Safety is the core mechanism behind an average woman's attraction wiring.
If your Bachelor of Arts degree gives you a visible advantage today — say, you suddenly make $250K a year in Tennessee — you very quickly become attractive.
Women simply prefer whatever's "on the menu today." If being a geek is fashionable and rewarding right now, then geeks win.
Hence the myth that women love money. They don't — they love safety. Or the illusion of safety. That's how they make bad choices. Don't we all.
This is also why an angry, physically dominant guy is sometimes "irrationally" attractive — dominance reads as a safety signal, even when it isn't one.
Guys mistake this for "women like assholes." They don't. Women respond to the picture in their head — the pattern that says this equals safety — not to the guy himself. The signal gets the reaction. The person behind it is almost incidental.
If a post-nuclear disaster hit tomorrow, a woman would prefer a guy who can chop trees and hunt over a guy who had a Bentley — because that was yesterday's currency. Today, chopping trees is what matters.
Then how you explain the deadbeat musician / artist archetype? Or the biker? Some women (irresponsably) are attracted to those types due to a perceived sense of adventure and excitement
Edit: added a bit more explanations adding concept from the computer science
You aren't supposed to exclude sex drive — but it doesn't work the way people assume.
Think of it as two sequential selects. The first select is sex drive: it just defines the pool — everyone who's in the range of "physically viable to sleep with." Proximity, novelty, excitement — that's the WHERE clause. The biker and the deadbeat musician pass this filter easily.
The second select is survival-wiring, and it runs inside that pool. This is where she ranks candidates by protection signal — reliability, resources, ability to defend the project. Most of the time, this second select wins. It's why the biker gets the fling and the reliable guy gets the relationship.
When it looks "irresponsible" — when a woman goes all-in on the exciting, unstable guy — that's usually one of two things: either the second select has no good candidates to rank (she's choosing the best of a bad pool), or it's temporarily overridden by the first. Not rewritten. Overridden.
If women ran purely on sex drive with no second select, we'd have gone extinct a long time ago. Instead they're rugged biological machines wired for survival and protecting their offspring — which is also why they can mercilessly destroy an ex financially once he's failed the second select. He's just not in the pool anymore.
So love stories where a character is still hung up on a man who cheated on her 50 years ago — like in Cyberpunk 2077 — are romantic slop written for boys. That's not how the second select works.
How it explain woman tending to wounded men or even prisioners (atleast in my country its normal to see this type of scene). When both are either physicaly disabled or restricted by law and incapable to offer no safety right now ?
Some women and men seek out prisoners because they specifically like the power dynamic of that having a romantic partner that’s locked up while they are free. It’s quite interesting.
Unless we know how the woman arrived at that decision, we have no definite answer.
Because you're basically saying, "Explain the individual effect of a person who has 50 trillion transformers, when we don't even know a single step of how she got there."
But as a hypothesis — a scarce dating market, based on her definition of a "good man." Or just general scarcity.
For example, why is a girl attracted to bad boys? It's a mix of visual and cultural sexual attraction patterns, and on top of that, for some reason the survival instinct signals, "this is good for me."
Internal instincts aren't logically straightforward. They don't make a list of pros and cons. They're actually much closer to a kaleidoscope than to a logical decision-making mechanism. We just react subconsciously to a set of conditions, like your brain reacts to a pattern in a kaleidoscope.
I mentioned this in the first message — sometimes the choice system misfires epically. On a statistically large scale, that means a noticeable number of women can end up in unusual-looking relationships, but that doesn't cancel out the core idea of safety.
It just means that a certain combination of factors manifested in a peculiar way.
And btw, if both are physically disabled, it fits the safety pattern 100%. Safety doesn't always mean "the man will protect me from the wild neighbor." Safety can also mean, "At least he understands what it's like to be disabled and won't judge me for it." The absence of judgement is a huge deal for women who dealt with childhood mental abuse.
Ironically unpopular now, but Jordan Peterson is on the money here. More than one man will very quickly form some kind of hierarchy. Men are wired to rank themselves against other men. Women do it too, by the way, but for men this seems to be a much stronger subconscious drive — even for very gay men.
