Danimal archive, part 6

Having the ability to see others more clearly than they see you confers an enormous evolutionary advantage. This is true for animals and true for humans.

That's why everyone instinctively craves privacy while simultaneously being nosy about others. We want to keep our secrets and violate everyone else's secrets.

Women like gossip magazines, and men like pornography. A key selling point of both types of entertainment: we can see them, they can't see us.

Most people would get excited about suddenly gaining the ability to spy on their neighbors. Most people would be horrified to learn their neighbors had suddenly gained the ability to spy on them.

This is most likely a trait of the emotional brain that has been repeatedly selected for. Being able to protect one's own privacy while penetrating the privacy of others probably increased a person's chances of producing viable offspring in the ancestral environment. So today we all have powerful emotions driving us to protect our own privacy while nosing into other people's business.

Christianity in thousands of distinct forms has endured because its memes are virulently successful at copying themselves.

For example, Christianity waterproofs itself against objective criticism by teaching people that to question Christianity is to play into the hands of Satan.

Other religions displaced by Christianity were not as equally endowed with such Jedi mind tricks.

When Christianity reaches some island in the Pacific for the first time, the native religions usually don't last any longer than the native flora and fauna.

Things which evolve on islands tend to be weaker than things which evolve in the brutally competitive environment of continents.

Christianity emerged from the bloodbath of thousands of small tribal religions by being more aggressive and catchy than all of them.

Barry Bonds wouldn't be interesting to watch if he were playing against your grandmother. If Barry hit a home run on the first pitch of every at-bat, that would get boring fast. For Barry's talent to mean something, he must go up against players who can get the best of him often enough. Nobody in the audience wants all the games to be blowouts. Even the most partisan fan would eventually lose interest if his favored team put everyone away in the first few minutes of every game. For some reason, submissive sports tools want their heroes to prevail, but only after a great struggle. It's like how in religion, a Jesus wouldn't be interesting without a very powerful Satan to fight against.

The effect of drugs may be to increase the overall quality of the product, by greatly expanding the pool of players who can play at a sufficiently high level to create the environment in which the superstars can meaningfully showcase their skills.

Without drugs, for example, there might not be enough good players to fill the rosters of all the MLB teams. For all we know, maybe the second-tier players get a proportionately greater benefit from drugs than the superstars. Not enough to turn them into superstars, but enough to make them good role players. Perhaps the superstars are already so genetically gifted that they are near the limit of human performance anyway, and they don't benefit from drugs by the same amount.

That's one reason why I don't put much stock in Lance Armstrong's frequent denials that he has always competed clean. Even if he has competed clean, that didn't stop him from entering lots of races and beating lots of athletes known to be dirty, with the dirty athletes raising the level of competition and making the product better.

It's kind of like going to work for the Mafia, while making sure that you personally do not break any laws. If you manage to stay clean while working a dirty environment, you are still gaining a reward from the lawbreaking that goes on around you. It's disingenuous to benefit from a corrupt institution while claiming to be personally above the corruption.

Beautiful women enjoy preferential treatment everywhere they go, and this can be an asset to any man who has one. A man who has a beautiful woman will automatically be more respected, more admired, more credible, etc. People know a beautiful woman can select from a vast number of eager men, so whichever man she selects must somehow be special. At a minimum, he cannot be "a loser," since he has clearly won the intense competition for one of the few beautiful women. He obtains a certain benefit of the doubt before people know anything else about him. His beautiful woman can get help from other people that he would probably have difficulty getting on his own. People tend to be suspicious of a male stranger, whereas they warm to an attractive woman almost automatically. A beautiful woman opens doors and creates opportunities for any man who manages to latch onto her. Talk about a partner in life!

Gay men usually don't have contempt for women. By not finding women attractive, gay men skip the years of rejection, humiliation, and frustration that lead unattractive straight men to develop such contempt.

I don't understand why pretty girls always wish people thought they were intelligent. It doesn't make sense. It's not like pretty girls admire intelligent people much anyway; they don't admire me, for example. Why would they want to have a trait they don't even admire?

Everybody I know who is intelligent has never been able to hide that fact. Not that I know many of them, to be sure. But I met a few in college. People who had always been the smartest kid in class through the early phases of stupid school, then they finally got to college where they could congregate in appreciable numbers.

I mean, come on, pretty girls, didn't you take enough tests in school to figure out how smart you are? Numbers don't lie. If you are smart, then you got more of the answers right than most of the other dumb kids. For a smart person, it's as easy to take tests and get good grades as it is for a pretty girl to give guys a boner.

