"Dating power" maxxing for men

An anti-Blackpill, anti-looksmaxxing take

I’ve got a younger, still-single friend and business partner who has recently become aware of the influencer Clavicular and male looksmaxxing in general, and in addition to being a source of some good laughs, it seems to indicate it might be an apropos time to talk about what actually matters for maxing out male dating power.

It is NOT facial prettiness or masculinity, at least in my own opinion, but you decide after seeing the evidence.

The Blackpill

As an aside, I’ve never understood “the black pill.”

Like a one-sentence summary is “women like men who are hot and high status, so if you’re not that, just give up now.”

AND??

Do MEN not like women who are young and hot, and so high status?? Is this not a perfectly symmetrical thing?

Actually it’s asymmetrical the OTHER way, where men always and forever only find hot 20yo’s to be peak attractiveness, but women’s tastes actually age along with them:

Shouldn’t women be giving up if this is true, not men?? Instead of getting ever-pickier, as blackpill types complain?

Besides, you should have some sympathy for the women - they’ve got it pretty tough, even the hot and smart ones, as I triangulate about 20 different ways in my post on how women legit have it harder than men, and I argue that any reasonable person behind the veil of ignorance would choose “male” in today’s world, in direct contravention to whatever manosphere and blackpillers seem to think.

Blackpill steelman

Okay, so if we steel-manned the Black Pill argument it might be something like “one’s romantic and sexual fate is determined by immutable factors like physical appearance or genetics, and thus self-improvement is futile.”

Clavicular and his cohort thinks you need to “looksmaxx” to win in today’s dating world. That’s their answer to the black pill - don’t accept your fate, looksmaxx! He advocates surgeries, steroids, peptides, meth for just the right cheek hollows, literally hitting yourself in the face with a hammer before going out, and god knows what else, because every .1% of facial prettiness matters, apparently.

I personally think he’s mistaken (and honestly, if you’re at a point you’re doing meth and hitting yourself in the face with a hammer, maybe re-examine your values?), because women care about a lot more than looks.

What’s our first sign that it’s mistaken?

We have dating-specific data from Oktrends that shows that being polarizing is actually more than 3x better than being “average.” In other words, it’s MUCH better to be a “7” that got your rating because 50% of people rated you as a “10” and 50% rated you as a “4,” than to be a 7 that most people consider a 6-8.

And what is looksmaxxing? Pretending that there is one universal “attractive” standard that you should exert all your optimization power towards attaining.

Congrats, you just cut your “dating power” by 2/3 (!) if you actually succeed in becoming a consensus 7 or 8!

Yes, this particular example is about women and quantified via messages, but we know it applies to men, too. In fact, as strong as this effect size is when it’s men being attracted to women, there are fairly strong reasons to think that it’s an even stronger force in women being attracted to men!

I can point you to at least 5 studies¹ that show that the cross-male consensus on which women are attractive is routinely about twice as strong as the cross-female consensus on which men are attractive! Just one example: Roth et al. (2023) examined inter-rater agreement on pre-date attractiveness. When separating by gender, it was found that women showed a smaller cross-rater consensus of 0.25, while men showed a higher one of 0.50.

So if there’s a 3x difference when MEN look at polarizing women, and men agree on which women are attractive twice as much, what do you think that means for women looking at you? It means that if anything, you should expect the power of polarization to be even stronger as a man being considered by women.

And obviously, you can be attractive to women for multiple different reasons, but even if you solely indexed on “facial attractiveness” I hope I’ve shown you that you’re making a mistake trying to go for the One True Face.

Maybe I’m wrong - it’s obvious looking at attractive men that there’s One True Face - like are they all TWINS?? Just look at that resemblance! Uncanny :-P

What’s the REAL way to max attractiveness and dating power? To do it across the multiple areas that women care about, while leaning in to your own uniqueness.

The dating power equation

This is my own personal off the cuff “dating power” regression equation for men:

.1*height + .5*status + .2*social skills + .2*attractiveness = Male dating power score

Or slightly reformatted:

Notice how “attractiveness” is only worth 20% of your score? And I’d argue further that more than half of that “attractiveness” factor is non-facial stuff - your weight, fitness, bearing, body language, and style.