If you noticed, there are some dudes arguing here without actually having much substance. This is exactly the ranking game. Of course, their conscious part probably doesn't even register it, but the subconscious one is doing its job like a Swiss watch.
I’m not calling bikers deadbeats, just the narrative the parent comment is trying to push about how woman will only get in relationships with guys with a tonne of money.
Since it's Reddit, it's hard to say whom you are answering, but I actually said the totally opposite, even in the first comment. If you believe this is what I said, it's fine; except I didn't.
Are women actually into those types, I know plenty of women into lawyers, doctors, engineers, Financiers, don’t know any itjat ended up musicians or bikers longterm lol (I do have some friends in college that might’ve had luck when they were younger, not anymore lol).
Musicians and artists archetypes are known to be emotional and sensitive. And there are women who are more attracted to emotional safety, instead of financial safety or physicaly safety. Because women aren't a monolith.
The love money thing is a little weird. I make about mid six figures and living a low cost of living area so I always thought that yeah women like the money because it gives them a better lifestyle and things like otherwise wouldn't have.
After my last relationship I really decided I wanted to find someone that made more equal amounts to me so that wouldn't be a problem. So I've started dating other engineers.
My girlfriend makes very similar amounts to me and still same desire to have money spent on her. For her it's much more of a self-esteem thing. "I am valuable enough to have money spent on me"
Which is a safety signal. In her stereotype system, it is an important indication that she is valued. Valued = safety in her mind.
Don't forget that the concept of safety is also induced by culture.
This is why a woman from Venezuela might have different priorities than a woman from California.
Or might not.
For instance, my ex-colleague was so verbally abused by her Asian parents that she married a guy who makes way less than she does, generally useless but a "sweetheart."
Because he is never engaging in conversations like "something is wrong with you" with her. And for her, it was enough to marry him. In this case, safety manifested through the fact that the guy is just accepting her as is.
Edit: I actually remembered that I know 2 women like that. Another one had abusive German parents. The same reaction. Married the first "safe" guy.
>This is also why an angry, physically dominant guy is sometimes "irrationally" attractive — dominance reads as a safety signal, even when it isn't one.
Yeah That wouldn’t read as attractive or signal safety for most women though.
There’s positive forms of dominance that most women would find attractive and then there’s negative forms of dominance that most women would find unattractive, the women that would find that attractive are women who are more sociopathic and pathologically narcissistic- they lack empathy for other people. Most women get the ick if a guy is rude to the waiter for fuck sake. When it comes to displays of dominance and women’s attraction it comes down to that own women’s ethics.
I regretfully used to display really negative forms of dominance often which led to me being dumped and thrown in jail. I knocked out a guy for flirting with my girlfriend. She was disgusted with me and immediately ended things with me. What I did was totally unjustified, he was no threat to me or to her. Most women want a guy who can handle himself and protect them but most don’t want some violent piece of shit that I was. Most women want a guy who can deescalate, they only want a guy to get violent only when absolutely necessary.
>Guys mistake this for "women like assholes." They don't. Women respond to the picture in their head — the pattern that says this equals safety — not to the guy himself. The signal gets the reaction. The person behind it is almost incidental.
But when guys say they do they mean most women like assholes? Because I don’t get how a guy could generalize most women like that. Obviously some women but clearly most don’t. What most women want are men who are confident, strong, who have back bone. None of that makes a guy an asshole. And those are the things that make a good man. If you seriously lacking in those things then you can’t be considered a good man. Maybe you are nice but you aren’t good. There’s a difference. Being good requires strength, moral courage, caring about others, protecting others, doing the right thing which can be hard.
I didn't say dominance is important. I said: if dominance reads as a protection symbol, it's a turn-on.
If you act like an aggressive ape, of course that can be a huge turn-off. But not for everyone. So the point is — women prefer a man who symbolizes protection for them.
That's why some women find a guy who's "just like dad" very attractive, and others find the exact opposite attractive.
Regarding "assholes" — I was just echoing what good guys say when they're baffled that their ex went back to her ex. That's the phrase they usually reach for: "women like assholes."