And if you could do consistently well on tests, you wouldn't have any trouble getting the point across in everyday life of how smart you are. You would just be yourself, and various people would interact with you for a while, and then look at you funny and ask, "Are you a genius or something?" Because you would keep coming up with creative solutions to problems that other people would wish they had thought
of first.

If you are smart, this sort of thing just routinely happens. A smart person doesn't need to hear how smart he is, any more than a pretty girl needs to hear how pretty she is. Anybody with an obviously outstanding attribute has been hearing about it their whole life.

The tabloid industry does stimulate women, but only partially, like the way the porn industry does stimulate men, but only partially. The product in each case does not yet simulate other more-important components of sensory stimulation that people crave, and indeed require for deep emotional satisfaction. That is, a woman cannot yet relate to a tabloid magazine, and a man cannot yet relate to a porno magazine. Those products do not yet provide the sensory data stream that tells the susceptible brain it is relating to a high-quality mate.

A woman is used to having the people around her expressing great concern about her every little emotional whim. In an environment where the relevant issue is some outside objective, such as building better products at lower cost, the woman will perceive the whole environment to be hostile to her in a personal way, because the issue is no longer how she feels. Men, in contrast, have an advantage in environments where their emotions are irrelevant because we have been trained from childhood to function without much emotional support. The notion of "taking one for the team" is ingrained in us.

A woman expects her opinions to be heard and respected. She expects the same favorable treatment she gets in real life to extend to environments that care only about objective results.

Men are somewhat more likely to realize, eventually, that opinions don't matter---only the facts matter, and getting at the facts requires a willingness to question everything we believe.

Given that the Universe is pretty much indifferent to humans, men have an easier time coping with the Universe, because we don't expect to be cared about.

Feminism is itself a set of social rules that dictate what people can and cannot do, specifically to hinder the male gender.

For example, feminism says if a man owns a company, he cannot just hire anyone he wants. Instead he must hire people in accordance with the social rules of feminism.

Your attempt to portray feminism as some sort of gender-neutral attempt to lift all boats is as transparently dishonest as the silly lies Patriarchy has told women for thousands of years to keep them in their place.

Just be honest and say feminism is an attempt to curtail some freedoms currently enjoyed by men, and transfer them to women.

Feminism is the idea that men should have less, so women can have more.

I don't doubt that somewhere in the world, there may be some women who actually desire fat men first and foremost, but they seem to be quite rare, as in I have never met one. Most women who do end up choosing fat men don't seem to be getting their first choice.

Here's another analogy to consider: a number of women work as prostitutes. Do you think this means they have a definite preference to be prostitutes? When they were little girls, did they dream of growing up to be hookers one day?

The fact that a woman is in a situation does not, by itself, tell you whether or not she thinks her situation could be improved.

I don't think many girls aspire to be hookers, any more than they aspire to marry morbidly obese men.

Note that the very existence of NAMBLA, combined with the nonexistence of any corresponding NAWBLA organization, undermines your argument. Attractive women like Debra Lafave do not need to form an advocacy organization to let them have sex with adolescent boys, if for some reason they aren't satisfied with the many willing adult men they can choose from. There are already plenty of adolescent boys who want to have sex with them, and are eager to help out. Debra Lafave doesn't need an advocacy group; she only needs to be discreet---or, perhaps, to reconsider her odd choice of rejecting all the adult men who want her. Granted, maintaining secrecy could be tough, because an adolescent boy who scores with his hot female teacher will probably experience overwhelming urges to brag to his friends about it.

Theodosius Dobzhansky famously wrote: "Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution." This includes relationships between men and women.

If you examine the mating attempts of men, you will probably see them shying away from women who are "out of their league," as well as ignoring available women who are below some minimum level of attractiveness, and concentrating their efforts on women who are around a similar level of attractiveness, the level where the payoff from scoring attractive partners matches the pain from a rejection rate that is higher than uglier women would pose.

It's like the way people take jobs that are more challenging, and higher-paying, than the stupidest jobs they could take, while they simultaneously shy away from jobs that are far too demanding. "Sexual market value" is similar to "qualifications" in the job market. Most people take jobs near the top limit of their qualifications, somewhere below the point where the job demands would overwhelm them, just as most people choose partners near the top limit of their sexual market value.

That is, men and women end up choosing partners who are about as attractive to the opposite sex as they are.

A man who is highly attractive to lots of women is unlikely to choose a woman who is attractive only to him. Conversely, a woman who is highly attractive to lots of men is unlikely to choose a man who is attractive only to her. The point is not that we want other people to want our partners, but because we want pretty much what most of our competition also wants.

