The New Science Of Female Attraction - Psychology Roundtable

2026-08-06 - 127 min - source - Read full transcript

Chris Williamson (host)Rob HendersonSteve Stewart-WilliamsMacken Murphy

Key insights

The 'myth of the Chad' - dating-app swipe concentration does not mean a small elite of men is capturing most real-world sex.

Rob Henderson's analysis shows roughly 18-20% of men and 12-18% of women report three or more sexual partners in the past year, a pattern stable since 2000. Most people's most common answer is one partner, then zero - meaning the vast majority of men and women have similarly modest sex lives, and viral online narratives of a hyper-successful minority are driven by anomalous stories going viral, not by representative behavior.

dating-app-dynamics

Looksmaxxing forums discourage members from disclosing their methods because undisguised enhancement undercuts the signal value of apparent natural beauty.

The panel traces looksmax.org's informal rule against discussing techniques to two motives: protecting the impression of natural good looks (since disclosed plastic surgery reduces perceived datability even though it still raises rated attractiveness), and preventing other men from copying an effective method and eroding its competitive edge - similar to how female makeup norms became a universal, and costly, baseline.

looksmaxxing

A controlled experiment manipulating both individual income and local gender economic inequality found mate preferences for resources shift strategically with circumstance, but preferences for looks and age gap do not.

In Steve Stewart-Williams' 45-condition study, participants placed in poorer economic positions (or where the opposite sex was locally wealthier) upregulated their stated preference for a resourceful partner, including hypergamous preference. Beauty preferences and age-gap preferences, however, stayed flat across conditions - a result that fits neither a pure social-role account nor the researchers' own pre-registered evolutionary-psychology predictions cleanly.

mate-preferences

Forced-choice attraction polls reveal a stark sex asymmetry in what people would rather have: being desired, or desiring.

Rob Henderson's Twitter polls found about 75% of men preferred sex with someone they find highly attractive but who is not attracted to them, while about 75% of women preferred the reverse - sex with someone who finds them attractive even if the woman is not attracted to that person. The panel connects this to Esther Perel's point that being desired is a primary driver of female arousal.

sex-differences

Physical formidability, not rated sexual attractiveness, predicted men's actual sexual success in David Puts' longitudinal study.

Men were filmed and rated by other men on likelihood of winning a physical fight, and separately rated by women on sexual attractiveness. Eighteen months later, formidability ratings predicted the men's number of sexual partners, while attractiveness ratings had no relationship to it - suggesting looksmaxxing culture may be optimizing for the wrong variable if the goal is mating success rather than male-status signaling.

mate-preferences

Body-size preferences swing with scarcity: hunger and famine conditions raise preference for larger women, abundance favors thinness as a costly signal.

Cross-cultural data (from societies like the Zulu, Jamaican, and St. Kitts populations) and hunger-priming experiments (the 'dining hall study') both show men in scarce or hungry conditions shift preference toward larger women, plausibly because body fat signals stored calories and continued fertility during famine. In abundant societies, thinness becomes the harder-to-fake signal of youth and nulliparity. The panel debated but did not resolve whether this reflects a dedicated evolved 'scarcity-detection' module or an emergent status association.

sex-differences

Sex differences in mate preferences show up far more consistently in industrialized 'WEIRD' societies than in extant hunter-gatherer societies, which unsettles some of the field's own researchers.

Steve Stewart-Williams relays anthropologist William Buckner's critique: if these preferences were forged in the ancestral hunter-gatherer environment, they should appear more reliably in hunter-gatherer populations, not less. Stewart-Williams says this 'does give me pause' but argues the preferences are still very consistent within industrialized populations, and other evidence (folk tales across world regions) supports an innate component alongside strong cultural modulation.

evolutionary-psychology-methodology

Rising male beautification since the 1990s may be a competitive response to women's growing financial independence, paired with a real rise in male parenting investment.

Citing historian Lynn Luciano's work and their own health-data analysis (showing recreational weightlifting has gone from rare to near-universal among young men), the panel's working theory is that as economic resources become less differentiating (given women's rising incomes), men are shifting competitive effort toward physical appearance and formidability, while simultaneously men have roughly tripled time spent on childcare since the 1970s - though this parenting increase is concentrated among college-educated men.

mate-preferences

Paul Eastwick's stated-versus-revealed-preference research likely understates real sex differences due to methodological limits Steve Stewart-Williams disputes.

Eastwick's speed-dating and partner-evaluation studies find little to no sex difference between what people say they want and what predicts their actual romantic interest. Stewart-Williams counters that Eastwick's samples are often unrepresentative university students with narrow variance in career prospects, that speed dating strips away information (like earning potential) that would normally matter, and that some other speed-dating studies (e.g. Rob Kersbergen's) do find the expected sex differences.

evolutionary-psychology-methodology

Real-money matchmaking data shows women treat mating-down on income, intelligence, and education as a near-deal-breaker; men largely do not.