Why should you believe this?

On status being the most important factor, countless studies² point to “ability to provide” and “status” as the primary determinant of female attraction. Also, see every ugly musician, actor, or executive with a smokeshow wife (ie basically all of them).

On attractiveness being about as important as social skills, see every comedian and pick up artist, who certainly aren’t maxing attractiveness, but do max the other thing.

On height being only 10%, see the height distribution of the top ~20% of men by household income, who have a ~90% marriage rate (and who are also the only men with non-fat spouses, according to the data) - LOTS of short men are getting high status wives:

On facial attractiveness not being all of attractiveness, you don’t think women care about weight, fitness, style, and comportment and body language?? All of those things matter - a lot! They matter enough to drive “facial attractiveness” down to probably 20-33% of your overall attractiveness score.

After all, just how well is a 350lb guy in sweatpants with bad posture and defeated body language going to do with women, even if he looked like Clav himself facially?

For all the other “olds” like myself without Tik Tok - here’s Clavicular, who putatively hits himself in the face with hammers to attain his attractiveness

Fine, fine, I buy that it’s at least plausible that other stuff matters

The rest of this post is about the interventions you can do to move the needle on those other “dating power” elements.

I’m skipping height. Yeah, there’s surgery (inevitably recommend by Clavicular) where they break your leg bones and you’re out of commission for 6-12 months, and then you’re 2-4 inches taller, but that requires a year of your life and $300k, and most folks just aren’t that motivated. It’s probably ~10% of your score, anyways.

On to the next ones!

Attractiveness

I know all the male looksmaxxers will say it’s facial attractiveness uber alles, and if you’re not born with “Chad face” you should just go cry into your computer monitor while eating cheetos forever, but I actually beg to differ.

If your jaw isn’t big and square enough to launch aircraft carriers you’re doomed to be an incel

Enter Ernest Khalimov, the Gigachad!

But did you know, men think the Gigachad is twice as handsome and appealing as women - a full 39% of women rated him 1-2 / 7 in attractiveness.

But whose panties really get wet for the Gigachad? Men’s, of whom only 14% rated him 1-2, and 47% rated 6-7 / 7:

Source: the excellent and always entertaining Date Psychology

In fact the “dominant / dimorphic facial appearance” literature is mostly mixed, and if anything, slants against strong sexual dimorphism being preferred by women. Two meta-analyses, Rhodes et al. (2006) and Chen et al. (2017) are the most cited meta-analysis on the relationship between facial sexual dimorphism and attractiveness. Chen found no preference at all. Rhodes found a small negative association (-.12) with facial masculinity and the attractiveness of male faces. Average faces (dimorphically average, not of average attractiveness) were more attractive (.64).

Oh, and what quality of woman did the Gigachad get? Surely he should have a hundred-woman-harem of Helen of Troy calibre women draped artfully at his feet, right?? Nah, his gf is a 7 - womp womp.

One more piece of evidence that facial dominance / prettiness doesn’t matter all that much? Myself.

Facially, I’m basically a potato man and I’ve dated waaaaayyyyy too many beautiful women, including models, influencers, and athletes. And my fiancée is so gorgeous she gets approached and hit on literally every time she steps out of the house alone, and if she walked into an incel house, everyone would literally burst into flames ark-of-the-covenant style from the sheer radiance of her beauty and femininity.

Dramatic re-enactment, no incels harmed during filming

So, if you don’t buy the meta-analyses, I’m at least a counter-example that you don’t need to be face-pretty or facially dimorphic to do fine. And who else is a counter-example? Oh yeah, basically every rich or famous guy:

An array of potato men with much more attractive female partners

And all the things that myself or these guys have going for them were more or less effortfully earned, in direct contravention to the Black Pill take that you’re born with what you’ve got and can’t do any better.

And what are those things?

Well, back to the male dating power equation - absent height, which you really are born with, you’ve got Status, Social Skills, and Attractiveness, all of which can be improved with effort.

I am here to give you pointers on how to get better at them!

And first, a note.

