Analyzing Attraction- Part 1

This is the first in a series of new posts on the subject of attraction. My life is quite busy at the moment, and I’m deliberately restricting the time I spend online right now as a result. So most of the posts in this series will be shorter rather than longer. Today’s post is mostly review.

I. Back to Basics

Attraction was a principal focus of this blog in the beginning, with a special focus on male attractiveness. Even before this blog was created I wrote a guest post for Sunshine Mary wherein I set out what I perceived to be the different categories that women evaluated men for in terms of their attractiveness. And by attractiveness, I mean sexual attractiveness. More about this clarification later. This was my original LAMPS formula:

• Looks
• Athleticism
• Money
• Power
• Status

As I noted in that original post, not all categories (which I called vectors then) are equal. Some were valued more highly than others by most women, and individual women could vary in their preferences as well. In terms of overall importance, they are (in descending order of importance) Power, Status, Athleticism, Looks and Money. This is sometimes referenced as PSALM. I often refer to them together as LAMPS/PSALM. A man with a high LAMPS/PSALM score is attractive to most women, and a man

I later clarified this theory bit by discussing the overall categories that women look at: Appearance, Personality and Externalities (also known as APE). The LAMPS factors all fold into that system, which is even simpler and pretty much catches everything there is to catch.

One of the major components of my LAMPS/PSALM theory and model was that it focused purely on sexual attraction. I deliberately excluded any “comfort” traits from it, because those ultimately have no bearing on female sexual attractiveness for all or nearly all women (possible exceptions to be discussed in a later post). I sometimes reference their effect on women as “creating Desire.” Desirable traits or “Retention” traits influence women in so far as elevating some attractive men over others. But unless a man meets a woman’s high threshold for sexual attractiveness (thank you Hypergamy), they don’t help a man.

Or do they?

II. Attraction v. Arousal

Rollo Tomassi has written plenty about his own views on attraction. So far as I can tell he hasn’t formulated a system or model as specific as mine. What he has done is use different terminology and approach attraction from a different light. Rollo uses the terms arousal and attraction to describe what I call attraction and comfort/security. Here is a sample of his use of those those terms from his post Alpha Tells:

In a social environment where men are conditioned to believe that women are as equal, rational agents as men, the belief men put their faith into is that women will appreciate their intrinsic qualities and base their sexual selectivity upon a man’s virtue, bearing, intelligence, humor, and any number of attractive intrinsic qualities. However, the truth of what women base their sexual selectivity upon (arousal) is far more evident in their instinctual, unconditioned behavior when around Alpha men – as well as men’s instinctual sensitivity to that behavior.

While Rollo uses the term arousal, and I use attraction, I believe that they both get to the heart of the same thing: female sexual affinity for a man. Essentially, a primal urge to want him sexually and to mate with him. Where Rollo and I perhaps differ is Rollo’s use of attractive to describe what I call desirable traits. Rollo gives them far more credit than I do in terms of generating female attention. As I understand his thinking, women are affected by two forms of attraction: sexual (what he calls arousal) and comfort/security (what he refers to when he mentions attraction). What happens is that women start out mostly driven by sexual attraction/arousal. As they get older, comfort/security attraction start to take precedence. This switch roughly coincides with a woman’s Epiphany phase- the point when her SMV starts to drop enough that both she and the men around her notice it, and react accordingly.

What Rollo has argued, and what is different from my original take on comfort/security/desirable traits, is that women are actively attracted to these traits. Women notice them and will seek men out based on them. And they will do so even if a man is not sexually attractive.

My own take on desirable traits was that they didn’t grab attention from women. Women aren’t drawn to them and they were only considered after a woman found a man to be sufficiently sexually attractive.

Having seen Rollo further develop his Epiphany line of thought through his Preventative Medicine series, I am now inclined to agree with his view on comfort/security traits. Women can and do appreciate them irrespective of a man’s sexual attractiveness. However, whether a woman does such a thing is heavily influenced by where she is on her “life script.”

Rollo’s female SMV timeline

Unfortunately, women being attracted to these traits doesn’t really help marriage-minded men much at all. This is because most of the women who are focused more on attraction rather than arousal are looking to settle. They are older and are desperate to cash in what remains of their SMV. This might make them appealing to PUAs and others of their ilk who can use this desperation for their own sexual gratification, but not to men looking to marry. Such women are not apt to make good wives. They are more likely than not to be or to become frigid during marriage. Also, they have lost much of their fertility already. Finally, it should be noted that their looks will have started to deteriorate, else they would still be in their Party Years phase.

So where am I going with all of this? That is for the next post to explain.