Data shared from Keeper AI, a paid matchmaking service where clients have real financial skin in the game, shows women are roughly 12 times more likely than men to refuse a partner who earns less, six times more likely to refuse someone less intelligent, and four times more likely to refuse someone less educated - a consistent, large asymmetry across all three axes that the panel treats as unusually credible because it reflects costly, incentive-aligned choices rather than a survey response.

sex-differences

Female sexual desire within a relationship appears to decline much faster than male desire, independent of aging, and none of the three researchers had a confident explanation.

The drop is described as steep within the first year or two of a relationship, unlike the more gradual, more universal decline attributable to aging alone. The panel speculated it functions initially as a mate-retention strategy (high early desire locks in commitment) that becomes less necessary once a partner is secured, and may later operate as a bargaining chip, but all three guests explicitly said they did not have a settled evolutionary account for the pattern.

sex-differences

Under constrained resources, sex differences in mate preferences sharpen; under abundant resources, they largely disappear.

In Norman Li's 'mate budget' experiments, participants given a large budget to construct an ideal partner want everything regardless of sex (looks, status, resources). Under a small, more realistic budget, men spend disproportionately on attractiveness and women spend disproportionately on resources and status - a pattern that also emerged when people allocated traits to describe themselves, with men emphasizing wealth and women emphasizing appearance.

mate-preferences

Books referenced

Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class - Rob Henderson - Rob Henderson's own memoir, plugged at the close of the episode.
The Ape That Understood the Universe - Steve Stewart-Williams - Steve Stewart-Williams' earlier book on the evolution of mind and culture, referenced as background for his sex-differences arguments.
A Billion Years of Sex Differences - Steve Stewart-Williams - His new book, the framing reference point for most of the panel's sex-differences discussion; Chris explicitly invokes it when asking Steve to adjudicate the Eastwick debate.
The Housemaid - Freida McFadden - Chris names this as a guilty-pleasure thriller he reads, cited while discussing predatory teacher-student dynamics.
The Housemaid's Revenge - Freida McFadden - Named alongside The Housemaid as part of Chris's Freida McFadden reading habit.
The Patient - Freida McFadden - Mentioned in passing among the Freida McFadden novels Chris reads.
The Teacher - Freida McFadden - Discussed at length as a fictional parallel to the episode's female-teacher-sex-scandal segment, including its twist ending.

Media referenced

Untitled documentary on hypermasculinity / 'myth of the Chad' - movie - Referenced as 'Louis Thru's documentary' capturing the caricatured hyper-masculine looksmaxxing subculture the panel discusses.
Modern Wisdom episode with Esther Perel - podcast - Chris recalls a past exchange with Perel about what makes women feel desired, and revises his own answer in light of this conversation.
Modern Wisdom episode with Paul Eastwick - podcast - Referenced as the source of the worldwide preference-matching study discussion; Chris had interviewed Eastwick previously.
Only Fans and female sexual attention (Spectator piece) - article - Louise Perry's piece is the basis for Rob Henderson's theory that sexual attention functions for women the way porn functions for men.
PNAS paper on gender inequality, income, and mate preferences - paper - Steve Stewart-Williams' own 45-condition experiment (with Macken Murphy and Rob Henderson referenced as co-discussants) manipulating income and local gender inequality to test causal effects on stated mate preferences.
David Puts' formidability and sexual success study - paper - Found men's rated physical formidability, not their rated attractiveness to women, predicted their number of sexual partners 18 months later.
Marta Kowal's cross-cultural beautification study - paper - Cross-national data on time spent on beautifying behaviors (grooming, makeup, weightlifting) by sex, cited to show male beautification has risen sharply.
2026 Kinsey Institute study of passionate love experiences - paper - Survey of over 10,000 US adults finding an average of 2.05 passionate-love experiences per lifetime, used to reason about historical partner-switching before contraception.
OkCupid attractiveness distribution data - other - Older, informal dataset cited as an early source for the (contested) idea that women rate most men as below-average attractive.
Worldwide preference-matching paper - paper - Eastwick-associated study finding no sex difference in what predicts overall romantic evaluation of a partner once people are actually dating them.
Northumbria University dance-attractiveness study - paper - Motion-capture study finding women rate male dancers highest when they use their whole body with varied, non-repetitive movement.

Companies

Tinder - Cited for swipe-rate data (roughly 4% of men get most swipes) and for its height-filter rollout history.
Hinge - Cited for the statistic that the top 10% of male users receive 60% of likes.
Keeper AI - A paid AI matchmaking service ($50k, with per-date fees) whose real-money-incentivized client data shows large sex differences in willingness to 'marry down.'
AG1 - Episode sponsor.
Momentous - Episode sponsor (Fiber Plus product).
Eight Sleep - Episode sponsor (Pod 5 cooling/heating mattress cover).
Element - Episode sponsor (electrolyte drink mix).
looksmax.org - Online forum for 'looksmaxxing' whose unofficial first rule, per the panel, is not to talk about looksmaxxing.

