What is High Sexual Market Value? An Examination of An Obsession
A new framework of status
In many online circles, you hear of conversations of “high status” versus “low status” traits. This is often lingo for a frame.
What’s the MAS take on this?
“High status” and “Low status” is a pretty good frame to get out of “thinking about what that one man or woman I really like wants.”
Most people go through their lives, their childhood, their teens, being themselves. They encounter world. The self confronts world head on.
Then they reach puberty. And they have a crush. And they start trying to be either like the person they like, or be somebody who the person they like, likes.
And then they get rejected. And it’s not clear that they did anything wrong. Rather, the other person is just paying attention to something else — something else in the world, or someone else in the world.
But if you were basing what “to be” and what “is good to be” on impressing a crush, and you cannot win that game, then you need another game to play.
And here enters the “high status” and “low status” lingo.
If it feels harsh, and utterly lacking context or subjectivity, that’s because that is part of the point. The whole point is to go back to a “man (or woman)” versus “world” framing of self-improvement, versus co-merging with a desired other.
The entire point is to have something like an objective metric. A way to improve such that even if your special person rejected you, you can still have a direction to in such that *somebody* *someday* will find you desirable, because you have desirable traits.
And having objective criteria to strive for, outside of another person, is good. The “harshness” there is a way to depersonalize it. It’s not your fault you’re not optimal in some ways, you just are. But if you acknowledge this, you can be better. And then you will be better than you were before.
Where the “high status” and “low status” frame falls apart is that relationships are fundamentally a dance, and rigidity kills the dance.
Too much judgment of the self or the other kills the fun and kills the dance. The point was to find a way to rise up and carry on in the face of rejection; to absorb the nice things the person you liked taught you, to take the beauty or kindness they showed you and make yourself kind and beautiful. To take the discipline they had that impressed you to inspire yourself to become more disciplined. It is a way to self-improve with gifts from the world.
The point was never for you to become a judgment and rejecting machine yourself, to put out into the world “objective” insults towards people (such as calling women on the internet “mid” as a pastime — as if these women themselves aren’t battling their own imperfections).
So what are the high status and the low status traits? If the truth is somewhere between harsh perfection and subjectivity for the preferences of a desired other, can we figure those out?
Before that, let’s talk about seduction.
Why do so many women go for “high status” guys? Is it because of status, or is the status correlated with an unrelated thing?
For a man to be “high status” that means that he is at the top of the hierarchy of status competitions among men. That means that in fights with men, a high status man is “winning.”
This means that a woman with a high status man is dating a winner. She has access to more things, and potentially is able to relax more. If you date a lower status man, that means the man you are dating is generally at the mercy of higher status men. It means his woman generally worries about him more, and either has to join him in his fights, or give up having the fruits of winning certain fights.
But then why do women, often enough, choose the penniless musician over the rich financier?
The answer is that wealth is one dimension of high status, but it is not all of them. And wealth is not correlated with seduction. Sometimes it is even anti-correlated!
A man who puts energy into learning things like music, dancing, and seduction, is also a man who is not putting all his time and effort into making money.
A large source of confusion in this area is that intermale competition itself is not settled.
Between a man who is great with tools and a man who is great with money, it is not obvious which man is higher status, or in which competitions.
Between a man who gets along with professional organizations, and a man who befriends all blue collar workers, it is not obvious which man is higher status.
There are some games that are high status across everything — being fit, having good emotional intelligence, knowing how to cook, having resources. But then you might get confused why even with these three things, when you compete with other men who are good at those three things, it seems to matter less than you would expect in impressing anybody.
That is because there is an art to seduction.
Seduction is hard to define. I define seduction as the “follow me into my world” maneuver, or the “trust me I’ll show you a good time” maneuver.
It involves some elements of showing, not telling. Some elements of telling what can’t yet been shown. A leap of faith. A taking of the hand. A dance. Responsiveness. A belief that we will be happy together, until the end of time.
If it sounds floofy and existential and cosmic and fake and real, it’s because it is all of these things.
Marriages sometimes fall apart where the promises fail to deliver, when the seduction has to meet the concrete demands of a physical body. When the magic carpet has to be taken to the dry cleaner’s, but the dry cleaner’s is closed and you have no money and no car and the wife is sick.
But without the seduction there would be no marriage. There would be no magic to maintain.
I think men are less confused about “what counts as status” — they see it when a man enters a room. It doesn’t have to be a man they like. They can feel it and sense it and notice when a man has credibility — even if it’s in a different domain.
I think what they are confused about is how status does and does not lead to attracting and keeping a woman.
Part of the confusion here is women themselves are split as to what kind’s of men’s status suggests to them that they might have a nice life with that man.
One woman may decide that a nice life is a life where she gets to bake bread with her husband as they look over their children together. One woman may decide that a nice life is a life where her husband is away most of the time, and she sees him once a week to go over household inventory and finances.
These are two very different men. Who is higher status?
And that is where the subjectivity comes back in.