I feel like guys are basically cavemen, in the sense that they want one big “I win” button that they can hammer, and they just want to spend all their time getting better at the one thing, so they can hit it REALLY hard, and thereby Win Forever.

This is how you get men who hear that women don’t like fat, unfit men, and become 250lb bodybuilders, or you get men that think women want money and get rich, but then only attract gold diggers because their social skills and the other areas of life and personality that matter are nonexistent.

Sadly, this isn’t how women, or the world, works. There is no one “I win” button. EVERYTHING matters. And the better you are at multiple things, the better off you are.

On the one hand, this sucks. Wait, I’m going to be graded on *everything??* That’s not fair! Who can keep track of everything? Who can get better at everything, for that matter! It’s too much. Maybe I should just give up and eat cheetos in front of a computer monitor forever.

But on the other hand, this means two things - one, if everything matters, you can lean into your strengths, and get credit for them. Two, if a bunch of other men give up because working on more than one thing is too hard, then the field is handed over to all the men who ARE willing to do that!

So rejoice, my brethren - the field, as always, is given to those willing to Put the Work In.

So what are those things?

Attractiveness - 20%

• First, don’t be fat. Weight gain is a permanent, one-way ratchet, and literally everyone in America (except asians) is on a steadily ratcheting freight train to Obesity-ville:

  

  BMI 26 is overweight and 30 is obese. “Other” is asian (of course)

  How to actually lose weight? As I go over in my post about obesity and weight loss, 98% of people fail! Use GLP-1’s unless you’re top 2% in discipline and conscientiousness - GLP-1’s are easy mode!

• Second, get fit. Note - this is NOT “become a huge / jacked body builder,” a common mistake men make, because men think women want dominance, when they actually want prestige, which I wrote a whole post about with other advice you should definitely read here. But being fit pays dividends and is still well within the strongly positive “effort ROI” regime.

• Third, get stylish. Most guys dress with all the flair and elan of a potato sack wearing sweatpants. But you can do better! And women really appreciate a guy with a sense of style. What does “style” mean? It varies depending on your social circles - broadly, look for people widely recognized for being stylish in your circle, and study and emulate them. Keep optimizing until you’re regularly receiving compliments for your shoes, outfits, or overall style from the opposite sex.

  

  Exhibit A: the typical male style standard

• Fourth, bearing, comportment, and body language. Study and emulate people with body language and comportment and bearing you admire. Read books and practice stuff - I reviewed one with direct tips and strategies on this front here.
  

• Finally, maybe 20-33% of attractiveness (so 4-7% of your total dating power) probably IS “facial prettiness.” You probably shouldn’t go all out like Clav and literally hit yourself in the face with a hammer before going out, but there are real things you can do in terms of grooming, taking care of your skin, and in the limit, surgeries. This allows me to trot out the fact that being bearded or stubbly is strongly preferred by most women over clean shaven.³

  

  Also, if you do well on the other stuff, you can basically ignore this and be a facial potato man and still do fine, like yours truly, or like Putin’s former boss, Anatoly Sobchak (or Putin himself, for that matter).

Status - 50%

This is the place to focus, because women overwhelmingly want prestige, not dominance:

Kruger and Fitzgerald (2011) - Reproductive strategies and relationship preferences associated with prestigious and dominant men shows us that prestige dominates for one night stands, <2 month relationships, AND long term relationships:

How do you get “prestige?” Via education, career, and income / wealth.

• Education - high status guys have college educations, and not just undergrad degrees - 30-50% have grad degrees depending where you cut (with higher status having higher percentages of grad degrees).

  

  
  And why wouldn’t you want to go to college, when they’re 60/40 women? By all accounts it’s an empyrean sexual Valhalla for the guys there nowadays, due to basic supply / demand factors.

  
  Is undergrad basically pointless signaling, an immense waste of time and money for a dumb credential you shouldn’t actually need? Yes, 100%. But you can have a lot of fun getting the credential, and as long as you’re paying a reasonable amount because of scholarships or local residency, it should be net positive.

  
  Still don’t want a degree? Focus on income / career.