Women do have a sweet deal going with mainstream values. Somehow, women have cast themselves in a sympathetic light when it comes to being victims of unrealistic male expectations, while managing to largely conceal the fact that overall, women are about twice as superficially discriminating as men! Which is to say, what women desire men to be is twice as unrealistic.

In random pairings of men and women, the man is about twice as likely to desire a date with the woman as she is to desire a date with him.

Whatever superficial cues men and woman can detect about each other in a first meeting, men are about twice as accepting as women are.

In other words, whatever emotional horror women confront by failing to measure up to male expectations, men face about twice the horror.

Here are some simple facts: most men are most turned on by some tiny percentage of women who are, therefore, judged to be the most conventionally attractive. Everybody is aware of this, and yet most women who are not in that tiny minority of women who are the most conventionally attractive seem to think they can still earn an exemption by getting into a relationship. That is, once a man falls in love with her, an average-looking woman seems to think he should no longer be visually stimulated by the same women who visually stimulated him since he hit puberty.

Since virtually all women expect this, most men learn to be less than perfectly honest with women about the fact that they are still being turned on by the same women who previously turned them on.

Men who don't learn that lesson, and tell women the facts, are "creeps."

Don't believe me? Just try it. Go out, sleep with some women, and then tell them exactly how you think their appearances could be improved.

Are you saying you believe that if people had godlike powers allowing them to change their partners in any way they pleased, most people would refrain from changing anything?

That is, do you believe most people could not think of any way to improve their partners?

This weekend, fans of the NFL will be watching the surviving playoff teams. Many of those fans are married men. When the scantily-clad cheerleaders come bouncing onto the big screen, will those married men avert their gaze with disgust and instead stare at their middle-aged wives who they find far more attractive?

Here is another question: have you ever been in a relationship with a woman who made no attempt to change any aspect of your behavior?

A fat person can look in a mirror. What scientific study can be more persuasive than that?

It's incredible that most people can drive cars without any moral qualms, especially (a) those liberal whiners who complain about comparatively few casualties in Iraq, and (b) those conservatives who complain about pictures of naked women.

It seems one rule of morality as commonly practiced is that people invoke morality on issues presenting trivial risks while giving a free pass to a genuine crime against humanity.

This is because of how morality works. People absorb their morality passively from their peers. It's never the result of a logical, reflective process.

Therefore, if everyone is driving cars, it doesn't matter how many violent deaths and maimings result. Driving feels OK because everyone is doing it. To the typical human who is a slavish conformist, what feels OK is whatever most people around him are doing.

Anyone who refuses to join in the violence must be defective. Because only defective people fail to conform to the herd.

If any doubts arise, just watch a few thousand more automobile commercials, and let the automobile industry program your thoughts as necessary to safeguard its interests.

You know the automobile industry wouldn't be spending billions on advertising if the advertising didn't work.

People have always craved power over diseases, over the weather, over their sources of food, over their enemies, and above all power over death.

So the Bible has many stories---not one of them credibly documented by modern standards, of course---about Jesus and the prophets and apostles, etc., performing miracles such as healing the sick, multiplying loaves and fish, calming the storm, walking on water, evading enemies by blinding or confounding them, and raising the dead.

It's all about the promise of something for nothing. Many religions promise some form of eternal life, and you don't even have to invent it the hard way---by figuring out how your body works.

Every religion therefore appeals to the lazy. People who are looking for some kind of magic shortcut.

In ancient times, people didn't know any better. They were so massively ignorant about almost everything that they couldn't have known someday it would be possible to heal lots of diseases, predict the weather a few days ahead, and so on, with the good chance of even more improvements in the future. Ancient people didn't even know how to get started on their problems. So they invented religions in the hope of staving off disasters, guaranteeing good crop yields, and so on.

Now we know that if you want crops to grow, if you want to avoid getting caught in storms, if you want to walk across big rivers without getting wet, if you want to stay healthy, there is a proven formula for getting these things, but it requires a lot of work. Fortunately, the work is to some extent cumulative, so each generation can contribute some of its efforts to the next.

Today, unlike in ancient times, it is possible to look at almost anything we consider a "problem" and envision a realistic approach to solving it. Some things look hopeless, such as traveling faster than light, or postponing the Heat Death of the Universe, but that still leaves a lot of problems we can realistically expect to do something about, eventually.

Maybe Dove can sponsor some cheering squads made up of "real" women.

