Men think women want dominance, but what they actually want is prestige

On and the largest and funniest dating disconnect and to what extent "the Chadopoly" is true

This is a fun point that keeps coming up in the literature again and again, so I thought I’d do a post.

Basically, men think women want Chads, the infamous, muscular, blonde-coiffed, green pants-wearer:

I mean, yes, in a choice between those two up there, the Chad will get chosen a lot more. But who REALLY gets chosen, even more than a Chad? High prestige men.

Men again and again overfit on the things that THEY find salient, impressive, or intimidating in other men as the things that women want in a man, and this is recurringly wrong.

Let’s take a look:

Prestige vs Dominance

Our first data point is Kruger and Fitzgerald (2011) - Reproductive strategies and relationship preferences associated with prestigious and dominant men.

Female undergrads surveyed, so pretty much peak desirability according to nearly all men.

In it, we find that “Independent samples t-tests indicated that male participants’ ratings of female attraction toward the high-dominance description were significantly higher than the female participants’ ratings for all three relationship types; brief sexual affair, t(208) = 4.00, p < .001, two-month relationship, t(208) = 3.29, p = .001, and long-term relationship, t(208) = 4.21, p < .001. Men and women gave equivalent ratings of female attraction toward the high-prestige description.”

With the graphical synopsis here:

Second triangulation - hobby attractiveness

Another fun one - men’s hobbies - this from datepsychology’s excellent survey on the hobbies that men and women find attractive, and the mismatched perceptions therein.

What do women like their men to be doing? Men think “oh snap, I should be like a ralley-cross driver or base jumper, something awesome, that’s what impresses women.” Lol, nah - women hate stuff like that, and typically want to envision a life where they can be joining their men in their hobbies - think WAY more basic and passive:

Tying into the “dominance” thing, men think that women like motorcycles and MMA and bad boy types a lot more than they do, literally rating them as the top possible hobbies women would be attracted to, when they’re a lot closer to the 50th percentile.

Speaking as somebody who’s probably out in the tails of “dominance” across a lot of metrics, but who’s also dated a lot of women and effortfully carved schemas about what women actually care about from the nuance of reality, men constantly overestimate how much being a badass gets you laid from women worth dating.

Motorcycles and MMA - men think they’re the MOST awesome and attractive hobbies a man can have, women disagree (it’s Astronomy)

Another fun one:

The Gigachad

Who is the Gigachad? Russian model Ernest Khalimov, the archetype of the ripped, tall, impossibly strong-jawed ubermensch. The human incarnation of Chad, amplified to the max.

But who does the Gigachad appeal to? Men!

Men think the Gigachad is twice as handsome and appealing as women do. Datepsychology again:

Women don’t like bodybuilders

Another triangulation on this - as the recent fervent Substack discourse generated kilowords discussing, bodybuilding largely impresses dudes, not chicks.

Emil Kierkegaard wrote a solid and multiply triangulated take on this here:

Women don't like bodybuilder physique

But long story short, the headline result is basically this:

Why do men keep getting it wrong?

So why DO men get this so consistently wrong? Mating and having kids is pretty important, wouldn’t evolution have beaten any big disconnects like this out of men over the long run?

Yes, that IS the question, isn’t it? The answer is that dominance actually DOES pay off, in environments closer to our Environment of Evolutionary Adaptiveness (EEA).

In many hunter gatherer societies, there really are “two roads to success,” and one is dominance and the other prestige.

The following is from studying the Tsimane, a hunter gatherer group in Bolivia, which finds that both dominant and prestigious men have more attractive wives¹ and more descendants.

In this paper (von Ruden et al (2011) Why Do Men Seek Status?), both high prestige or high dominance men have attractive wives / partners who are ~2 years younger, and this is directly correlated with more surviving offspring (top quartile dominant and prestigious men both have ~1 more surviving offspring).

And I think it’s worth pointing out, that’s SURVIVING offspring, which in environments of ~40-50% child mortality (as in the EEA and most HG societies historically), that means they’re having at *least* two more children overall. So one more surviving is a really big fitness buff.