• Income / Career - I don’t need to tell you which careers are high status. Finance, consulting, FAANGs you know the drill. A lot of those are really gate-kept, so you need a T20 degree, STEM grad degree, and/or *great* social connections.

  
  Are there a bunch of non-FAANG careers that are high status? Tons of them! Everyone admires surgeons, astronauts, judges, and executives, and some portion of people admire lawyers, dentists, and pilots.

  
  I will also briefly argue to you that a better road, indeed the best road to real income and a great career is starting your own company, which I wrote a post about here. Equity ownership in something you help grow by your own efforts is the only reliable road to riches in under 10 years that *I* personally know of - and that’s as true for small businesses as it is for startups.

• Flash and dazzle - this is part of how you signal status. I will say the most impactful places to spend money that I’ve seen are nice shoes and nice haircuts, both of which are relatively cheap for the amount of lift you get. Outside of those, you’re stepping into things like “house” and “exotic car” and “lifestyle” that require 5-7 figure expenditures, so a $500-$1k pair of nice shoes or a $100+ haircut is a bargain!

Moreover, on this “status” metric I think it’s important to point out you don’t need to be high status in an absolute sense. Sure, you’d be better off if you were a billionaire Harvard-educated doctor-model-entrepreneur with abs, but status is always relative to your SES tier.

One interesting thing that Scott Alexander has pointed out is that people largely match up on attractiveness within their SES tier. But as I pointed out in my “women want prestige, not dominance” post, and as other sources in Scott’s post aver, men can trade off “status” for attractiveness within their milieu.

This means that if you are relatively higher status within your SES tier, you can get a prettier wife - and being relatively higher status often comes down to just being willing to work harder than your confreres, the other men in your cohort.

And on that front, good news! The bottom 20% of men work ~20 hours a week and the next 30% work ~32 hours a week, so even “putting in a full work week” makes you better than median. Now just look around at the level of effort the other guys in your social circle are putting in, and put in more than that, and generally the more incremental effort on your part, the higher your SES-normalized status will be, and the hotter your potential wife can be.

Social Skills - 20%

This is a fun area, because the average “performance” bar on basically all of these is just literally on the floor and practically nonexistent.

So if you’re willing to put in basically any amount of effort, you can easily attain “noticeably better than average” performance on all of these.

First, give some thought to what it’s like to be an attractive woman - practically no guy does this, which is mind blowing to me. You don’t want to know about your segment? You don’t want to know how the objects of your desire think or operate? You don’t want to know their environments and the baseline they’re coming from? How will you ever attract one of these divine creatures with zero knowledge of their habitats, care, or feeding??

To fully quote an amazing framing from a post I unreservedly recommend on this “social skills” front:

“Imagine that the human species is quite different. In your world, there are no human women, but there are still basically two human sexes. There are human males like yourself, and then silverback gorillas. Now, all of the silverback gorillas really want to fuck you. They are all much stronger than you and could easily kill or permanently injure you if they wanted to. And you barely find any of them attractive. Their impulse control varies, but probably at least a few of them have sexually harassed you at some point. You know that many of them are nice and willing to protect you and give you resources in various situations, expecting little in return, but again, you aren’t that into many of them, if any.

You have been rejecting gorillas your whole adult life. Sometimes they get angry at you, sometimes they cry, sometimes they stop being your friend, sometimes they decide not to hire you or tell others not to hire you. Now imagine that you are on a bus home after a long day of work, wearing your headphones, and one of these fucking gorillas sits next to you and keeps trying to get your attention even though you’re wearing headphones. How do you think you’d react?”

Example from Brangus’ exceptional post here, which I heartily recommend:

Brangus's 10 Rules for Sleeping with Women

Broadly, hot girls live within a constant, buzzing, testosterone-fueled cloud of male pleadings and exhortations for their attention. Any time they open an app, they have 20-40 new messages, most of them low effort, they’re bugged in person all the time, and it’s nearly always from gorillas. You need to lovingly embrace and live within this knowledge until you understand it at a deep, pre-verbal level. Then you need to approach anyways, in a way that’s low stakes but interesting to them. Read Brangus’ post for some great advice on that front.