Every attractive woman I have known tells a similar story. She doesn't know what a dry spell is, because unlike a man, she does not have to work to get her next partner. Ergo, a man who wants an attractive woman generally needs to meet many of them, then get in line to catch one on her next rebound.

It's like the way sailors on submarines sleep in shifts on the limited number of bunks. When one sailor wakes up and gets out of bed, the next sailor hops in to replace him. Since the bunk is still warm, the practice is called "hot-bunking" or "hot-racking." Dating attractive women is just like this. You can practically smell the last guy. He might even stalk you.

I find it hilarious when relationship advice so-called experts give stern warnings against rebound relationships. They typically say everyone should spend months "getting over" their last relationship before seeking another---as if there is any way to "get over" the genetically programmed constant need for the companionship of a suitable mate. They don't seem to realize that hardly anyone really prefers to be alone longer than necessary, so the amount of down time a person tolerates after a relationship ends is inversely proportional to his or her attractiveness to new relationship partners. When we meet the next person we find interesting, and that person desires our company, we do not say "I'm not going to talk to you for six months."

It's rare for a relationship advice expert to show any hint of awareness of sexual market value theory. The game rules are completely different for people at the top of the SMV distribution than for people at the bottom, but the so-called experts think one sort of advice works for everyone.

Women have an advantage because they look the same regardless of just having gone through a bad breakup, so they continue to attract men at their usual rate, since a woman's looks are basically what motivate men to meet her. A man, on the other hand, has to be together enough emotionally to go out and hit on women and absorb the required number of rejections. His attractiveness to women depends on the state of his personality, and that can be damaged if the last woman screwed him over. He may not be in the mood to get rejected another 20 times on top of just having gotten cheated on and dumped. But he has no choice---yet. Men won't have a choice until they become smart enough to invent artificial women.

Women also have the advantage that even while they are in relationships they can continue to collect offers, since men pursue women and not the other way around. For a man in a relationship to stockpile offers similarly, he must actively go out and hit on huge numbers of women, something that would be difficult to conceal from his present partner. Whereas the woman can bat her lashes innocently and claim she isn't asking all these other men to keep giving her offers to entertain. Whereupon when her current relationship ends, she is free to contact any of those men who recently made her an offer.

It's perfectly natural for women to give sex to men in return for resources. This became necessary when the adult hominid brain grew larger while simultaneously the pelvic opening in the female grew smaller, to allow the pelvic floor to better support the abdominal organs in an upright stance. That is, when our ape ancestors got smarter and began walking, it became necessary for offspring to be born less developed, thus burdening the female with offspring requiring a long period of parental care. The female occupied with caring for her offspring had to get food and protection from the male. The evolutionary solution for keeping the man interested in the deal was to make him constantly horny.

In my experience with people who have been victimized severely, it seems most of them become hypersensitive to further victimization, even mild victimization.

For example, try insulting someone from the ghetto who has lived a hard life. There's a good chance he will respond by trying to harm you physically. In contrast, a person who has had an easy life is more likely to shrug off your insults.

People like to complain about their disappointing relationships. But they usually vote with their feet by getting hooked up again as soon as they get a chance. Even people who go through what they describe as the "hell" of two, three, or four divorces. If it's so bad, why can't they just say no to the next opportunity? Especially when the odds are that whoever they married the first time around was probably close to the best they can do.

Also, it's not difficult to break up with women, provided you don't make the mistake of marrying them. So there are ways to avoid "that kind of hell."

Relationships can ruin your life, kill you, or worse. So can lots of things. Talk to some kid whose whole family just got killed in a car accident. The kid probably can't wait to get his own wheels.

Anthropologists say that men in every culture tend to overstate their sexual prowess and experience. If men do this, they must be somewhat reluctant to admit to a total lack of sexual prowess.

In contrast, women will typically downplay their level of sexual experience.

If a man manages to pull off a trifecta---having sex with three different women in one weekend---there's no way he resists the urge to boast about it to his buddies. Everybody recognizes this to be a rare and impressive achievement for a man. Even if we don't actually admire it, we have to say, "Damn."

If a woman sleeps with three different men in one weekend, she's not going to go around proclaiming it, because (a) that would make her a "slut," and (b) a very high percentage of women could easily do the same thing if they felt like it, so it's not even something people could respect for its difficulty.

For men, the difficult thing is to get sex with women; for women, the difficult thing is to avoid sex with men. To a first approximation.

I remember in college, there was this older guy who worked as a technician in my department, and he was generally friendly and well-liked. But occasionally when he was in the company of a few male students he trusted, and an attractive coed went sashaying by, he was known to gaze at her and say, "I would give [dramatic pause] anything."