But this is largely true in marginal environments with high risk of violence

Historically, in the environment of evolutionary adaptiveness, 20-40% of men had descendants versus 80% of women:

Yellow line - on average, 2-4 women are having descendants for every man, which is 20-40% men vs 80% women - the peak is the “17 women for every men” meme and is driven by the Yamnaya y-chromosome replacing everybody

What does this mean? Does it mean that 60-80% of HG men were incels, and the top quintile Chads monopolized all the women? Kinda, but not because of incel dynamics per se.

Polygyny (and hypergamy) is a thing - in a majority (87%) of HG societies, the top 5-20% of men have more than one wife (although usually only 2, rarely 3, very rarely 4 or more). I think it’s also worth pointing out that the “pairing up” dynamic in HG societies is almost never “the men allocate the women as they please” model, although pre-contact Australian Aboriginal people got the closest to that, but instead female choice in mates is typically extremely strong, and by all accounts, the vast majority of HG societies are notably more equal than agricultural societies and feature more female choice.²

So although polygyny and hypergamy are factors, a good deal of the dynamics are driven by men leading higher risk lives and dying more.

This is due to a lot of reasons (injuries, lethal mishaps, infections), but violence is a big one - men had a roughly ~33% chance of dying by violence in the EEA.

That is a HUGE filter and effect size, and being more dominant was a big buff in that environment (you see that top quartile dominant men in the Tsimane directionally have slightly more children than prestigious, although it’s within the margin of error). Being able to defend your mate / children / tribe meant a lot, as well as being able to conquer and raid some other tribe (because you’d probably get additional wives / kids that way too).

Additionally, the basic model driving the “only 20-40% dynamic” is that “successful men pair up with a given woman, stick around through the pregnancy and first 2-8 years, then move on to another woman.” Serial monogamy, in other words. And to be around to do that, you probably needed to be able to defend yourself and your tribe successfully - hence, dominance mattering. There are a number of fun factoids supporting this basic “serial monogamy” model.³

So our intuitions about dominance being desirable / important were correct for the vast majority of our existence (at least 200k years of being H saps, and probably closer to ~2M years of being hominins).

That is also probably why we pay so much attention to dominance cues in other men - in an environment where you have a 1/3 chance of dying by violence, knowing who else in your tribe and outgroups are dominant, stupendous badasses is important, because getting in good with them in your ingroup or avoiding them in your outgroup probably really mattered!

But surely dominance can lead to SOME buff?

After all, ~2M years of deep-seated evolutionarily-driven instincts have probably left SOME women open to dominance, even if it’s not directly relevant? Don’t women consider 80% of men disgusting? Don’t they only swipe ~5% of men?

Isn’t there some real-world aspect of dating dynamics that have driven the ubiquity and recurrence of the Chad meme?

Where Chad memes converge on some version of the truth

And I’d say yes, absolutely.

A point I myself made about the bodybuilding thing in the comments (I was a strength athlete for many years, and have a lot of powerlifters and bodybuilders in my social circles) is that there’s an old Oktrends post pointing out that being polarizing is a strong net benefit in dating.

Basically, consider two men rated “5” on a 10 point scale overall - one of them is 50/50 ratings split between 8’s and 2’s, and the other one is just mostly rated “5”. The first guy has a TON of girls interested in him, and he’s going to clean up compared to the second guy.

I think this actually happens - because I’ve always done really well, and all my gym bros are always doing well, in terms of having really attractive and desirable girlfriends or spouses (because after all, fit/ hot girls are more likely to want and be attracted to really fit men, as confirmed in Garza and Byrd-Craven (2021)).

Gigachad breakdown again:

You see this reflected in the Gigachad split - 8% of women rated Gigachad the top attractiveness ranking, and 24% were at “attractive” or “very attractive” - it’s a bimodal distribution. I feel like anyone is probably doing pretty well on the dating front if 24% of women were rating them 6-7 out of 7 - and I’d also feel that those women were actually significantly more likely to be fit and hot themselves.

