Countless reams have been written about the question of what women really want. This question has bedevilled great minds going all the way back to antiquity, and not even Sigmund Freud had a clue. Recent advances in evolutionary psychology have given us an answer from a biological perspective – but only for those who dare to read on!
In the animal world from which we have climbed, survival is primarily a matter of meeting metabolic needs. Every creature that lives has a need to eat, because only by eating are most animals capable of acquiring the necessary nutrients to keep breathing, to stay warm, and to have the energy to keep moving and find a breeding partner.
This is why the animal world has been described as “red in tooth and claw”, but there’s more to it than that. Whether a creature eats or dies, and therefore whether its genes are selected for in the next generation, is primarily a question of its capacity for resource acquisition.
Getting laid is all about demonstrating a capacity for resource acquisition. Why? Because this is by far the most accurate way for a female onlooker to determine if your genes are likely to produce offspring that are themselves capable of acquiring resources – in other words, if your genes are likely to produce offspring that can survive.
Whether an individual woman realises it or not, the females of every sexually reproducing species don’t care about anything else – and why would they? Compared to the need to gather resources to meet your metabolic needs, there’s little else that really matters for a sexually reproducing creature.
If one thinks about it, almost all of the qualities that women find attractive in men relate directly to his capacity for resource acquisition, and, by extension, the capacity for resource acquisition of any potential offspring.
There are four major ways that women determine a man’s capacity for resource acquisition, and all four of them correspond directly to major evolutionary challenges in the biological past of the human species (they also correspond to the four alchemical stages of clay, iron, silver and gold).
The first is to be healthy. After all, ill health in animals is often a consequence of not getting enough food, because without enough food it’s difficult to maintain an immune system that can keep the body free of diseases.
Having diseased skin or a rancid body odour will turn a woman off faster than anything, which is why men spend so much time washing and showering before they go into town. Both of those things suggest strongly that the man in question has failed to acquire the necessary resources for maintaining healthy bodily function. In other words, they appear to be dying, and nothing is less sexy than that!
The second major quality is to be tall and strong. Everyone knows that women are attracted to this, but fewer have thought it through to the next stage. Being tall and strong is extremely advantageous to the degree that resource acquisition has historically been dependent on the physical strength of the male in question.
This is apparent when one considers that males spent most of their time in the biological past hunting, which sometimes required hitting animals with sticks and bones or throwing rocks at them, and then carrying the prey back to the rest of the tribe on his shoulders, which are all matters of physical strength.
Arguably even more important is that fact that height and strength correlate very strongly with a male’s position on the social dominance hierarchy, which is the prime determinant of future mating opportunities. The stronger a man is the easier he will be able to defuse threats to himself, to his breeding partner or to their offspring.
The third major quality is to be intelligent. Not everyone appreciates the intense degree to which women are attracted to intelligence in breeding partners, which is probably because most people don’t really understand what intelligence is.
In the biological past, humans were able to acquire resources far more effectively if they were intelligent enough to notice and memorise certain patterns of nature. For instance, the first humans to figure out that large herbivores frequented watering holes were able to ambush those large herbivores, club them to death and thereby feed the entire tribe.
Ancient bushlore contains thousands of little patterns like this, unique to each locale in which they developed, but all with one thing in common – whoever possessed this bushlore was more effectively able to predict when and where the food was going to be.
The fact that intelligence has historically been an extremely important indicator of a man’s capacity to acquire resources can be seen from the manyfold increase in brain capacity in hominids over the past few million years, which is evidence of an extremely strong selective pressure in favour of it.
The fourth major quality is to be brave. This quality relates alchemically to the level of gold. Like the gold it is more subtle than the other qualities, and because of its rarity not quite as obvious.
Bravery relates to resource acquisition in ways like not letting another man take away the food that you have successfully hunted, or not letting the size of an animal scare you away from trying to club it to death. Essentially it’s the quality that allows a man to reduce the fear that makes him weaker and less intelligent.
In the modern world, resource acquisition has basically been reduced to having a job. If you have a job, chances are excellent that you have the capacity to acquire the necessary resources to feed a wife and children until those children are themselves capable of acquiring resources.
This is why being unemployed is extremely unattractive to women. Most women will naturally assume that a man without a job is either too lazy, too weak, too stupid or too cowardly to work or to hold down a job, and all of those four things correlate very poorly with the capacity to acquire resources.
Chris Rock joked about this in a stand-up comedy special, when he said “Fellas! If you lose your job you will lose your woman.” The reason why he had observed this pattern play out in his social circles is because a man losing his job has also lost his capacity for resource acquisition.
The other major quality that a man can possess to demonstrate his capacity for resource acquisition is to own a house. Females of all territorial species intuitively understand that the creature that dominates any given territory naturally controls all the resources within that territory, and so a man that controls a house appeals to very deep and powerful instincts.
Essentially, if a man is unable to get laid he needs to either become better looking, stronger, smarter or braver, because those are the qualities that correlate with a capacity for resource acquisition and are therefore the qualities that woman have evolved to select for in their breeding partners.
