Why Men Want Sex and Women Need Love (11 page)

The perfect woman

F
or most men, relationships have little to do with happily ever after and are based primarily on what services a woman can provide. She wants resources, he wants services, and so the basis of a relationship is simply an exchange of goods and services. When men are asked to describe the woman in their lives, they inevitably talk about the
services
she provides—she’s a good cook, keeps a tidy house, is great with the kids, is an excellent entertainer, a good friend, sexy, has a nice ass, and so on. In other words, services, which, put bluntly, he can pay for by the hour. When women are asked to describe their man, they say he’s a good provider, is smart, makes me laugh, has a good job, owns a home, and so on. In other words, he provides resources. Society presents this exchange of goods and services under the guise of “compatibility”
because it sounds polite and is a politically correct way to say it but at a base level, it still remains an exchange of goods and services. Men are simply interested in the services a woman can provide and her physical appearance.

If you are a woman reading this, you may begin to think that we are portraying men as shallow or self-indulgent. That’s not our objective. We want to demonstrate that men’s needs and priorities are fairly simple, and if you satisfy the right one at the right time, you’ll have a happy man. If, however, you choose to judge his male “values” against female “values,” you will experience constant conflict and continual unhappiness.

Many people, especially feminists, become angry and upset at any discussion about a man’s criteria for attractive mates, calling it superficial and skin-deep. They sometimes suggest, even insist, that any discussion about research into men’s mating preferences should be censored or suppressed as it makes some women feel bad. The reality is that men’s preferences evolved over hundreds of thousands of years, are hardwired into the brain, and have hardly changed. The fact that men’s preferences are based on physical beauty and youth has been necessary for the successful genetic advancement of the human race. Certainly, our society and how we now live have changed dramatically, but men’s preferences for women have not, even though these preferences evolved to operate in an ancient world that no longer exists. To suppress their existence or deny that these preferences are real is like being angry at the weather because it’s raining or being upset that carnivorous animals prefer meat to a vegetarian diet.

To accept that men’s biology is a powerful, compelling force that controls their mating preferences gives you the opportunity to develop strategies for dealing with them. Fish evolved over the millennia to love the taste of worms and maggots. So if you’re going fishing, it makes sense to use worms or maggots as bait because that’s what fish like. There is no point trying to feed them what you like to eat—they eat worms and maggots—and there is no point expecting the fish to jump into your boat because you choose to think it. Catching fish involves understanding how a fish thinks and playing to it. In the same way, accepting how men’s brains are wired to behave allows you to understand them better and to develop strategies for man fishing and man management.

The media, especially women’s magazines, are constantly criticized for promoting a standard of female beauty to which all women should supposedly aspire. Although this may be true for women’s magazines, it’s not so for men’s magazines. Women’s magazines portray celebrities, usually the thinner females with straighter body lines. The image of the stick-shaped woman comes from the fashion catwalks, where professional models act as coat hangers for new clothing designs and the designers want the emphasis on the clothing. Studies show clearly, however, that the stick shape has little to no appeal to most men. This is because the straighter and thinner a woman’s shape, the farther she is from a 70% hips-to-waist ratio (something we’ll discuss in more detail in
Chapter 8
) and therefore the less likely she is to bear children.

Men’s brains are wired to seek out the reliable biological clues to a woman’s reproductive potential and are attracted to the hourglass figure. Men’s magazines understand this—look at the magazines promoting cars and motorcycles and you will see curvy women draped over them displaying these biological signals. That’s why you’ll never see a woman who looks like a stick insect in a Harley-Davidson advertisement. Over 80% of viewers of the Miss Universe Contest are men, whereas less than 5% of fashion-show audiences are male.

Professor Douglas Kenrick and his associates at Arizona State University studied the media portrayal of biologically perfect women and found disturbing results. They found that men who were shown images of sexually attractive women then rated their own real-life partners as less attractive and were more dissatisfied with them than men who were shown images of average-looking women. Even worse, the men who had viewed the images of the highly attractive women described themselves as less committed, less serious, less satisfied, and less close to their partners. Even the men whose partners were considered very attractive were still less satisfied with them after exposure to the sexually attractive women. These findings are concerning because the images of women shown in men’s magazines and on the Internet are usually one or two pictures selected from possibly hundreds of images taken to try to capture the right image or pose. In other words,
these images do not reflect the real world in which we live. In our ancestors’ times, men would choose their mates from the actual selection of women available and would never have seen distorted or airbrushed images of perfect fantasy women. It’s a reasonable assumption that ancestral men could have described themselves as more satisfied with their women than twenty-first century men because what the men saw was what they got.

Male brains still carry the circuits for this evaluative process in mate selection, but they are being fooled by modern technology, which overstimulates men’s response to ancient female fertility signals. As an analogy, fast food uses modern chemical technology to trick our brains into believing we are eating something of value that we need for survival. The results are diabetes, obesity, and poor health.

The media images of perfect women are a contributory factor to why men have become less committed to relationships and are more likely to philander. These images also exploit women’s natural competitive urges to attract men; consequently, women go to unprecedented lengths with cosmetic surgery, clothing, and makeup to compete for men’s attention.

Beauty fades—implants are for ever

There are four basic things that men have always wanted from women:

1. Sex
   

2. Basic services—food, washing, mothering, etc.
   

3. To be loved and be number one
   

4. Solitary time without interruption
   

It’s that simple. Men filter everything they say and do through these four needs. If you can pick which of these needs a man wants at which time, he will become fairly easy to handle. The problem is that what’s important on a man’s list is likely to be seen by women as a low or irrelevant priority, and vice versa. For example, a man will see working late at night, working overtime, or having two jobs as sacrificing for his family to provide food and shelter, but a woman may see these things as evidence that he’s more interested in his work than in his family.

In a relationship, most men will do the things necessary to get a woman to provide these four basic services. This includes romantic dinners, dancing, showing his “feminine side” by talking with her and telling her she is the only one, the most wonderful woman he’s ever met—you know all the lines. His base goal, however, is still to get a woman to provide one or more of his basic service needs and to provide it now. If talking lovingly about “together forever” is what she needs to hear right now, that’s what he’ll tell her. A man will also lie to a woman about her appearance to raise his chances of getting laid because, among men, this is seen as a just and noble cause.

A man does things for a woman for the reward of sex and other benefits, and women know this. “Take me shopping,” she says. “Build me something, drive me someplace, take me to the cinema/dinner/my mother’s place, put the kids to bed, paint the garage,” and so on. How do we know men expect a payoff in sex for these things? Because men won’t do them for other men. And if they ever do something for another man, a silent debt is established between them that is expected to be repaid at some time.

If a man is not having sex with a woman but is investing time to do things for her, then the silent debt ledger comes in force, just as it would if she had been a man. He wants to be repaid for his efforts with either sex or future credits.