Do men and women feel attraction differently?
I’m gonna present to you a controversial theory from evolutionary psychology that might make some of you angry, but others, and I want you to let me know in the comments how well it lines up with your personal experience. Then i’ll crunch the numbers for a followup video.
Ready? Here we go.
Men and women have totally different biological attractiveness formulas. And I don’t just mean personal preferences like the 4 B’s. Boobs or butt, beard or bare.
I mean the internal calculation that your brain makes when you’re around someone that takes in aaall the various inputs and spits out something ranging from “eek, toss him into mount doom” to “where’s the nearest motel?”
Evolution gives us ONE primary goal: to pass on our genes. To have as many healthy babies as possible. And yes, we’re all different, and this whole thing is a big spectrum, but, in broad strokes the biggest differences between male and female mating brains arise because we have different COSTS.
A man can sleep with 5 women in 1 day and then disappear with few repercussions. Evolution doesn’t care, so long as it turns into a baby - or 5. It just wants to make sure those babies are healthy, by prodding him to look for physical indicators of health in those he sleeps with.
But when a woman gets pregnant, that’s an investment! 9 months where she gets progressively more physically limited, and then years of having to actually raise and provide for the child. So her brain is programmed to look for someone who will help her through that whole process! And to have healthy babies.
Now let’s look at the formulas.
For women, they take all of the personality traits like humor and kindness, add them to direct “supporter” indicators like car, watch, job, trust fund, add in physical attractiveness, and then average it all together. If there are no red flags and the average is high enough, the brain spits out “yes, we are attracted!” even if the physical aspect is meh.
For MEN, it’s a bit different. We still take the same things into account, but there’s an added math step. We add up all nonphysical aspects and then multiply them by the physical (which itself is still subjective). Even if everything in A is solid 10s, if B is a 2, that’s a recipe for friendzone. And this can be frustrating, because while Column A can shift a lot as you get to know someone, B has much less wiggle room.
There’s a LOT of scientific debate about this theory, so let’s do some science of our own. Comment a number from 1-5, strongly disagree with this theory to strongly agree, and it would help if you also included your pronouns. And share this to help us get more data!