Being young and full of more hormones at the time, the male students probably wanted the attractive young woman even more strongly, in an absolute sense, but we were cooler about it, because at the time our world seemed to be full of attractive young women. It never seemed like the current one represented the last chance. But to the older guy, seeing her and not getting her is like getting snubbed by the entire set of attractive young women, because he is in fact being completely locked out of the game by all of them.

It's hard to imagine people who are drastically less (or more) capable than oneself. "Let them eat cake."

There are two issues here:

1. The facts.
2. Whether some person "should" face the facts.

A glance around indicates that many people, perhaps most, have decided some facts aren't worth facing.

Religion, for example, will remain popular as long as science hasn't solved all the problems, such as disease, death, and being unable to increase one's talents.

Facing the facts works for you, but billions of people prefer their wacky religions, and they will continue to prefer their wacky religions until the minority of people who face the facts come up with a better option for people who can't face the facts.

People do what feels best. Facing the facts often doesn't.

It's very very rare to find a woman older than, say, age 25 who is still a virgin and not by choice. Fat or not. Whereas it's easy to find men in that state.

And women are fussier than men! In studies where men and women were randomly paired up for blind dates, the man was twice as likely as the woman to desire a second date.

Of course if a man is having trouble impressing the ladies, getting fat isn't going to help his cause.

Getting fat doesn't usually wipe out a young woman's chances altogether. Usually a gluttonous young woman hasn't had time to get sickeningly overweight yet, and she still has her youth causing her to exude fertility cues which attract men. (Young fat doesn't look at hideous as old fat.) A fat young woman won't usually attract men in the same numbers a slender young woman attracts, but enough to cure virginity if she wants.

If a woman is obese and older than, say, 40, her chances with anything resembling a quality man have probably gone in the toilet. Then she's got both age and weight working against her. She might have to compensate by pursuing men much more aggressively.

Sexual temptation is proportional to a person's SMV, therefore:

I'd wager decent money that religious virgins in "that age range" have lower SMV, on average, than religious non-virgins "in that age range." Religious abstinence may itself be in part a form of sour grapes, a way for losers to dupe themselves into picturing their defect as a virtue.

Churches are social organizations, and social organizations have been responsible for hooking up men and women for sex as long as there have been humans. Anybody with high SMV in a social organization is going to get the interest of the opposite sex.

Gluttony is also a sin in some religions, yet look at all the fat slobs in any church. If they could get laid as easily as they can find doughnuts, do the math.

Handing out contraceptives in schools is cheaper than paying all the social welfare costs to raise unwanted children, and then paying to imprison a disproportionate fraction of them after they grow up to become criminals. Not too surprisingly, a child who must grow up with the immense handicap of being unwanted by his or her own mother is less likely to become a productive member of society, and more likely to become a criminal or a welfare slob.

And yet Republicans object to making contraceptives available to teenagers. What's up with that?

Obviously the real issue here has nothing to do with costs. Republicans don't care how much their ideas cost society. Republicans have had their logical thinking ability systematically eliminated by televangelists and replaced by faith (i.e., imagination).

"Desperation" is not often an attribute of the party in power.

Let's ask the women of the world to stop demanding diamond rings from men, and to stop celebrating the traditional holidays. When Christmas, Valentine's Day, etc. roll by, just act as if nothing happened.

Are political conservatives more resistant to "change" than the typical woman? I doubt it could be possible. Women are some of the most hidebound traditionalists the world has ever seen. They can't even conceive of change, let alone embrace it.

It's interesting that I have never seen any advertisement aimed at telling women where to find three billion horny, sex-starved men. Probably that's because every woman knows where "Planet Earth" is.

Since every sport is inherently nonsensical, the role of tradition is overwhelmingly important. Only tradition is powerful enough to sustain major-sport nonsense in the face of common sense. (Sporting tradition functions quite a bit like religious tradition.) If baseball has traditionally been a certain kind of sport, transplanting some other sport's tradition into baseball will be difficult. Much like it would be difficult to persuade Christians to adopt the Muslim tradition against religious images, or to persuade Muslims to adopt the Christian tradition of eating pork.

It would be more efficient for the President to stay confined to Dick Cheney's bunker, and do his fundraising with telepresence, rather than waste all the petroleum and finance all the terrorism it takes to fly Air Force One and drive those motorcades on all those political junkets. It's too bad the average person is stupid enough to be emotionally swayed by a demonstration of the President's ability to squander resources.