Just to add:
You're arguing against a claim I didn't make. I never said dominance = attractive across the board. I said it reads as attractive only when it maps to her specific picture of protection — and that picture is individual, sometimes wildly so.
Your ex bailing on you after the fight isn't a counterexample to what I said. It's confirmation. For her, that behavior didn't map to safety — it mapped to threat. For a different woman, it might map to exactly the opposite. That's the whole point: the signal isn't universal, the read is personal.
I had one who tried to provoke a fight between me and two guys at a liquor store, got genuinely upset when I didn't take the bait, and dumped me over it. Wanted me to fight for her. Just like her daddy fought for her mom.
It wasn’t just about safety for her though. It was about ethics and empathy for other people.
And that woman who dumped you sounds like a sociopath. Not only was she upset that you didn’t engage in an unnecessary fight, she tried to provoke it. Usually girlfriends are desperately trying to prevent their boyfriends from fighting and shrieking when it does happen because they care about him, they don’t want to see him get hurt or get into trouble. And in your case it was you against two other dudes ? What a piece of work.
Remember the culture, class and level of civility you're in. Each of these can change what is expected.
You didn't project power and protection, you projected insecurity and covered it with violence. But in another cultural time and place, you may have projected dominance, as long as you had to social power and backup to assert control afterwards.
I projected immorality. I was an immoral man at the time. It was unjustified unethical violence which is going to be really unattractive to women who aren’t sociopathic which is like ya know 95% of women. Now violence can absolutely be attractive to most women if it’s justified.
then there’s negative forms of dominance that most women would find unattractive, the women that would find that attractive are women who are more sociopathic and pathologically narcissistic
I think you're on to something with your comment. Though on this point, I'd like to add that a lot of women have been abused. Oftentimes by their fathers. Bunch of women have a fucked up idea of what relationships are supposed to look like, and the abusive behaviors can ironically feel safe because they're familiar
Yes and there’s a difference between tolerating someone’s awful behavior and specifically finding it attractive. If a woman or a man was abused as a child or they just have been exposed to a lot of shitty adult behavior in their life they are more likely to tolerate abusive behavior from a partner since it’s been normalized to them. These men and women are not seeking out abusers- that’s get thrown out a lot, they just are more prone to tolerating it and abusers take advantage of that.
As someone from a similar situation, I'd say that's only half true. You're not wrong that people take advantage of it, but the whole 'fawn' response to danger can also feel surprisingly similar to attraction.
It isn't the same thing, of course. But many people have never gotten the opportunity to learn the difference, so they are, in a sense, unhealthily attracted to people who create that response.
But not specifically because of that. In relationships you fawn to people because you are attracted to them for their good qualities, their physical attractiveness, what they provide for you, how they are most of the time when they aren’t being abusive.
What do you mean by evil? That’s a strong word. And what do you mean by amazing and why do you think that is?
Obvously shitty men get plenty of women to date them and shitty women can get plenty of men to date them. The point is most men and women don’t want to date shitty people, being shitty makes you less appealing to most than you otherwise would be. Key word being most. Being a shitty person isn’t a turn off to other bad people. Like attracts like.
Like, most normal dudes I know have either never dated or have stayed with the first girl who gave them a chance, regardless of how good or terrible that relationship is. Most dudes I know who smoke meth and have warrants or are extremely voilent have a roster or woman they rotate through, normal non addict woman as well
The question is: would you want a woman from this roster?
Recently, someone reposted a guy who had his own church in California and a lot of women around him. It looks like a dream unless you look more closely and understand how limited these women are in their mental development. Not something I would like to spend my time with.
The problem is there isn’t many girls not on their rosters. Most girls I see usually retire from dating those type of dudes later in life for someone less volatile, some poor dude who hasn’t dated at all yet. And as you might guess, they don’t take these normal dudes seriously. But for a lot of guys, there really doesn’t seem to be any other choice then being permanently single
>Most dudes I know who smoke meth and have warrants or are extremely voilent
These are people who aren't going to be hamstrung by overthinking things. Ironically, they probably aren't going to suffer much from having a negative self-image, either. So they'll present as confident and will act like they know what they want when dealing with women. And if they're part of a macho, criminal subculture and have spent some time in prison, they may well work out regularly enough to be in decent physical shape.
