I've been saying for a while that women are more attracted to dominant men. I've also been saying for a while that men shouldn't take advice from women because most will tell you otherwise. Check out this study
Although recent research has increasingly focused on human sexual selection, fundamental questions remain concerning the relative influence of individual traits on success in competition for mates and the mechanisms, form, and direction of these sexual selective pressures. Here, we explore sexual selection on men’s traits by ascertaining men’s dominance and attractiveness from male and female acquaintances. On a large American university campus, 63 men from two social fraternities provided anthropometric measurements, facial photographs, voice recordings, and reported mating success (number of sexual partners). These men also assessed each other’s dominance, and 72 women from two socially affiliated sororities assessed the men’s attractiveness. We measured facial masculinity from inter-landmark distances and vocal masculinity from acoustic parameters. We additionally obtained facial and vocal attractiveness and dominance ratings from unfamiliar observers. Results indicate that dominance and the traits associated with it predict men’s mating success, but attractiveness and the traits associated with it do not. These findings point to the salience of contest competition on men’s mating success in this population.
Let's take a further look at the study.
[P]rior studies have typically focused on either female choice or male contests without attempting to quantify the relative contributions of these mechanisms to the total sexual selective pressure on a particular trait (Hunt, Breuker, Sadowski, & Moore, 2009). Second, to our knowledge, no study reporting relationships between a male trait and mating success has investigated whether these relationships were mediated by attractiveness or dominance. Third, most studies of sexual selection in men have measured success under female choice or male contests from limited information, such as body size, strength, or ratings of faces or voices made by strangers in the laboratory. Attractiveness and dominance have thus frequently been assessed devoid of relevant information, such as personality and intelligence, and in isolation from the complex webs of social relationships in which we live.
Many guys think it's all about looks but as explained here, those studies ignore the importance of personality, attitude, charisma.
Although we are interested in how past selection produced present sexual dimorphisms, we take a behavioral ecological approach, which emphasizes contemporary selection. We take this approach because we expect that, in general, current function will provide insight into past function. However, attractiveness, dominance, and even mating success have likely been at least partly decoupled from reproductive success by features of modern industrial environments such as effective contraception and socially imposed monogamy.
In simple terms, dating/mating success in the past would have been measured by number of children. The pill and the condom thwart reproduction and encourage pre-martial sex. Therefore pre-marital sex will be the measure, not number of children. Who gets laid the most.
When mating success was used as the fitness measure and success under female choice (attractiveness) and male contests (dominance) were treated as traits, there was directional selection for dominance, but not attractiveness (Fig. 1, Table 3).
Dominant men get laid more than attractive men who aren't dominant.
Although facial and vocal attractiveness (Table E2a) and related eigenvectors (Table E3a: m1, m2) positively linearly predicted success under female choice, they did not predict mating success (Tables E2b, E3b). Again, linear, but not quadratic or correlational, sexual selection on male traits acting through female choice differed from that acting through mating success (see ESM).
What this means is that your efforts to get laid matter as much as, if not more than, female choice. An average man with the balls to approach and pursue women will do better than an attractive guy without the balls to do so.
When mating success was used as the fitness measure and attractiveness, dominance, and sociosexual psychology were treated as traits, there was directional selection for dominance, sociosexuality (Table E8), and an eigenvector onto which dominance and sociosexuality loaded heavily (Table E9: m1), but not attractiveness (Table E8). Dominance and sociosexuality also positively interacted in predicting mating success (Table E8).
Sociosexuality is basically a willingness to engage in flings. High dominance + high socio-sexuality = poon slayer. Looking pretty doesn't do much for a man's mating success if he's neither dominant nor sociosexual. Handsome betaboys will struggle compared to uglier bad boys with devil-may-care attitudes.
Female choice exerted positive directional selection on height and stabilizing selection on an eigenvector that was heavily weighted by girth. These results corroborate previous research finding that women prefer taller males particularly for short-term mating (Pawlowski & Jasienska, 2005), and that they prefer men of intermediate brawniness (Frederick & Haselton, 2007).
