should be attracted to you, instead of drowning in competition and not being happy and not attracting a mate anyway. When you’re attracting a mate, you shouldn’t be doing false advertising or “branding.” What you should be saying is, “Here’s who I am, and here’s an ordinary day-to-day approximation of what I will be for you. If that sounds good, say hello to me.”

“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.” - Antoine de Saint-Exupery

1. This is why, to take a perfect example, Clavicular is such a profoundly stupid person to pay attention to. He’s like the Collateralized Debt Obligation of the male influence world: he’s a product that has been abstracted out of its original purpose to be sold as a standalone replacement. CDOs serve no financial purpose other than to be traded for financial speculation; Clavicular serves no purpose other than the idea of maximizing one’s looks along some arbitrary syllabus. He doesn’t even want women to find him to be mate material; he just wants young men with no self-respect to think that he does. His product isn’t about women at all, it’s about the jealousy of men.

And it’s also why, if you have been ensnared by Instagram Face and female influencers, you need to drop that nonsense immediately and without further ado. Real men don’t want a cartoon. The women online want you to think they do, but they don’t. If you turn your body into a cartoon, the only people you will attract are cartoons themselves. Women with no self-respect, and men of the shallowest variety.