Why do you need to do this? Because of this:

Approaching in person - The bar here is just on the floor. Basically, if you said “hi” to a potentially eligible woman only once a month, you’d be in the top quartile of all single men in terms of approaching!

Not just that, the vast majority (80%+) of women 18-24 are single AND they would *like* to be approached more. After reading Brangus’ post, I urge you to read another one, where I go over the approaching data here.

Flirting - it’s harder to find good data on this, but just anecdotally most women will tell you men are pretty bad at flirting, and getting worse rather than better. Jacob Falkovich has a decent article here with some solid tips - it’s paywalled, but you can claim one free article:

How to Improve at Flirting When You Don’t Like Flirting

Flirting is about having fun right along the plausibly-denial line of “are you actually hitting on me,” and is entirely about “not actually saying the thing” but implying the thing, skillfully. Also, it’s about making her laugh. Which brings us to…

Jokes and humor - “good sense of humor” is one of the top characteristics of what people want in a mate in most surveys. Those preferences are probably mostly fake, but even if the stated preference is aspirational, when you are in person, if you can keep your date laughing, it’s generally a genuine sign that they like you and things are going well. How to improve this? It’s all about A) thinking about what your desired segment finds funny, B) memorizing some stories or jokes along those lines, and C) working on delivery.

Be fun and interesting - do you know that most people spend 10-11 hours a day staring at screens? That’s the default and that’s crushingly boring. You’re gonna do a lot better if you have hobbies and stories and interesting things to talk about. This also gives you interesting things to do, and to propose as dates. If you start pitching dates like “have you ever ridden in a race car” or “wooly mammoth rave” or “masquerade / costume party” or “iron chef cook-off dinner party” you’re going to get a lot more dates, AND have more fun in life overall! And being able to narrate well and tell a good story and build excitement in conversations is key here too, which segues into…

Good conversation - you ever notice how with some people you just “click” and conversations are easy and natural on top of being interesting and entertaining? This is an example of what conversation at its best should be. But here’s the kicker - you can achieve this more often with effort on your end, by reading tells and interests on the part of your conversational interlocutor, and going where those things are telling you they are interested in. A good book on this is Leil Lowndes’ How to Talk to Anyone. And speaking of going where people are interested…

Being good at sex - I’m putting this in “social skills” because it’s mostly social / mental, even though it naturally has a physical component to it.

So once, again, the performance bar here is literally on the floor. The median “inter-ejaculatory latency time” is 9 minutes. NINE MINUTES. How on earth is any woman supposed to ever get off in this world?? Like seriously, is it any wonder that the majority of women (62%+) opt out of marriage to men in the 50th percentile and below? Is there any evidence that this level of skill is not doing the job for women? Oh, my yes. And if you don’t want the direct comments from women, here’s the graphs:

So if you can put enough effort in to do better than a princely 9 minutes, which should be every man’s literally first and only focus if they aspire to having a worthwhile long term female partner, you can do better too. Once you attain “basic physical competence” and can last at least 4-5x longer than 9 minutes, good sex is almost entirely about mental connection and narratives.

Sex is a dance, a give-and-take, a set of strange loops and attractors defined by perception, pleasure, bids and asks, and the waves and feedback loops between them. When you’re having good sex, you are specifically looking for physical and mental signs of arousal, and doing your best to accentuate and create positive feedback loops between those signs and what you’re doing (mentally or physically).

An analogy I frequently resort to is that your partner’s body and mind as something like an instrument, and it’s your job to learn that instrument. I wrote more in a post here.

Uniqueness

Remember how I pointed out being “polarizing” is 3x better than being “consensus?”

Aren’t I giving the lie to that by advising you to get fit and funny and educated and to have interesting hobbies?? Isn’t that the most generic, BS, “high status man recipe” ever?

No!

The best thing about all of this, is that you are actually unique in terms of having a high dimensional set of interests, and a different allocation of good things about you, that genuinely differentiates you from all other men.

Your unique combination of attractiveness, status, and social skills, your unique package of hobbies and interests and knowledge and how you treat women, how well you do in the bedroom, and how you make them feel, is what really sells a relationship, at the end of the day.