And we do reliably see “dominance” being a factor for short-term mating in various studies, with it being within 10% of “prestige” in Kruger and Fitzgerald (2011) above, as well as in a number of other studies.⁴

And speaking from experience, I mean, absolutely, being top-tier dominant CAN get you laid in the marginal case. Usually from super-hot, younger and more damaged / daddy-issues girls (the intoxicating alt-girl phenotype, per Scott Alexander⁵), which as we all know is the mathematically optimum short term sexual partner (the “lol, yes plz” zone below):

I mean, that’s just SCIENCE

To what extent is “the Chadopoly” true?

Chads exist in the sense that “there’s a segment of top 1-2% men who can sleep with hundreds of women fairly easily.” Chad’s don’t exist in the “80% of women only have sex with the top 20% of men” sense (top tier men don’t bother with <50% tier women).

But something like the converse is probably true - are <20% of the men having ~80% of the sex, either by number of partners or by “number of times sex is had per time interval?” Yes, absolutely.

But this isn’t a road available to the great majority - this is the true domain of the Chads of the world. You have to be basically swimsuit model hot (or equivalently high status) for it to work, and have good in-person dynamics, and if you were in this ~1-2% of men, you’d definitely know it already. But I think it’s important to point out that you’re not really missing out on much if you’re not a Chad!

Railing a bunch of girls isn’t a long-term play for anyone that cares about their long-term quality of life and / or having a family. If you actually want kids, or healthy and mutually satisfying long term relationships, you should be looking for mentally stable, high human capital women, not racking up a high body count.

And to the broader point, the majority of men today pair up at some point and have descendants. We’re far from the ~80-90% of men having descendants that was true in the 50’s Baby Boom, but we’re also far from the “only 20% of men having descendants in the EEA” - we’re typically around 60-75% in the developed world. So the majority of men pair up and have sex and do so to a degree they actually have descendants - there’s really nothing to worry about from the big picture view.

We live in a peaceful world today

Obviously, none of us live in super-violent societies any more, not even contemporary hunter gatherers (who all live under the umbrella of some larger state that has monopolized violence / depressed inter-tribe warring - they still absolutely have higher rates of violence than developed societies, but still OOMs lower than the historical ~33%).⁶

So our male instincts to care about dominance as a road to mating success are maladaptive in pretty much all societies today, not just developed societies.

Arguably, even trying for middling dominance buffs to bump your mating prospects is a mistake for most men - unless you can clearly take yourself to the top dominance quintile, or better, top 10%, with the buffs, it’s probably net negative.

As we saw in the Kruger and Fitzgerald data, prestige dominates for one night stands, <2 month relationships, AND long term relationships.

Let’s look at the Tsimane data again, too:

You have to be top quartile dominance to have a positive effect (and I’d even bet at least half that quartile is near zero, and it’s better to be top decile to get a strong effect size), but you only have to be top 50% prestige to have a positive effect size, a 2:1 ratio.

See how even in a HG culture where dominance is still actually adaptive, the dominance effect is negative up to the fourth quartile (versus prestige is notably net positive by quartile 3)? This argues that unless you can very clearly achieve better than top quintile dominance with your efforts, it’s smarter to focus your efforts on “prestige” buffs.

Sure, “better than 50%” isn’t anywhere near good enough in the dating apps of today - the Tsimane only have local pools of 30-50 and broader pools of a couple hundred people, whereas dating apps have at least 10k candidates in any city, so the bar is much higher. But I’d expect the 2:1 ratio to hold true - a given improvement effort / result should be twice as powerful when allocated to “prestige” instead of “dominance.”

So prestige is where all the arbitrage is at, from now on.

And how does that work, operationally? In what specific ways does “prestige” pay off? Well, as we just saw again, it increases short term mating prospects, but for the much more important long term matching, it subs for looks. At a high level, in long term pairing people basically match up impossibly strongly on looks and SES / educational attainment, and this is assortative mating in a nutshell.