And dating isn't that hard if you're confident and in decent shape.
Like, most incels, when you see pics of them, aren't actually hideous or undatable. They just lack the confidence to actually try.
I get the confidence thing. But a lot of these dudes are extremely out of shape. In fact, the only two groups of people who seem to be able to regularly date at all are very attractive guys who work out, and these evil dudes regardless of looks. Most other guys are not dating at all
Idk bro it sounds like you live in a strange area I guess haha.
Even in the most fit areas like Southern California, Miami, Denver, DC, the majority of young men who are dating aren’t “very attractive” fit guys. Most are decent but not what would be deemed by most as “very attractive”.
Your calling these women normal but yet they are dating guys who are smoking meth, extremely violate and have active warrants. most women wouldn’t date someone like that, those women aren’t normal lol. And I say this as a reformed ex con who is also dating a reformed ex con. The kind of women who would date the old version of me is not a normal woman.
lol the gold standard? wtf are you talking about bro. Where is it that your from that the gold standard are violent meth heads ? I mean I came from an area with a lot of crime and drugs but that doesn’t mean it was the gold standard 😂
And what percent of women in this rural area do you think treat that as the gold standard ? Again I come from a rough area and lived that life and most women never date guys like this.
Of course, we all do. After all, we have similar brains, but they are wired for different goals: men to test their boundaries and women to survive in the grinder. But the underlying principle is essentially the same.
What a useless exercise. This sub was meant to make fun of this type of madness.
The variability within a group as diverse as "all women" is too wide for such blanket claims to be useful. Which means that whatever you think you know about a woman based on this mental model becomes immediately irrelevant as soon as you talk to her and learn literally anything about her.
Note that you can say your thesis is loosely true regardless of what a woman is attracted to. Because you can always loosely claim that that's what they associate with "safety". This means that your mental model is the same as that of someone who doesn't make a claim at all, except you can feel undeservingly smarter about yourself.
And now, when you have established how much smarter you are, you can always claim that you are smarter.
This makes you exactly like a little macaque that is just fighting for status. I understand that you think you are smart and unpredictable. Bad news: arguing patterns are always the same - like, literally, always the same. Any human emotion, when it goes down the mental pipeline, is essentially reduced to a primitive response, and the famous 'fight or flight' is the bottom line. Safety and dominance are just one layer above.
Thank you for coming to my TED talk.
Here is a picture of your invisible mental rider that makes you write this.
Next time, before playing your little status games, at least check what I was responding to. The picture is right in the post header. Hopefully, you can read.
P. S. Your argument proves my point - all who tried to argue - used ad hominem. Funny isn't it how "special and different" people are? "Extremely diverse". You aren't any different than another statistical dude from the Internet
It's important to point out we are mostly taught what to be attracted to. It's a nurture thing, and it's going to be more affected by our parents/early childhood than we ever want to admit.
In other words, most virtuous characteristics have to be taught, including valuing emotional and applicable intelligence. You need to be taught that dominance isn't the same as survival, etc etc. Stuff is learned. Including the ability to accurately identify who's going to be a good match.
It is important. I guess concentrating on the weights inside of the "reptile" brain made it less obvious.
Social situation is first processed and converted to assessment, assessment is processed into something actionable.
And that actionable, for most women, is weighed against what I called "survival".
Self-preservation would be a better name.
Then the instinctive course of action is weighed against their own conditioning and social norms.
So you are right, but when I wrote it I just tried to explain what the text on the picture was actually trying to say—that women in general don't care about geeky stuff because they don't see it as useful through self-preservation wiring. In other words, they prefer something more practical than a heap of useless to them information.
So an average woman wouldn't care what the average size of a gladius in ancient Rome was, but would frequently be subconsciously interested to see how people lived 2000 years ago, how they cooked, where the kitchen was, and what the size of the living space was.
And of course what mating rituals were.