Since only something like 20% of women reach orgasm consistently with their partners, one might think a huge market would exist for sex advice. But on the list of things women care about, this one ranks very low. The people who care most about reaching orgasm are men, and most men have no trouble reaching orgasm whenever their women put out. Men don't need to pay anybody to tell them how to enjoy sex, any more than a dog needs to pay.

In any case, if someone is too stupid to figure out where to find sex-technique information for free, that person is probably too stupid to follow advice he or she pays for.

You may have noticed that Native Americans are less likely to believe in Jesus than African Americans. Most likely this is because white slaveowners forcibly uprooted Africans from most of their cultural heritage, making it easier to brainwash them with European Christian heritage. Given that a higher percentage of African Americans than Native Americans are Christians today, if slavery is responsible for much of this difference, would you say slavery was worth it, in light of the millions of African American souls who have been spared eternal damnation?

After all, slavery lasts but one lifetime, whereas eternal damnation is, well, eternal.

The challenge for a woman is not to lose her virginity. Rather, her challenge is to secure commitment from a man and retain it. Most of the men she desires commitment from are not going to give it while they still have opportunities with other women.

It's interesting that mental illness is such a handicap in romance, and yet there seems to be no selection against it. Maybe all the nutcases eventually find each other and manage to breed more nutcases. So don't give up hope.

Fat Acceptance propaganda could never have originated with men. While men have certainly concocted their share of nonsense---see every religion---men generally restrict their nonsense to varieties that aren't immediately and obviously falsifiable.

People admire beautiful things. That is the normal emotional response to beauty. We see something beautiful, and we admire it. How do you react to something you consider beautiful?

Fat women have to describe themselves as beautiful because nobody else does. They want to be admired just as any human wants to be admired. But hardly anyone admires them.

"Major lifestyle change"---are you brave enough to face the simple truth without trying to hide behind silly euphemisms? Nobody who sees an obese person is fooled for a second by your purposely vague labeling. When we see an obese person, we are not seeing a "major lifestyle," but instead a person who chronically overeats.

Fat people are fat because they eat too much. They can lose weight by eating less.

More to the point, when you tell fat bashers to shut up and pretend they admire obesity, you are demanding that they too make a "major lifestyle change."

Does the fact that a change in behavior is "major" have anything to do with anything? No. When you see someone else behaving in a way you don't like, you tell him to change. The fact that his behavior constitutes his "lifestyle" in no way exempts it from your attempt to meddle.

Of course the demographic reality is that because so few people truly believe in lifetime monogamy (many people firmly believe in commitment, right up to the moment when they decide to end their relationships), and because children are the natural waste product of sex, the sexual market will be cluttered with so many single moms at any given time that lots of men will have to settle for them.

A few of them may be worth the added hassle. I'm thinking of Angelina Jolie. Probably more often than is healthy. But in most cases, when a single man can choose between two otherwise comparable women, the childless woman is the clear winner.

This is something for women to consider when contemplating motherhood. If your current relationship fails to go the distance, you will re-enter the sexual market at a lower station than where you left it, in addition to the automatic deduction for increased age. Men will still be plentiful at your lower station, but you may find them inferior to the men you previously attracted.

Let's consider the job analogy. Seeking a job is roughly (but not perfectly) analogous to seeking a relationship partner. For a person of average employment value, job offers are not typically raining down. He or she has to make an effort to go out and find them. This takes work. People are lazy, so once a job is in hand, most people stop looking for better jobs, unless something turns out be unacceptable with the current job.

But if a person's idea of the dream job offer does happen to drop out of the sky one day, he or she probably takes it, after determining that it is genuine. A similar situation is when some average working stiff wins the super lottery jackpot. Goodbye, job.

Thus it would be fair to say that although the average working stiff doesn't spend his whole life actively looking for better jobs, he is certainly open to something better if it should unexpectedly materialize. Buying lottery tickets is not the same as dedicating your whole life to a quest for something better; it's an innocent little way to keep oneself in the potential path of massive improvement.

Relationships appear to work the same way for most people. People tend to be as choosy as they can, while they are actively choosing, and then they settle into relationships which for most don't stay too exciting for very long. However, most people who are in relationships do not sequester themselves from all other potential partners. Instead they continue to put themselves out there, a little, not necessarily going out of their way to talk to people they find attractive, but not exactly fleeing from them either.

People routinely try to adjust their surroundings to make them conform to some internal idea they have about how they want their surroundings to be. This includes the people they surround themselves with as well as the things.