In general, “prestige” in men seems to directly compensate for deficits in physical attractiveness when it comes to how it affects female choice and male/female pairing. This is pretty well supported in the literature too, but I’m going to spare you the deep dive on that for now.

In other words, what prestige gets you is younger / hotter women than you can pull with your given attractiveness tier, and understanding this should point you towards where and whether the cost / benefit is worth it for a given “prestige” intervention.

And what things best signal prestige?

Just speaking from my own experience, what do women actually care about on the dating front? Nice haircuts, good shoes, being well dressed and articulate, your career and earning potential, demonstrating social and emotional fluidity, the status accolades and reactions from other people she sees you interact with, and having a vision and plan and a direction at every scale (for your life overall, for the date you’re on right now, for the evening overall, for your future spousal-life dynamic, etc).

And it’s not just a matter of having money, either. One thing that effortlessly communicates prestige is “performing excellence,” in whatever domain. If you can whip together an amazing tasting meal on short notice, and you’re demonstrating clear mastery in the kitchen as you do so, that’s prestige. If you’re great at stories or jokes, likewise. If she’s admiring your deck or a piece of furniture and you point out that you built it, well, you get the idea. As long as it’s topical, brief, and not actively narcissistic, perform excellence wherever and whenever you can.

This was actually one of the original roads to prestige, in fact! Geoffrey Miller points out in The Mating Mind that it’s very likely our big brains were a result of sexual selection, where we got big brains in an arms race to be better storytellers, to position ourselves better socially, and to better persuade mates to sleep with us.

The traits that display prestige are the same traits that make a good leader, both in hunter gatherers and today. They include things like having and being able to sell the vision (future planning, charisma, verbal fluency, good storytelling), caring about your people (empathy, altruism), selflessness and “moral leadership” (being trustworthy, demonstrating high personal standards), empirical success (in hunting, war, business, taking and holding rich environments for the tribe), and how you are seen by others in your social network (seen as all the things listed).

Work on attaining and demonstrating those things, and you’ll be much better off than if you tried joining the MMA gym or peacocking.

1. Attractiveness, dominance, and prestige (as well as other measures) were ranked by all the tribespeople ranking non-self photos, then the results being aggregated.

2. Per Apostolou (2007), 75%, or 3 out of 4 currently studied African hunter gatherer tribes practice "courtship marriages" and genetic studies indicate that true concurrent polygyny (as in multiple wives at the same time, versus wives in series) is relatively low incidence historically overall (less than 20% of men are married polygynously in 87% of the sample of 190 HG societies), going back 50k years.

Polygyny being relatively low incidence is a strong argument that women are influencing their male mate's choices and reproductive practices to be more in line with what they wish versus what their partner's wish, because there's a reliable split in most cultures down to the present day, where males desire and see nothing wrong with polygyny and females don't want it to happen. How powerless are they against their spear-wielding brutes of husbands, if most of those husbands didn't actually father children with other women?

Many HG cultures do have "bride price" or dowries and similar arrangements, but that doesn't mean that women have no choice, it means of the men they are choosing from, it's probably one factor among many that's considered by them and their families.

On HG equality - ethnographies are chock full of instances of overbearing people in HG tribes getting mocked, censured, and even cast out of the tribe or killed if they persist - I wrote about this in my post touching on human self domestication here.

