CH has traditionally been agnostic on the burning question of whether chicks dig smart men because they’re smart or because male smartness is correlated with some other attractive male trait. It has been our contention that smarts alone do nothing for vagina tingles, unless the smarts are leveraged into wit, humor, and adult-themed teasing.
Smarts, too, will help a man better understand and apply the principles of Game. The sweet spot for male smarts is an above-average IQ that is coupled to a robust EQ. The biggest haters of game are either dumb “bros” who scoff at any idea that’s more mentally taxing than the philosophy found in beer commercials, or smart but socially maladroit spergs who lack the concrete field experience with women to accept that it’s possible to attract women without being a Hollywood star.
The Heartiste Dating Market Value Test for Men has a category devoted to IQ, and pussy-parting points are given to a man if he has an above-average intelligence, but deducted from him if he has a below-average or a well above-average IQ.
15. What is your IQ?
Under 85: -1 point
85 to 110: 0 points
110 to 130: +1 point
130 to 145: 0 points
over 145: -1 point
This scoring system reflects the reality any man who has lived a day in his life has observed: super smart men are often nerdy and weird, and that turns off women (or at best is considered a neutral attribute by women), while dumb men without compensating attractiveness traits will turn off women who aren’t dumb themselves.
And now here comes the confirmatory ♂SCIENCE♂ adding heft to the humble CH formula.
Human general intelligence (g) has been hypothesized to be an indicator of genomic mutation load and under sexual selection for indirect genetic benefits (‘good genes’ for the offspring), implying that high g should be sexually attractive. People clearly report preferences and assortatively mate for intelligence, but these effects can be due to direct phenotypic benefts of g and social homogamy.
I am on record stating that the “assortative mating” phenomenon of late 20th-early 21st century America isn’t driven so much by women preferring smart Ivy nerds (or by men preferring smart Ivy nerdgirls, as HBD nerd-triumphalists like to claim) as it is driven by simple convenience: people tend to date whomever is readily available within their social milieu, which one could call a “dating market bottleneck”.
Measured male g had no effect on female short-term attraction, but a small positive effect on long-term attraction, though only after extraversion and independently rated physical attractiveness were controlled.
Kneejerk nerd-defenders like LotB are chastened by this news.
The minor male attractiveness boost of intelligence to women thinking about the male subject as a long-term relationship prospect is caused by two factors:
- the readout from an innate mate assessment algorithm women possess which informs them of the “dad” quality of potential suitors, and
- the tendency of women to conflate intelligence with extraversion and looks. (We all know that social king with the wisecracking, uninhibited tongue who comes across smarter than he really is.)
Revenge of the nerds? Not quite:
Overall we found no support for intelligence being sexually attractive to women on first encounters, and limited support that it increases initial impression of the potential as a long-term romantic partner.
Someone alert the feminist industrial simplex: Women are shallow!
A commenter at Dr. Thompson’s sums it up pithily,
Mensa has no groupies.
A brief excursion into helix-gazing abstraction:
Taken together with very limited support for an association between g and mutation load in the currently available genomic data, these results cast doubt on the hypothesis that g is an indicator of genetic fitness under ‘good genes’ sexual selection.
I always thought that the best indicator of genetic fitness was, in women, their youth and beauty, and consequently their ability to induce my boner. (Women’s IQ plays little to no role in men’s sexual arousal. As no man ever said, “Dayum, that’s a fine-looking grad school degree you got, baby!”) It now appears men’s smarts play nearly as insignificant a role in female attraction.
Now, point of contention, I don’t actually think this is entirely true, based on the simple objection that the men I personally know (a large-ish number) who are good with HSMV women are also smarter than the average bear. But.. and this is a big but… those men are also socially savvy and self-confident, no doubt both of which traits are benefited by their respectable smarts. And they mostly hit on SWPL chicks who would probably not give the time of day to slow men who had trouble parsing their snark-heavy conversations.
No man reading this post should despair that he has a high IQ. There is no end to the ways in which being smart/alpha/sexy is better than being dumb/beta/scalzied. The study results merely suggest that smarts ALONE aren’t sufficient to attract women. You need something else, like charisma, humor, or… wait for it… POWER RAPE. As another commenter at Thompson’s put it,
Intelligence doesn’t need to be *inherently* attractive in order to make its possessors more attractive. Assuming ‘power’ is still “the ultimate aphrodisiac,” intelligence can be useful for getting it, showing it, faking it, and wresting it from unfavorable circumstances. Therefore, I don’t see this finding as necessarily dampening the hopes of shy intellectual men.
Precisely. A smart man has a leg up on a dumber man in one crucial respect in the sexual market: he has the brainpower to better understand women and therefore to sell himself to women more effectively.
PS There’s a not-so-hidden trove of dystopian nightmare material peeking through this study, for those who want to amuse themselves with supporting evidence for the Heartistian theory that unconstrained, liberated female sexuality (in conjunction with restricted, regulated male sexuality) necessarily leads to dysgenic reproductive patterns.
Filed under: Biomechanics is God, Game, Girls, Rules of Manhood