The happiest people tend to be those who have the most success at adjusting their surroundings. That's part of why going to prison is unpleasant---the prison inmate loses most control over his surroundings, and unlike joining the army, he doesn't get to shoot people legally.

For a woman, the men in her life are a significant part of her surroundings. Her ability to "adjust" the "man" component of her surroundings depends in large part on how good she looks and feels to them.

By looking good, a woman attracts more men, giving her more men to choose from, and thus a better chance of choosing a man who is closer to her ideal of the man she wants to be part of her surroundings.

It's analogous to having more money when she shops for furniture. More money means more choice, and more chance of getting what she wants.

A woman's looks are the analog to money when she shops for men, because men happen to be genetically programmed to respond emotionally to a woman's appearance more than
anything else about her.

There are some interesting sociobiological hypotheses about why men are so visually-oriented when it comes to evaluating potential sex partners. If your "and for what?" question was not purely rhetorical, read some sociobiology books for the best answers anyone has proposed yet.

A woman does not have to pursue men; they come to her. She merely selects the one she likes best from among the men who hit on her. Therefore, she views "the man in her life" much like she views, say, her body parts or her ancestry: they just happened. She didn't have to create them.

A man's reality is different. "The woman in his life" is there because he went out and pursued many women, eventually finding one who accepted him. The difficult part for a man is finding a woman he can please enough to get her to sleep with him. Once she is sleeping with him, he has little incentive to please her more than that. What more does he need to get from her at that point?

If he could increase his capacity to please a woman, he would be wasting it if he used it only to further please the woman he was already pleasing enough to have gotten her into his life. Odds are there are other women out there he finds more attractive; if his capacity to please women increases, he would be better off trying to please them.

Consider the analogy of a deer hunter. Once he has bagged a deer with his rifle, why would he be interested in upgrading to a machine gun and blasting the deer some more? He bagged it already, and it isn't going anywhere. He doesn't need a bigger gun than he has now, unless he plans to go hunting again, for bigger game.

Another analogy would be taking a job in which you have no opportunity for advancement. You met the qualifications initially, so you have the job. If you then increase your qualifications and become more productive, what difference will that make if you are still digging ditches or scrubbing toilets for the minimum wage? Your boss will be happier, to be sure, but it won't help you if the boss can't pay you more.

When employees obtain new skills, they expect to move up to more desirable jobs, either by advancing within their current employer, or by looking for work elsewhere.

Within a given relationship, there is limited scope for such advancement. Making your existing partner happier doesn't make her much more attractive, compared to how much more attractive other partners might be. She is analogous to a grateful employer who can't give you a raise or an opportunity for advancement. Working for a grateful employer is better than working for a resentful employer, to be sure, but there may be other employers who are way better.

Being in a relationship is hardly about making your partner as happy as possible. Rather, it is about thwarting your partner's opportunities to be happy in many ways. For example, you want to appropriate your partner's time, and you probably don't want your partner enjoying sex with other people.

Ever notice how people who love their dogs spend so much time yelling at them? "Love" for many people translates into control.

If people loved their dogs and wanted their dogs to be as happy as possible, they would encourage their dogs to chew up all the shoes and furniture, crap and piss wherever they wanted, and basically run wild as dogs want to do. But in practice, most people who love dogs want their dogs to be obedient rather than fully realized as dogs.

Presumably you've heard the term "high-maintenance." It is not a compliment when someone applies it to a relationship partner. Most people consider a low-maintenance partner to be superior. People are lazy. Nobody wants to spend years working harder than necessary. Why do you suppose there are so many stray cats abandoned by their owners? As soon as it gets difficult, it's goodbye kitty.

In the long run, probably the single factor most critical to the "success" of a relationship (assuming relationship stability is your goal) is how little you have to work to maintain it. That is, you would like to find a partner who just likes you the way you are, rather than someone who needs you to make some huge elaborate effort to please her.

Almost everyone is a sucker for flattery, but only about things they aren't really good at. For flattery to work, it must be undeserved.

Ben Franklin was so otherwise clever that it's hard to account for that particular lapse. I suppose he was indulging in hyperbole, because every society gives up a little liberty to gain a little security.

A modern example is the traffic light. The light turns red, and we give up our liberty to proceed. In return, we get the increased security of knowing that when the light turns green for us, we are less likely to get blasted by cross traffic.

What is "government," except a mechanism for reducing liberty in exchange for increased security? To "govern" means to compel people to behave differently than they would behave if left to themselves. That is, to reduce their liberty.