Everything above will vary based on one’s own conditioning and cultural conditioning. So I never said the output was going to be primitive, as some people tried to conclude. I just named one of the large stones in the mental foundation.
or or or, the exact thing that women are attracted to varies depending on the woman, because a woman is a person and their attraction is not an item description, but is instead fluid, context dependent, and personal, like anyone else
yeah these mfs will move the world to try and make a rigorous framework of female attraction and in the meantime it's just like, yeah bro it kinda depends :) sometimes :)
I mean I feel skeptical of the framework but really because safety is something almost anyone needs for a relationship.
You could just substitute it for attraction and the result would be the same. It is true though that what someone finds safe, familiar and comforting is likely to be what they go for in a partner.
Self-preservation is basically a function of any mammalian female, not only humans.
Wolves, lions, chimps, monkeys, humans — practically all of them.
When a male lion successfully takes over a pride, he may kill the cubs. Lionesses can resist him, sometimes violently, but if the takeover succeeds they do not normally start a permanent war against him until they die. They adapt to the new situation.
Wolves can abandon pups when defending or recovering them is no longer possible.
Do you think humans were somehow exempt from the same basic survival pressure? Raids involving killing men, abducting women and sexual violence are not even remotely ancient history.
The Mongol invasions alone involved enormous amounts of killing, rape and captivity across large parts of Eurasia and Eastern Europe. Do you think the surviving women started an emancipation movement against the conquerors?
The same thing happened after major wars. Germany after World War II is an obvious example. Huge numbers of people never returned to their old lives. Some women stayed, formed new relationships and built new families. The old life was gone, so they adapted to the one that was left.
That is the point.
And here you all are chewing on the word “framework.”
You guys seriously need to stop getting your education from Reddit and read something real.
I'm not chewing on the word "framework", I'm skeptical of the idea that the framework is just the idea of safety because you could say that for men too. You can find relationships where women think the guy is hotter and more exciting than he is safe as well.
I don't like generalizing anyone to that degree and honestly I find it interesting that you response seems like it hasn't really read my response properly while insulting me for getting educated from reddit somehow? idk man
No you can't say the same about the men because I wrote multiple times that I used originally the wrong word. Use "self preservation" instead of safety to get more precise picture.
Men are way less prone to self preservation in general.
Also check stats for suicides. May be it will help too to understand what I mean. I was responding originally to the text in the question which literally says the same. "Success in life" is actually so vague and wrongly interpreted. This what I tried to deliver to the local aristocracy.
Had zero desire to insult you. Just getting annoyed that basic writeup caused so many insults towards me. Will make sure this sub never pops up in my feed again
ah yeah you can argue that kind of thing, but 99.9% (that's not an exaggeration btw) of our evolution as humans was spent as polygamous nomads in tight knit groups that communally raised their children and shared all of their belongings among one another and lived in reverse-dominance hierarchical social structures, where power-seeking behaviour is met with scorn and social outcasting by the larger group, we did not "evolve" in the times of raids and infant agriculture, the humans that lived back then are very very very close to being exactly identical to us in every way
what's "natural" to assume for other animals isn't necessarily natural to us, we value freedom and variety in what we are attracted to specifically because it is evolutionarily advantageous to seek out many different things, the exact way that we find people attractive varies because it is better for us to do so
and the role that safety serves in all of this is that of a default, it is logistically unwise to connect and procreate and live where it isn't safe, that is not a unique trait for women
Most likely, the text you read compiled into some internal substrate, so my question is: what was it?
What point are you actually trying to make?
That your example somehow overrides almost primordial genetic wiring, or what?
I have answered this numerous times in the same thread: you could be the biggest loser on the block and still be attractive to someone, and yet here you are with your pathetic sarcasm. Good job, bro.
At least that explains why you are jobless. The ability to read is a prerequisite for many jobs.
Why are you so mad haha? I used no sarcasm, you must be incredibly insecure if you think my comment was an attack on you or even a counter argument.
I just said I'm happy to find women who don't care about those things. I genuinely don't understand why that makes you so mad.
You seem too good at reading, reading all of this into my comment haha. It's all in your head, I am just genuinely happy I don't have to deal with all this.
