What makes people attractive to one another?

(written by lawrence krubner, however indented passages are often quotes). You can contact lawrence at: lawrence@krubner.com, or follow me on Twitter.

What makes people attractive to one another? This seems to change over time, depending on what people lack. A hundred years ago, in the USA, it was reasonable to summarize dating advice as “The way to a man’s heart is through his stomach” but that was before the economy had shifted to a service economy, so one could not buy services such as good food, one had to instead rely on women. Nowadays such advice is ridiculous, we get food by going to a restaurant. But what is scarce in this modern world? Finding someone who will listen to you.

According to Time, a study published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin found that male participants find women most sexually attractive when they were receiving their blessed opinions. While it’s natural that a human being would be attracted to someone who was demonstrating an interest in them and not acting like a rude asshole, women didn’t feel the same way as universally as the male participants did. Rather, women sometimes interpreted male interest in their words as a disingenuous ploy to obtain sexual access to them, a fair if not paranoid assessment. What woman hasn’t had what she felt was a nice, pleasant conversation with a seemingly attentive man, only to be girlfriendzoned and guilt tripped about not rewarding his endurance of Lady Opinions with a cookie in the form of a blow job?

By itself, the attraction study is interesting; it indulges the sort of cynical conformation bias that caused a piece on The Toast called “Women Listening to Men in Art History” to be one of the funniest fucking things on the whole goddamn internet. But it doesn’t paint a complete picture of just how strongly some men believe they are entitled to women’s attention.

On Sunday, Buzzfeed’s Katie Notopoulos urged her 18K+ Twitter followers to unfollow men, because ridding her Twitter feed of “male opinions” had improved her social media experience and she thought it would do others good, too. Unsurprisingly, reaction to #UnfollowAMan was swift and predictable and ranged from this is a joke, right? to MISANDRYYYYYY!!! to whoa guys feminism has gone too far.

Post external references

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    http://jezebel.com/men-like-women-best-when-they-listen-listen-listen-1613277991
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