Techniques and frameworks

Looksmaxxing - Umbrella term for appearance-optimization practices (bone smashing, mewing, cosmetic injections, grooming) discussed as a status-signaling arms race.
Phenotypic gambit - Macken Murphy's evolutionary-anthropology method of inferring adaptive function from environmental inputs and behavioral outputs without claiming to know the underlying psychological mechanism.
Stated vs. revealed preferences - Framework used throughout to distinguish what people say they want in a partner from what their actual dating and mating behavior shows.
Mate budget allocation - Norman Li's experimental design giving participants a fixed 'mate dollar' budget to build an ideal partner, used to show sex differences sharpen under resource constraints.
Formidability theory - David Puts' framework distinguishing physical formidability (fight-winning capacity) from conventional attractiveness as separate predictors of male mating success.
Behavioral immune system / evolved disgust - Proposed mechanism underlying 'the ick,' framed as an evolved disgust response to cues of poor social competence or disease risk.

Summary

This Modern Wisdom "Psychology Roundtable" brings Chris Williamson together with three evolutionary-psychology-adjacent researchers - Rob Henderson, Steve Stewart-Williams, and Macken Murphy - for a wide-ranging, unusually technical conversation about what actually drives female (and male) attraction, and where the popular "myth of the Chad" narrative around dating apps breaks down. The panel repeatedly returns to a central methodological tension: what survey data says people want in a partner, what dating-app and matchmaking behavior reveals they actually choose, and how much either should be trusted as a window into evolved human nature versus a product of the specific, historically novel environment (dating apps, social media, industrialized wealth) people currently live in.

A major thread is dismantling the idea that a small minority of highly attractive men monopolize modern dating. Using their own sexual-partner-count data and Hinge/Tinder swipe statistics, Henderson argues that most men and most women have modest, similar sex lives (one partner or zero in the past year is the modal answer for both sexes), and that viral stories of hyper-successful "Chads" or entirely sexless men are overrepresented online because anomalous stories - not typical ones - go viral. This connects to a broader discussion of "looksmaxxing," where the panel dissects why online communities that optimize male appearance (bone smashing, cosmetic injections, extreme grooming) enforce an informal taboo against admitting to the practice: disclosed enhancement reads as vanity and short-term-mating orientation, and undermines the signal value that natural-looking beauty is supposed to carry.

The middle of the episode turns to original and cited research on how resource scarcity and gender economic inequality shape mate preferences. Stewart-Williams walks through his own 45-condition experiment (built to move past purely correlational cross-cultural data) showing that people strategically adjust their stated preference for a resourceful partner based on their own income and local gender inequality, but that their preferences for looks and age gap stay essentially fixed - a result inconvenient for both strict social-role theory and some evolutionary-psychology predictions. This leads into a long, careful back-and-forth about David Puts' finding that physical formidability, not conventional attractiveness, predicts men's actual sexual success, and about body-size preference reversals between scarce and abundant environments, where the group debates whether an evolved "scarcity detection" psychological module is really necessary to explain the pattern.

A recurring meta-theme is methodological self-scrutiny: Stewart-Williams openly grapples with anthropologist William Buckner's critique that mate-preference sex differences show up more reliably in industrialized societies than in hunter-gatherer ones - the opposite of what a straightforward "forged in the ancestral environment" story would predict - and says this "does give me pause." The group also spends significant time on Paul Eastwick's stated-versus-revealed-preferences research, with Stewart-Williams disputing Eastwick's methods (unrepresentative student samples, speed-dating formats that mechanically foreground looks) while still crediting him as a serious scholar worth taking seriously.

The back half covers a grab-bag of related findings: Rob Henderson's Twitter polls showing men and women have opposite preferences between "hot but unattracted to you" versus "attracted to you but less hot" partners; Keeper AI's real-money matchmaking data showing large, consistent sex differences in willingness to "marry down" on income, intelligence, and education; women's luxury-handbag signaling as a possible mate-poaching deterrent rather than a direct male-attraction strategy; and rising male beautification (grooming, weightlifting) as a plausible competitive response to women's growing financial independence, paired with genuinely increased male parenting investment since the 1970s. The episode closes on an unresolved, candidly acknowledged puzzle - why female sexual desire in relationships appears to decline much faster than male desire, independent of aging - which all three guests admit they cannot fully explain.

Notable Quotes

"And what this means is that the vast majority of men and the vast majority of women have relatively unexciting sexual lives." - Rob Henderson

"I got fucking ripped on the internet until the guy realized that the clip had been cut, both before and after what I meant, what I actually said, about saying, I think that Ozempic is more pushed back against by people who are in shape than people who are out of shape." - Chris Williamson

"It does give me pause that my preferences aren't found as consistently among hunter-gatherers. Definitely does give me pause." - Steve Stewart-Williams