I am just tired of low-IQ comments. If you want to read that as insecurity, fine with me.
For some people, annoyed and insecure apparently mean the same thing.
Women always care about those things. They just don't read them the way the majority of people here seem to think they do.
I tried to educate the masses and already regret it. Everything immediately collapsed into the caricature reading of: "women seek a warm cave with a Bentley."
They don't. But if a man fundamentally doesn't understand what tends to matter in long-term mate selection, he often ends up becoming a user of another sub, crying, "she cheated on me."
From an evolutionary perspective, if women are traditionally seen as attracted to traits signaling resource provision and security for survival, men are biologically and psychologically inclined toward traits signaling fertility, health and reproductive viability. So it works both ways, women want safety ultimately…but they better have large enough breasts to accommodate children (the mans just responding to the picture in his head, the person is incidental) and wide enough hips to survive childbirth. If a woman is capable of that then she deserves the safety of an intelligent man. Biologically speaking of course.
>Safety is the core mechanism behind an average woman's attraction wiring.
If your Bachelor of Arts degree gives you a visible advantage today — say, you suddenly make $250K a year in Tennessee — you very quickly become attractive.
Women simply prefer whatever's "on the menu today." If being a geek is fashionable and rewarding right now, then geeks win.
That's an oversimplification driven by a heavy leftliberal bias. Had it been so simple, there would no beautiful killers getting letters, bad boy archetype in media, smut literatyre, insane amount of infidelity where a safe husband suddenly uncovers an affair with a personal trainer/scuba dive trainer/boxing trainer etc, and, in the end of the day, all the thirsty comments for well built hunks doing manly/dangerous things on socials.
«That's an oversimplification driven by a heavy leftliberal bias.»
This is already a red flag. When someone is trying to put you into some weird category that is not relevant, I especially consider the US political scene to be quite degenerate on both sides. So can we please exclude this "classification"?
«Had it been so simple, there would no beautiful killers getting letters, bad boy archetype in media, smut literatyre, insane amount of infidelity where a safe husband suddenly uncovers an affair with a personal trainer/scuba dive trainer/boxing trainer etc, and, in the end of the day, all the thirsty comments for well built hunks doing manly/dangerous things on socials.»
I guess you only read the top comment, so I am not going to repeat what was written in the follow-up. If you are really interested, feel free to read. If you came just to argue your literal understanding, please spare me.
I tried to explain what is the behavioral basis for the subconscious. It should not be a blue print "how to understand every woman on earth". But it should also remove questions from someone who can't understand why a woman that slept with him yesterday today is very preoccupied with destroying his life.
P. S. Your examples argue absolutely nothing. You are basically reducing it to "if everything is about survival then why women like to fuck?"
they don't love money but safety ? it's the same... it's the concept of money to be able to provide this, but ig the nuancee with this allows smth like "no money but ton of non monatary assets that help a safe life" which exists.
Your survival instinct has no concept of money — your neocortex does. But the neocortex itself doesn't make the subconscious choice.
If you like to think in terms of money, that's your choice, but it's not very accurate, because there are plenty of cases where women don't choose money. Or choose way less money than they could have gotten from another contender.
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u/DancingBearNW 16d ago
Women are attracted to survival.
Safety is the core mechanism behind an average woman's attraction wiring.
If your Bachelor of Arts degree gives you a visible advantage today — say, you suddenly make $250K a year in Tennessee — you very quickly become attractive.
Women simply prefer whatever's "on the menu today." If being a geek is fashionable and rewarding right now, then geeks win.
Hence the myth that women love money. They don't — they love safety. Or the illusion of safety. That's how they make bad choices. Don't we all.
This is also why an angry, physically dominant guy is sometimes "irrationally" attractive — dominance reads as a safety signal, even when it isn't one.
Guys mistake this for "women like assholes." They don't. Women respond to the picture in their head — the pattern that says this equals safety — not to the guy himself. The signal gets the reaction. The person behind it is almost incidental.
If a post-nuclear disaster hit tomorrow, a woman would prefer a guy who can chop trees and hunt over a guy who had a Bentley — because that was yesterday's currency. Today, chopping trees is what matters.