Going up a “better” gradient to become better at fitness or career or social skills doesn’t homogenize you, instead it makes you MORE unique, because women actually do grade on multiple aspects, and take a holistic picture of somebody into account.

You have a given set of strengths and weaknesses across all of these things in your dating power score. I personally recommend leaning into the areas that you genuinely like and are good at, because I think you get more lift from doing that, and are more likely to make real progress and make it stick.

If you do all this stuff, and improve those areas you’re stronger or more interested in, you’re actually becoming more differentiated and more unique relative to other men.

And more unique = more polarizing = more dating power.

This sounds hard and like a lot of work

Yeah. Being good at stuff takes work, fully generally. It’s like the man says:

The real question is how bad do YOU want it?

Everyone is big on “wanting” things, as long as it takes no effort. I think this is basically the central core of black pill and inceldom - if you embrace an ideology of a fixed unchangeable hierarchy with you at the bottom, you have given yourself permission to give up, and have relieved yourself of the burden of trying.

But what if you could get it, but it took effort? What about when it takes a LOT of effort? Years of effort? Do you still want it?

Empirically, most people don’t. That’s why inceldom and Blackpill is growing as an ideology, and why the performance bar is literally on the floor for all these things - status, approaching, flirting, being fun, being good at sex - basically everyone is bad at them, because they don’t want to put any work in.

Success takes work, full stop.

I didn’t say it would be easy, but why should achieving something that basically everyone wants (a beautiful gf or wife) be easy? Definitely not how supply and demand works! It may not be easy, but whether it’s worth it is up to you!

Or, I guess you can get steel jaw implants, start doing steroids and meth, and pay $700 for personalized “looksmaxxing coaching” with Clav. Your choice!

But if I’m right, you’re moving your overall dating power by only 5-10% by doing that - and maybe I’m only half right about all of this, maybe I’m wrong by a whole factor of two! In which case it’s worth a whopping 10-20%…is that really worth breaking out the meth, steroids and face-hammer?

Is that lemon really worth the squeeze? Well, only you can decide!

1. Studies showing roughly twice the consensus on what’s attractive in men vs women:

• Donovan et al 1989

• Townsend & Wasserman 1997

• Marcus & Miller 2003

• Wood & Brumbaugh 2009

• Roth et al (2023)

The excellent Nuance Pill goes over a lot of these in this awesome post investigating whether women are genuinely more attractive and desirable in the aggregate than men (duh, they are).

2. Just the ones I have close at hand, there’s actually far more:

• JL Martin 2005 - Is Power Sexy?

• Buss and Schmitt 1993 - Sexual Strategies Theory- An Evolutionary Perspective on Human Mating

• Snyder 2008 - The dominance dilemma- Do women really prefer dominant mates?

• Von Reuden et al 2011 - Why do Men Seek Status?

• Kruger Fitzgerald 2011 - Reproductive strategies and relationship preferences associated with prestigious and dominant men

3. From the outstanding datepsychology website:

Neave & Shields (2008) found that light and dark stubble were rated as more attractive than clean-shaven faces, at .65 and .56 respectively. This amounts to about one half point higher for stubbled faces on a 7 point Likert scale.

Dixson & Brooks (2013) similarly found that heavy stubble was rated more attractive than clean-shaven, lightly stubbled, and bearded faces. The increase in attractiveness for stubbled faces was about 1 point higher on a 5 point Likert scale.

Dixson et al. (2017) further found a general preference for beards over clean-shaven faces.

Stower et al. (2020) similarly found that beards were rated as most attractive. A potential interpretation of this is that beards may be especially valuable for enhancing the attractiveness of less dimorphic faces.

In context, Clarkson et al. (2020) found that beards were rated as more attractive by women both for short term and long term relationships. A large study by Dixson et al. (2019, N = 2013) found that mothers preferred bearded men when judging a potential father and that postpartum women (women who recently gave birth) also preferred bearded men.

Dixson et al. (2019) also found cross-cultural preferences for facial hair, as well as individual difference preferences. Women who preferred higher masculinity also preferred bearded men. Women from countries with a higher Human Development Index, as well as a lower education index, preferred bearded men.