Women prefer tall men, and men of intermediate brawniness. Why? Those are visual indicators of dominance.
Moreover, both multiple regression analysis and canonical analysis indicated selection under female choice for negative covariance between girth and facial and vocal masculinity, suggesting that the brawnier a man is, the more important it is for him to have a feminine face and voice, and vice versa. Female choice favored more attractive, but not more masculine, faces and voices, and facial attractiveness became more important as height increased.
There seems to be some kind of competing interplay with women preferring men with some sort of balance between masculine and feminine traits. Preferring taller brawny men to be more pretty, and shorter, less physically imposing men being able to get away with more masculine facial features and vocals.
These results indicate that beyond height, masculine features tend not to make independent positive contributions to success under female choice, suggesting that other factors may have operated in the selection of masculine traits in men.
...But female choice matters less than male dominance when it comes to mating success. Masculine traits aren't a winning combo on their own. Masculine traits were favoured by evolution for reasons other than female choice.
Given little evidence that men generally deferred to, or that women preferred, men with masculine faces in the present study, perhaps facial masculinity evolved in men not so much as a dominance signal or sexual ornament but because robust facial skeletal structure was protective against facial fractures incurred in physical fights (Puts, 2010).
Interesting. Men evolved masculine traits because the men of the past who reproduced the most were men who were able to dominate other men in physical combat.
Overall success under male contests (male acquaintance-rated dominance) predicted mating success, but success under female choice (female acquaintance-rated attractiveness) did not.
Pretty boys get a lot of facebook likes, but the men who do best are men who other men view as being more dominant.
These results suggest stronger sexual selection through male contests than female choice in the population studied. Much research in evolutionary psychology states or implies the contrary: stronger sexual selection in men through female choice (reviewed in Puts, 2010).
Feminist women, who assert that women are the choosers and that they solely anoint the winners, are wrong as usual.
At the same time, these results appear incompatible with the apparent autonomy with which Western women choose their mates. One possibility is that female choice determines men’s mating success, but women choose dominant men (i.e., men’s attractiveness and dominance are functionally equivalent). However, women preferred different traits from those favored under male contests, and dominance rather than attractiveness predicted men’s mating success. Another possibility is that women choose from among dominant men—that is, men’s attractiveness and dominance posi- tively interact, so that the influence of attractiveness on mating success increases with increasing dominance. However, in predicting mating success, we observed no statistically significant selection for positive covariance between attractiveness and dominance: in fact, if anything, the correlational selection gradient was negative in sign.
Dominant men with rougher looks actually do better than dominant pretty boys. Dominance is even more important if you're not amazingly good looking. That balancing effect I mentioned before seems to apply here too.
Nevertheless, perhaps women rate men’s sexual attractiveness differently from how they ultimately choose.
All the time. Don't take female preferences too seriously. I'm looking at you guys complaining about the 6' Tinder thot standard in particular.
Finally, men’s dominance may limit female choice in subtle ways. For example, in the bars, clubs, parties, and other venues in which sexual affairs are initiated, a dominant man may have little compunction against interfering with the mating attempts of a less dominant man, whereas the reverse would be less likely.
Many people will tell you that any attempt to get laid beyond saying hi, having a conversation, being nice and waiting for a girl to take you home is bad, but they're talking shit. Make your move. When you approach a woman confidently as other men do so sheepishly or worse, stand there nervously clutching their beers to their chests waiting for women to come to them, you stand a much better chance just for having the balls to do that.
Third, the use of hormonal contraception may have affected some female participants’ and raters’ mate preferences (Roberts, Gosling, Carter, & Petrie, 2008) and decoupled male participants’ copulatory patterns from their reproductive success. However, copulatory patterns can predict the reproductive success that would be realized in the absence of effective contraception (Perusse, 1993).
Contraception has changed the dating scene in a big way, the way men and women behave. As women are more free to have sex with cads rather than dads, as they would have in the past when pre-marital sex was discouraged and the risk or pregnancy was much higher. In today's dating scene dominant cads win.
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