3. Let’s see:

• The biggest bites in child mortality happen <5 years old

• Even today, the most common “marriage-to-divorce span” is roughly 7 years - the infamous “7 year itch”

• The largest “mom needs help to get through this” extra caloric and alloparenting needs happen while breast feeding, so the first 2-3 years

• Just to make the math work and fit the known 20-40% of men for 80% of women factoid, you need some serial monogamy going on in addition to polygyny / hypergamy for the top 5-10% and male deaths due to injury, mishap, or war

• Even in many contemporary less violent HG societies, the genetic father of a given (living, so more likely to be >5) child is only around in the local tribe / group ~33% of the time! (From Sarah Hrdy’s Mothers and Others, which cites Hill et al (2011))

4. What other studies show the “dominance” short term mating buff? So many! But here’s three.

Ganstead and Simpson (2000) - The Evolution of Human Mating

“Gangestad and Thornhill (1997a; 1998a) tested three other poten- tial mediators, namely, three sexually dimorphic traits in- volved in intrasexual competition: (1) Body mass – Humans show moderate sexual dimorphism, consistent with their purported ancestral polygyny (Alexander et al. 1979); (2) Physicality – A measure of men’s muscularity, robustness, and vigor, as rated by both men and their romantic partners; and (3) Social dominance – A measure based on the Cali- fornia Adult Q-Sort. Once again, a relation was found be- tween men’s FA and their number of lifetime partners, r 5 2.29 (estimated by causal modeling). In addition, all three traits associated with intrasexual competition were predicted by men’s FA, estimated rs 5 2.31, 2.39, and 2.39, for body mass, physicality, and social dominance, respec- tively. The indirect effects mediated through these traits ac- counted for more than 70% of the total effect of FA on the lifetime number of partners.”

Buss and Schmidt (1993) - Sexual strategies theory: an evolutionary perspective on human mating

“Prediction 20: Because one hypothesized function for women of short-term mating is protection from aggressive men, women will value attributes such as physical size and strength inshort- term mates more than in long-termmates. To test this predic- tion, the characteristic of physically strong was evaluated on its desirability in long-term and short-term mates by women (N= 73) and men (N = 75). Women placed greater value on physical strength in a short-term mate (t = 6.49, p < .001,7 = 0.94) and in a long-term mate (t=4.25, p <.001,7 = 0.66) than did men. Furthermore, women placed greater value on physical strength in a short-term mate than in a long-term mate (t = 2.19, p < .05, 7 = 0.20), despite women's generally higher standards overall for a long-term mate.”

Garza and Byrd-Craven (2021) - Effects of women’s short term mating orientation and self-perceived attractiveness in rating and viewing men’s waist to chest ratios - from which we get the confirmation that it is indeed hotties who are more attracted to fit men:

“Interestingly, women who perceived themselves as attractive rated men with low WCRs (waist chest ratios - low is “big chest, small waist”) as more attractive and allocated attentional resources to physical features important in mate choice, such as the head and midriff region.”

Snyder, and Kirkpatrick (2008):

5. "Because borderlines can’t get a clear self-image in the normal course of things, they often err on the side of becoming extremely distinctive just so they feel like anything at all. A borderline teen might become really Goth – dressing in all black, talking about vampires all the time, et cetera – because at least then they have one adjective that definitely describes them (“Goth”) instead of floating around on the winds of uncertainty. Many borderlines radically alter their appearance – hair dyed unnatural colors, unusual hairstyles like mohawks, tattoos or very visible piercings. For the same reason, borderlines enjoy anything where they have to play a clearly defined role – whether that’s theater productions or BDSM."

Elsewhere, Scott has described them as having a magnetic allure, but despite searching SSC and ACX, I couldn’t find the particular quote - if you know where it is, please drop me a line.

6. When you think about it, the drop is amazing - from ~33 out of every hundred, or 33k / 100k, to 3/100k in the USA, which is ~3x most developed places today (1/100k). Japan even gets down to <0.3 / 100k. Sure, 0.3-3 / 100k is annual, so we’d need to annualize the 33%, but doing that still leaves HG rates at 1-3%. So our rates overall went from 3k / 100k annually for approximately everyone to 0.3-3 / 100k in the developed world - that’s an amazing drop, 3-4 OOMs. Go go state monopoly on violence!

Today, hunter gatherer societies under state umbrellas still have higher violence than that - it seems to range from 15 - 150 / 100k, roughly, depending on the tribe. That’s still much higher than the developed world, but still several OOM’s lower than historic HG conditions.