Cave men had no government, and thus they had maximum liberty. A cave man was free to do just about anything he was physically capable of doing. But the cave man had almost no security beyond what he could obtain with his own abilities. Most people today reject the cave man's way of life and accept the restrictions of society to gain more security.

The hardest part of many things is getting started. Getting your foot in the door. Getting off the ground. There is an initial barrier that is hard to get over when you haven't done it before.

That's why women tend to give irrelevant relationship advice to men. A woman might go on about what to do for Valentine's Day with your special someone. It doesn't occur to a woman that finding a "special someone" in the first place would itself be a much harder problem than figuring out how to keep the special someone happy once you have her. That's because a woman with any looks doesn't have to make any effort to get men. She just goes out, smiles and makes eye contact, and then selects from the men who approach her. For her, the work doesn't start until after she says yes. She doesn't have to think of anything to say to men to get them interested in her; if they approach her, they are already interested in her. Only by being extraordinarily offensive can she squander her early lead.

Men have the problem that we have to approach women who are not already interested in us, and somehow persuade them to be interested. If this doesn't happen "naturally" for some particular man, he may not know how to make it happen.

I think one major handicap is the fact that men are quickly attracted to (some) women. It's difficult to talk to a woman when what you really want is to grab her, and your feelings are way, way ahead of hers. It's difficult to talk to her about something other than grabbing her, if that's all you can think about.

Maybe "players" have the advantage of being able to temporarily shelve their immediate desire to grab a woman stranger, and relate to her at least initially somewhat like a human.

This is another reason why it's easier to hit on less attractive women. Not only do they tend to have lower standards and fewer opportunities, improving your odds at the outset, but you aren't as blown away by them so it's easier to make early conversation with the proper detachment. In other words, any man can be a "player" with a sufficiently ugly woman.

If the onus of self-control in the workplace is "on everyone," which presumably means "on the viewers," then why do most businesses have dress codes? Having dress codes is like admitting that people tend to react emotionally to seeing certain other people dressed in certain ways, and some of the responsibility for what happens falls on the people who make the displays and evoke the reactions.

Maybe someday Science will discover God was just kidding when he said gay sex was wrong, just as God was kidding when he said the Earth is flat, and just as God was kidding when he said it is a sin to lend money at interest.

A modern economy cannot function without the lending of money at interest. So it's a very good thing that the Men in charge of inventing Christianity have determined God was only kidding when he said not to lend money at interest.

Imagine if Pat Robertson tried to enforce the scriptures against lending money at interest with all the energy he expends on trying to enforce the scriptures against abortion---oops, there are not any scriptures against abortion. The word "abortion" is not in the Bible.

When you were a teenager, were you ever sexually attracted to an adult?

Check out the old movie "Weird Science," in which an adult Kelly LeBrock gets "created" by a couple of boys in high school. Do you think the young adult Kelly LeBrock would have had any problems seducing schoolboys if she had felt like doing so? A theme in the movie, which was perfectly believable, was how all the young guys were drooling after the stunning adult beauty.

If a fat woman could think realistically, she would eat less.

When will someone write the following books:

1. The New Rock Star
2. The New Multi-Millionaire
3. The New Extremely Attractive Person
4. The New Guy Who Gets Laid with Lots of Beautiful Young Women

to help people fitting any of the above descriptions to feel better about themselves?

One of the trainers at my gym is a pretty good-looking chick. I heard that some guy at the gym changed the oil in her car, and then her boyfriend came to the gym looking for that guy. I saw her boyfriend. I was glad he was not looking for me.

The fact that my gender produces most of the billionaires doesn't help me much; and neither do the flaws of my gender hurt me much. My situation depends more on my own production and flaws. The latter, sadly, are ample. The former might improve if I could remove myself from Usenet altogether.

I'm sure some things you find funny would send the Taliban into a murderous rage. Similarly, fans of Jimmy Kimmel know he has no qualms about mocking fat women (e.g. Starr Jones), whereas his delicious squeeze Sarah Silverman avoids that topic even though she mocks everything else.

On two occasions I have had the pleasure of working out at gyms that were having tryouts for the Ben-Gals cheering squad. I don't know if any pre-selection had already taken place, but I can say I've never seen such astounding concentrations of female hotness in one place anywhere else.

Normally in life you might see one or two seriously attractive women in a large crowd. To see a whole line of them strolling down the hall right past you in glorious three-dimensional high-definition reality is, well, enough to make breathing difficult.

That's what life will be like every day when sex robots get perfected.

In the meantime, I just have to accept the reality that the only way I make breathing difficult for attractive women is when I neglect to bathe for several days.