It is not adaptive for women to know the truth about their rapidly depreciating looks and fertility. Therefore, they don’t. We know this already.
What’s fascinating is to see the exact solipsistic programming that replaces realistic assessment. And how it works to cement female bonding across age gaps, and to buffer the psyche against the ravages of The Wall.
From Delusion Damage:
The march of stupidity continues unhindered with a ridiculous survey that says women are most beautiful at 31. The mental three-card monte necessary for that kind of conclusion is not well hidden:
The research concluded that beauty is as much about personality as appearance.
It was defined as being confident by 70 per cent, having good looks by 67 per cent and being stylish by 47 per cent.
Almost two thirds of women surveyed – 63 per cent – agreed that “with age, comes beauty”.
That’s funny. What follows is considerably less funny:
The same number said that as they get older, they care less about what others think of the way they look.
And 51 per cent said as they age they shed their insecurities and feel prettier.
So if you’re wondering where all those sex-and-the-city bitches with their inflated egos and deflated physical assets are coming from… there you go. They think that “confidence” equals “beauty”.
Now Delusion Damage chalks this up to projection, and sure that’s a mechanism at work here. But the more interesting question is the why behind the design, not the intermediary mechanism of its action.
Women are insecure, innocent, less scheming, more tractable, and less calculating when they are at their ripest and most valuable. They follow feminine instincts ardently and with little reflection. This strategy is well adapted to a commodity in high demand. There’s less need for aggressive pursuit of either mates or resources, and the solid bank of value creates a high tolerance for risky head over heels emotional behavior. She can be vulnerable, feminine, emotionally unreserved and initially passive.
These high value babes must connect with the withered hags, and vice versa, to gain the benefits of the Universal Sisterhood (TM), an EQ cartel that outmaneuvers men to cooperatively maximize female reproductive and resource allocation strategies. To this end, the hotties should respect and fear the older hags, rather than despising them. Therefore they must neither know nor understand their value. Thus the belief of hotties that beauty comes with age. There’s no need for these hotties to fear the impending wall, because contingencies are already in place – an alternative tendency to pursue alpha seed givers and beta providers that results in getting knocked up and settling down – or at least it would in a world without contraception.
Now to the agenda of the Wall-smitten hags. These women, having lost their intrinsic value and attractiveness, must compensate by increasing their sexual availability, reducing investment costs for sexual partners, and becoming more aggressive. Hence the statements like “not caring how I look” and “feeling prettier” and becoming more “confident”. A hag should’ve spent her salad years converting looks into social capital, insulating her from social opprobrium. She mono-maniacally pursues her increasingly desperate agenda of continuing to capture high quality sperm. If not already securely ensconced, she also becomes dramatically more calculating about securing beta provision.
The life of a woman is one of huge risks, gambles on futures over which she has little control, being the dependent player. Humans are not designed to face such terrifying prospects unblinkingly. Thus the proper program is laid out in the emotional tendencies, and the woman’s conscious attention is focused inwards, on solipsistic processing of these emotional signals, fighting to strike a balance between the program and annoying obtrusive objective reality. Typically the hamster wins, and the program gets its way.
A woman’s life is also objectively one of severe hopelessness – assets depreciate inexorably, rapidly and irreversibly. To compensate, the solipsistic program creates dynamics that fascinate a woman with her own sense of progress, personal development and self discovery. Humans, like all mammals, require a sense of purpose and progressive narrative to feel fulfilled. In the case of a dog, it’s following the leader on a walk. In the case of a woman, it’s learning about herself, becoming more confident, gaining “wisdom” and “experience”, etc.
All of this has been framed in the negative, an indictment of the contemporary Western woman. But it is perfectly possible for all this structure to behave healthily, and produce beautiful, graceful and deserving women, who go from enchanting maidens to noble mothers to wise and benevolent grandmothers. The structure is the same in either case.
PS Why the peak at age 31? Why not continue to gain beauty throughout life? Well, even the hamster has its limits. (Yeah, right). Actually, after a certain point a woman’s fertility drops so low that sex is no longer on her agenda, and her priorities shift to managing her familial and social circle. At that point, believing in her own attractiveness is no longer important. Also, a belated conscious realization of the last brick in the Wall may help finally inject some intelligent urgency into the behavior of the most obtuse of old maids.
PPS The rest of the post is great, too. Looks like he’s nailed the curve. Kudos.