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Five Ways Women Can Increase Their Mating Rating
Advice from Barbara and Allen Pease
Ladies, do you want the truth about how to be more attractive to men?
Based on the surveys of what over 20,000 men said, here’s a collective summary of the most valuable actions women can take to improve their attractiveness and their Mating Rating.
1. Enhance and improve appearance…
Because men place such importance on a woman’s appearance, women strive to make themselves appear reproductively more valuable by displaying youth, health, and physical attractiveness. Women spend three times as much time as men on their physical appearance and fifteen times as much on products to maintain that appearance. Women who fail to do this lose their edge in the mating game. Even though some men now use a range of cosmetics, it is usually limited to aftershaves, skin conditioners, and hair products. A man spending too much time on his appearance can be seen by women as egotistical or perhaps gay, which reduces his attractiveness to women.
Almost all deceptive visual aids are used by women to attract men. These include wearing high heels to make the legs appear longer (higher fertility), artificial nails to make the hands look longer, breast implants to look more youthful, dark clothing or vertical stripes to appear thinner, dying their hair, cosmetic surgery, wearing wigs, and padding their clothing. In the nineteenth century, many of these tactics were illegal and a woman could be jailed for using them to attract a man.
The reason these strategies work is that they work on the preferences hardwired into male brains. It’s not that women necessarily want to do these things; it’s that men want them to and women know it.
Cosmetic surgery and the cosmetics industry target women’s need to enhance their appearance and look healthy and youthful to men. Face powder evens out the skin and hides any evidence of potential health problems, and a face-lift removes the signs of low fertility. Lipsticks and collagen injections enlarge the lips, and shades of red mimic increased blood flow, which signals a woman may be sexually receptive. Mascara gives the illusion that a woman’s eyes are wider and receptive to males, and hair shampoos and conditioners suggest that her recent health has been excellent. Men see flushed cheeks as a sign of good health in women, so women use blushers to feign health. Because men are attracted to youthful, perky breasts, women wear push-up bras or have breast implants. Women who do these things claim it is “to feel better about themselves.” The truth is that they feel better about themselves because men are more attracted to them. Women’s magazines promote cover pictures of women displaying the health and youth cues to which women aspire, whereas men’s magazines show younger women displaying the same cues plus using body-language gestures and positions that indicate sexual availability. The only time men are shown on the cover of men’s magazines is when the story is about how a man can enhance his appearance by building his body so he can look as if he could wrestle a large animal.
2. Highlight fidelity
Dr. David Buss identified 130 tactics of attraction among people from twenty-two cultures. Here are the top three he reported that men wanted from women:
1. Faithfulness
2. Avoiding sex with other men
3. Showing devotion
These were ranked by men as at least 93% important for a woman to have as they were strong indicators of a man’s paternity. Ancestral men had no way of knowing whether a child was really theirs, but they had a harem of women, so a man’s odds of bearing his own children were good. The above three characteristics would be more important to the twenty-first-century man than to his ancestors because today’s women now insist on monogamy. This means a man is limited to one woman to carry his genes forward, so he needs better guarantees of his paternity…
The three best ways for women to highlight fidelity are:
1. Don’t talk about men in your past relationships.
2. Don’t flirt with other men.
3. Don’t have sex early in a new relationship. Early means before he has demonstrated that he is prepared to invest his resources and time into you.
3. Play hard to get
Acting shy, bashful, or coy also was found to be very effective when used by women on men who were seeking a long-term partner. Coyness works on men as it indicates that a woman could be hard to get and is seen as an indicator of fidelity. If a woman is an “easy lay,” a man assumes that she’ll also be easy for other men, which compromises his certainty of paternity. Playing hard to get is an excellent strategy as it appeals to two primitive male motivations of men: fidelity and assurance that his kids are really his…
For men seeking a casual sex partner, however, coyness is a negative as it indicates that too much hard work or resources would be needed on his part. A woman who withholds sex raises her Mating Rating because it forces a man to look at her as a potential long-term partner.
4. Show less skin
Nocks, Hill, and Gardner showed men and women a series of images of the opposite sex in which varying amounts of skin were exposed. The more skin a woman showed, the higher men rated her as a potential casual sex partner but the lower they rated her as a long-term partner. The tighter-fitting and more revealing the woman’s clothing was, the higher she rated as a short-term sex partner and the lower as a marriage partner…
The lower the cut of a woman’s dress and the more she revealed of her boobs, the less the men could remember—or cared—about anything she said.
The lesson here is that the more skin a woman has covered—especially in erotic areas—the more likely she is to be perceived as a potential long-term partner.
5. Act dumb, helpless, or submissive
Dr. Buss found that these three tactics work reasonably well in attracting short-term mates (48% effective) but not so well for attracting long-term partners (23% effective). The key to these tactics is that they imply that a man with short-term motives is less likely to be rejected by a woman who acts dumb, helpless, or submissive, and he may easily be able to manipulate her. This explains the history of the “dumb blonde.”
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Copyright © 2009 by Allan & Barbara Pease From the book WHY MEN WANT SEX AND WOMEN NEED LOVE published by Broadway Books, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc. Reprinted with permission. |
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